organizational dilemma essay

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Managing organizational ethics: How ethics becomes pervasive within organizations

Cecilia martínez.

a Centre for Applied Ethics, University of Deusto, Avda. Universidades 24, 48007 Bilbao, Spain

Ann Gregg Skeet

b Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95053, U.S.A.

Pedro M. Sasia

This study analyzes real experiences of culture management to better understand how ethics permeates organizations . In addition to reviewing the literature, we used an action-research methodology and conducted semistructured interviews in Spain and in the U.S. to approach the complexity and challenges of fostering a culture in which ethical considerations are a regular part of business discussions and decision making. The consistency of findings suggests patterns of organizational conditions, cultural elements, and opportunities that influence the management of organizational cultures centered on core ethical values. The ethical competencies of leaders and of the workforce also emerged as key factors. We identify three conditions—a sense of responsibility to society, conditions for ethical deliberation, and respect for moral autonomy—coupled with a diverse set of cultural elements that cause ethics to take root in culture when the opportunity arises. Leaders can use this knowledge of the mechanisms by which organizational factors influence ethical pervasiveness to better manage organizational ethics.

1. Business ethics and culture management

In the last 40 years, globalization, accelerated by technological development, has transformed the context in which companies work and compete ( Dolan & Raich, 2009 ). Technology amplifies the influence of a broad group of social and political actors that have no financial stakes in companies (Kennedy, 2013). Managers have to deal with this complex and dynamic framework of social, organizational, and individual drivers of socially responsible performance. Instances of these drivers include policies, laws, and regulations (social factors); organizational ethics and tone at the top (organizational factors); and individual preferences of customers, employees, and investors. Moreover, these drivers are evolving dynamically at all three levels in response to the consequences of globalization ( Aguinis & Glavas, 2012 ). Environmental degradation, growing inequality, the 2007-2009 financial crisis, and the global COVID-19 pandemic have revived the debate on ethics in the business realm.

As a result, researchers and managers have shown renewed interest in managing organizational ethics. Companies began incorporating new values and goals beyond economic profit in their organizational cultures as a strategy to deal with the dynamic and uncertain context in which they are operating ( Garriga & Melé, 2004 ). Thus companies’ social roles and ways of doing business have evolved ( Freeman, 2017 ). In August 2019, the Business Roundtable redefined the purpose of a corporation as promoting an economy for the benefit of all stakeholders; not just shareholders but also customers, employees, suppliers, and communities ( Business Roundtable, 2019 ). They did not, however, explain how companies would achieve this new purpose. Many companies are adopting culture management, including ethics, as a strategy for meeting social demands ( Treviño et al., 2014 ). But neither the traditional triple bottom line nor the culture underpinning decisions have fully encompassed ethics ( Burford et al., 2016 ). One of the main causes of the 2007–09 financial crisis was the lack of ethics in management. Ethics has received more attention since then owing to high-profile ethical dilemmas in the technology sector, long considered an economic bellwether. Governance is also now focused on ethical culture. In 2017, the NACD Blue Ribbon Commission recommended that boards should monitor their organizations’ culture and integrate it into ongoing discussions with management about strategy, risk, and performance ( NACD, 2017 ). Although companies linked to the financial crisis and companies in the technology industry had strong reputations for corporate social responsibility and appeared to embrace ethics, the behavior of some managers in these companies was clearly unethical ( Sims & Brinkmann, 2009 ).

The predominant approach to culture management has focused on the alignment of values between the individual employee and the organization ( DiStaso, 2017 ). As a consequence, research has focused primarily on individual factors—age, behavior, personal values, or organizational commitment—more often than on organizational factors, such as culture, policies, rewards, or training ( Lehnert et al., 2015 ).

But everyday business practices have challenged the idea of a direct link between values and behavior that underlies this familiar paradigm. When inconsistencies or conflicts are perceived to threaten cognitive frameworks, individuals ( Lord & Brown, 2001 ; Watson et al., 2004 ) and groups ( List & Pettit, 2011 ) adjust their values to preserve integrity, affirm a positive self-image, or support contextual pressures that orient their behaviors. Therefore, behaviors may be most effectively influenced if management shifts its focus from defining values to creating a learning process that builds and activates a shared ethical culture ( Appelbaum et al., 2007 ; Watson et al., 2004 ). Caterina Bulgarella used the appealing metaphor of an “architect of culture” to describe this new paradigm, offering fresh insights for facing the complexity of managing culture and ethics ( Ethical Systems, 2018 ).

This study focuses on the organizational level. Using a model developed by Gutiérrez Díez (1996) proved remarkably effective to connect elements of culture to conditions and opportunities to build shared ethical culture. It revealed patterns between the types of cultural elements in use, the conditions present in the company, and the organization’s ability to take advantage of opportunities for promoting ethics in the company. Companies can use these findings to establish mechanisms to build individual and organizational ethical abilities and successfully manage their organizational ethics.

2. Managing culture to manage ethics

Culture relates to a unique shared purpose and set of values articulated in a system that internally provides a shared mindset for employees. It shapes how a company interacts with its context, orients its decision-making processes, and performs its functions ( Flamholtz & Randle, 2011 ; Schein, 1990 ). Therefore, culture influences the degree to which ethics becomes embedded within an organization. It makes sense that intentionally managing culture is an appropriate strategy to promote ethics ( Treviño et al., 2014 ).

Gutiérrez Díez (1996) proposed four groups of cultural elements after studying previous approaches based on Schein’s (1990) culture framework of basic assumptions, espoused values, and cultural artifacts. Gutiérrez Díez’s model helps to further define the visible and invisible aspects of culture, a relevant topic in contemporary business literature ( Rick, 2015 ). The types of elements, from minor to major visibility, are normative, symbolic, declarative and structural.

• • Normative elements constitute a framework to explain reality, to understand how it is and how it should be. Examples of these elements are beliefs, implicit values or standards, sanctions, or taboos.
• • Symbolic elements include rites, ceremonies, the physical appearance of facilities, attire, logos, exemplary people or heroes, organizational codes, stories, and myths, and group jargon that create feelings of unity among employees.
• • Declarative elements are statements and formal declarations of mission, vision and values statements, codes, industry pledges, public messages, or internal messages to employees.
• • Structural elements involve organizational structures and visible procedures using the previous elements, including organizational charts and hierarchies, communication and dialogue channels, internal participation mechanisms, and human resource management ( Gutiérrez Díez, 1996 ).

Literature and practice identified three main steps in the process of designing and managing organizational culture. The first step is the definition or redefinition of shared values that the company declares and communicates. The second step is using those values in decision making, inculcating them into organizational life and practices. Finally, the alignment of policies and procedures with the values affirms and consolidates culture in signs and observable behaviors in the company ( Arthur W. Page Society, 2012 ; Treviño et al., 2014 ). As a result, the different elements of culture develop as the company evolves; thus more evolved, mature companies present a greater variety of cultural elements.

Still, the incorporation of ethics cannot be taken for granted in the complex process of culture management. All too often, companies do not use ethical principles in culture management or in establishing a hierarchy of organizational values. For ethics to permeate the organization, the steps of culture management should incorporate ethical values in order to build ethical cultures ( Grandy & Sliwa, 2017 ).

Cultures are ethically sound when the shared set of values is ethically conceivable and credible both inside and outside of the company. Employees must perceive decisions as ethically consistent with their personal values, so that they and the groups they participate in are committed to acting according to this common ethical framework and to revisiting it as new obligations arise ( Haski-Leventhal et al., 2015 ; Rothschild, 2016 ). At the same time, political and social agents outside of the company must see the business culture in this same way for ethics to take hold over time.

But even when managers are committed to orienting organizational culture ethically, they may not know how to effectively integrate ethics. Moreover, two companies with similar conditions can also differ in the way and extent to which they incorporate ethics ( Eccles et al., 2014 ). So how does ethics permeate organizations to create ethical cultures and encourage moral behavior? What are the cultural elements influencing ethics to take root in culture?

3. Finding patterns in how companies encourage ethics

To answer these questions, we have studied the real experiences companies have had incorporating ethics in their cultures. We analyzed experiences of 18 businesspeople diverse in terms of age, seniority, and leadership positions. Their companies varied in size and type of industry, and they operated in two countries with different cultural, political, and regulatory frameworks on two different continents. All participants interviewed were engaged in ethical forums promoted by university centers of applied ethics. These executives have been participating, some for many years, in a group that meets regularly to discuss ethics in a confidential setting, allowing a learning community to form over time. They are a sample of motivated, ethically aware leaders in high- and medium-level positions who are willing to share information about their companies based on relationships they held with each of the ethics centers over time. We felt it likely that we would be able to study the ethical evolution of culture in their companies in enough detail to truly examine decision making and other actions taken in these companies in the context of promoting ethics in organizational cultures.

We started the study at the Centre for Applied Ethics at Spain’s University of Deusto, with nine men and three women. In three half-day sessions, this learning community analyzed two real cases of cultural change and discussed them with experts to identify patterns of ethics pervasiveness. In the U.S., we posed the same questions answered in Spain to another six businessmen from the learning community at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Individual semistructured interviews with participants at their companies helped us reconstruct the ways ethics had been introduced. The analysis of data confirmed and enriched the patterns identified in Spain. As a final step, we presented our conclusions to the learning community in Spain for further discussion and validation.

Our study, although its sample is small, meets conditions for the validity of findings ( Guest et al., 2006 ). But some characteristics of participants may introduce bias, so further studies, with a wider group of companies and incorporating greater participant diversity, are required to confirm and complete the patterns identified here.

3.1. Getting ethics into organizations

From the data we collected, patterns emerged around three aspects. First, we identified some consistent situations with similar characteristics that companies used to embed ethical principles in corporate culture. We named the three types of situations opportunities. These opportunities correlate well with the main stages of building organizational culture, so we used them to classify our findings. Second, we identified three conditions present in companies successful at promoting ethics in their cultures. Finally, we found that a mix of cultural elements, rather than overreliance on one or two types, contributed to ethics in the culture. More mature companies used a greater array of elements and had more and better developed practices for promoting ethics.

Opportunities of the first type, which we refer to as turning points, are challenging situations rife with difficulty, uncertainty, or complexity. These situations are opportunities to introduce and incorporate ethics. A second type of opportunity emerged around decision-making processes , which can be informed by ethics. Finally, transmission of ethics in culture, resulting in the broader dissemination and further strengthening of the norms shared throughout the company, is another opportunity to affirm culture. In some stories, participants described companies’ abilities to leverage one situation for more than one type of opportunity. For example, they leveraged staff turnover—a turning point—not only for introducing but also for affirming ethics; or they used development of ethical skills—an example of transmission— to both affirm and use values ( Table 1 ). This suggests a cyclical dynamic in the process of introducing, using, and affirming ethical values ( Lozano, 2009 ; Treviño et al., 2014 ).

Examples of opportunities

We found three conditions that, when present in companies, made it easier for them to leverage opportunities to promote ethics in the organization. The first condition was a responsibility to society , implying awareness and acceptance of the company’s role in society beyond economic transactions. When this existed, participants confirmed that the company engaged with social agents, assumed its social duties, and held itself accountable ( Aßländer & Curbach, 2014 ; Dembinski, 2011 ). The second condition is the respect of moral autonomy and a climate of mutual trust , which is when the moral arguments or ethical concerns of all individuals are heard in situations that affect them or in which they have expertise. The final condition is ethical deliberation, the main principles of which are ( List & Pettit, 2011 ; Stansbury, 2009 ):

• • The use of information to clarify the ethical dilemma;
• • The respect of individuals’ moral autonomy that allows a deliberative process to reach a consensus based on moral arguments;
• • The consideration of downstream effects of the decision; and
• • Sharing the motivations behind that decision in a transparent way throughout the company.

3.2. Patterns of conditions and cultural elements that support ethics

Participants described the evolution of ethical culture in their companies, and we identified significant coincidences in sets of conditions coupled with specific cultural elements put in place to leverage opportunities ( Table 2 ). Although we asked about successful experiences, participants also discussed inhibitors working against the pervasiveness of ethics in culture that also supported the patterns. For example, participants reported that if organizational conditions were not present, cultural elements identified as enablers of leveraging opportunities to promote ethics would not be influential.

Patterns of opportunities, conditions, and cultural elements

While the study focused on organizational factors, an unprompted, recurring reference to individual capabilities emerged, indicating their essential role in the success of iterative learning in culture management. All participants mentioned the importance of individual ethical attitudes and competencies. For example, participants cited reflection and learning capabilities ( Treviño et al., 2014 ). The specific individual factors emerged largely in the six interviews conducted in the U.S., which could be due to the different methodologies used in the two locations. Therefore, our observations about leadership skills and competencies from this study are only a promising starting point; more research may discern whether there are indeed patterns of individual moral capabilities that also contribute to promoting ethics in workplaces.

The patterns shed light on the mechanisms by which conditions and cultural elements influence the pervasiveness of ethics in the company. The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics used the patterns in the design of a World Economic Forum survey about creating ethical culture conducted among 99 respondents, confirming their ability to shed light on the organizational processes ( Skeet & Guszcza, 2020 ). The next subsections explain the mechanisms in each type of opportunity that we were able to identify ( Table 2 ).

3.2.1. Mechanisms to introduce ethics

When companies find themselves at turning points opportune for introducing ethics, they should decide whether to incorporate new principles or values to reinforce their organizational ethics. These turning points may be external or market-based, such as pressure from major stakeholders, unfavorable economic conditions, or legal or regulatory changes, or they may be internal, such as changes in leadership, staff turnover, conflict resolution, or poor economic performance ( Aguinis & Glavas, 2012 ). Indeed, large companies in both the U.S. and the EU have had to address issues of ethics and corporate culture due to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (U.S.) and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. We even observed some companies intentionally creating turning-point opportunities by rotating employees through different assignments so someone in a new role could introduce ethics from a fresh perspective. Several companies used outside consultants as a mechanism for generating turning-point opportunities that would promote ethics.

When the first condition, the sense of responsibility to society, was present, it allowed leaders to take advantage of all these turning points , including changes in procedures, to meet sociological and cultural diversity or to reinforce social responsibility as the company grew. We also observed evidence of the second condition, the respect for individual moral autonomy, especially when individuals were willing to identify issues without fear of retaliation. Several examples highlighted how staff were motivated to uncover ethical problems or conflicts of interest and how people were empowered to make recommendations even to reverse prior decisions, thus creating turning points.

The most commonly mentioned cultural elements during turning points were those enabling formal or informal ethical leadership or bringing attention to social or individual ethical values ( Table 2 ). Spanish participants were more likely to mention normative elements in turning points, while North Americans referred more often to declarative elements, which may be due to cultural differences. Some of the specific symbolic elements mentioned in both locations included exemplary people as promoters of ethics, attention to legacy by founders, and ceremonies observing volunteer work outside the company, suggesting that role models can be highly influential in moral engagement ( Appelbaum et al., 2007 ). One company developed country profiles—a structural element—to improve cultural sensitivity in preparation for future turning-point opportunities in different settings around the globe.

3.2.2. Mechanisms fostering ethical decision-making

We found that opportunities to use ethics arise in decisions about policies, products or services, and procedures, as well as in operational decisions. Ethical decision-making is critical in managing ethics in organizations ( Bowen, 2004 ; Lehnert et al., 2015 ). Our respondents described decisions that led to changes in policies, codes, or internal messages, favoring the spread of values throughout the company and showing the ability of the company to leverage the connection between two of the steps of culture management: the use of and the affirmation of values.

Although three conditions were present in the decision-making examples, two of them seem to be most relevant. Participants mentioned specific examples of ethical deliberation in decision-making situations entailing individual accountability and involving people in the creation of certain standards for which they were going to be held responsible. Participants, especially in the U.S., mentioned a sense of responsibility to the society in which the company operates when making decisions related to policies or procedures affecting stakeholders in diverse cultural or social contexts. Moreover, in the absence of either a sense of responsibility to society or of conditions conducive to moral deliberation, companies were less likely to use ethics when making decisions. In one example, the company was more interested in appearing neutral, in terms of its impact on society, than in making any value judgment about what the right thing to do would be in certain circumstances. The company did not expect to be held accountable for the downstream implications of its decisions.

The cultural elements drawn upon in the use of ethics included normative and declarative elements that shaped decision-making frameworks, and structural elements allowing companies to establish or clarify responsibility and accountability, to support the conditions for ethical deliberation, and to develop ethical motivations and abilities. These elements aim to clarify rather than to impose how ethics can be used ( Bowen, 2004 ; List & Pettit, 2011 ) ( Table 2 ). Interviewees in startups mentioned normative elements more, while people in more established companies mentioned declarative and structural elements, reinforcing how critical these implicit elements are when a company is in its earliest days and has not yet developed declarative and structural elements.

Ethical decision-making can be inhibited by a lack of certain conditions or by a mix of cultural elements. In one case, the interviewee assured us that all employees were free to confront management, which sounded admirable in principle. But he went on to say there were no mechanisms in place to consult people affected by decisions or to share the reasons behind them. In other words, even when there is a will to respect moral autonomy, it is hard for decision-making to follow ethical principles if the conditions for ethical deliberation are absent. Additionally, a lack of policies that spell out responses for employees in specific situations, both when dealing with management and with customers, created voids for ethical decision-making.

3.2.3. Mechanisms involved in affirming ethics

Companies that successfully leverage ethics find a way to lock it into their culture, promoting and demonstrating coherency between values and behavior. Examples of these opportunities are processes for deploying standards or cultural norms, or for developing and measuring ethical motivation and skills. As we saw with turning points, companies also intentionally create opportunities for transmission of culture ( Table 1 ). For instance, some companies approached renewals of policies or codes—opportunities to introduce ethics—as training processes to strengthen the transmission of ethical standards throughout the organization.

Respect for individual moral autonomy seemed especially important in building a shared ethical mindset and values. Awareness and acceptance of social reality helped companies deal with the diversity and pluralism of their employees. Elements useful in affirming culture allow for shared comprehension of corporate culture and for awareness of the consistency in the application of values across the company ( Table 2 ).

Declarative elements describing culture were used early and often as enablers of transmitting culture in companies. And structural elements, such as formal training procedures, “tone at the top” programs, internal communication channels, and deployment of compliance and ethics responsibilities, were means for transmitting the culture and promoting shared values. These elements were correlated with enhanced awareness and moral capabilities in employees ( Warren et al., 2014 ) and with the development of ethical behavior and practices in organizations ( Treviño et al., 2014 ). Other examples of ways to bolster company values included drawing up organizational charts that reflect values and setting up a foundation to reinforce local community engagement.

Finally, symbolic and structural elements enabled coherency within the companies we examined. Structural elements such as measurement, assessment, reporting, and reward systems to operationalize declarative elements were cited by several companies as influencing awareness of and motivation to practice ethics ( Burford et al . , 2016 ; Griffiths et al., 2018 ) and also in creating an environment that inhibits deviant behavior. Two companies described using “culture buddies” as an orientation method to transfer culture to newer employees, suggesting this could be an example of ethical “contagion”—the idea that exposure to ethical behavior encourages more ethical behavior ( Appelbaum et al., 2007 ).

In cases where ethics failed to take hold, the lack of exemplary leaders—that is, when leadership talked the talk but didn’t walk the walk—inhibited development of a culture of ethics. A lack of balance in the types of cultural elements identified as enablers was another inhibitor for transmitting culture effectively. One company relied heavily on declarative elements and normative elements—mission statements and related slogans, and the beliefs of founders—but did not deploy a balance of structural or symbolic elements to ensure their implementation. The company did not promote a collective learning process to achieve a shared hierarchy of values, and it has suffered from a disconnect similar to Enron ( Sims & Brinkmann, 2009 ). This company is now known for having a strong mission and culture, but not one that encourages ethical behavior.

In startups, survey participants cited as inhibitors pragmatic normative elements—a focus on legal, not ethical considerations—and the influence of having a poor array of cultural elements. For example, they mentioned a lack of formal declarative cultural elements (e.g., mission and values, policies and decision-making criteria); scant symbolic elements (e.g., a lack of ethical sensibility and moral competency in leaders, or few sanctions for behavior that went against stated norms or values); or an absence of structural elements (e.g., channels for participation beyond informal meetings). To test these tendencies would require further studies focusing on a larger number of startups. When affirming values, conditions and cultural elements interact, reinforcing the culture and the consistency with which it is implemented, and thus strengthening the procedures and practices that engender individual and organizational accountability.

4. Toward a culture of ethics: A roadmap

More and more companies are intentionally managing culture as a strategy for organizational ethics. But there are currently few practical tools and approaches to deal with the complexity of fostering cultures in which ethical considerations are a regular part of business discussions and decision-making. The patterns identified in this study show a dynamic relationship among opportunities, conditions, and specific sets of cultural elements, thereby uncovering some of the mechanisms of ethics pervasiveness. Further, these patterns show the importance of using different types of cultural elements to leverage opportunities when conditions are present. An old framework ( Gutiérrez Díez, 1996 ) used for the analysis of cultural elements offered new insights to uncover mechanisms by which ethics is instilled in companies.

Our evidence-based patterns can help managers encourage ethics in their organizational culture by leveraging foreseeable or even intentionally created opportunities to incorporate ethics ( Figure 1 ). The starting point for ethical development within a company is to explore and reflect upon its current culture. The patterns observed in this study support regular culture assessments that include reviewing cultural elements and assessing the presence or absence of conditions that can lead to the introduction, use, and affirmation of ethics. Through these types of assessments, companies can identify conditions and cultural elements worth promoting to encourage ethics. Once the company has acted on its findings to drive cultural change, a reassessment starts the process anew. In this way, culture management becomes a practical, technical skill, measuring outcomes and developing an organization that can learn about itself.

Manager’s actions using patterns

Ethical aspects

All procedures performed in the study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and research committees in each location of the study, and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This study has received no external funds.

Declaration of competing interest

Cecilia Martinez Arellano declares that she has no conflicts of interest. Pedro M. Sasia Santos declares that he has no conflicts of interest. Ann G. Skeet has the following conflicts of interest:

• • During the time the research was conducted, a relative of Ann Skeet's worked at one of the companies where the interviews for this study were conducted. The company is a multinational enterprise with over 80,000 employees, and there is no direct connection between him and the people who were interviewed as part of this study.
• • The Center for Applied Ethics where Ann Skeet works receives general marketing sponsorship support for business ethics programming that includes events and business ethics internships from some of the companies interviewed, but not support specific to this study. Interns participating in the center’s business internship program worked at one of the companies where the research was conducted.

Acknowledgment

We would like to acknowledge the members of the learning community of academics and practitioners focused on business ethics training and research at Directica, the Centre for Applied Ethics at the University of Deusto, and also the companies and businesspeople of the Markkula Center’s business ethics partnership at Santa Clara University that have taken part in this study.

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An Organizational Ethical Dilemma Essay Examples

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Chipotle , Ethics , Customers , Ethical , Food , Stakeholders , Pets , Law

Words: 1300

Published: 03/08/2023

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Introduction

It is common for an organization to fall into some predicament once in a while. The concept reveals itself by the aspect of organizations having contingency plans that leverage them in the case of an impromptu or ongoing scandals. I have always observed that companies have insurance covers for such incidences. Most of the problems that organizations are likely to encounter include organizational ethical dilemmas. Recently, one of the well-known fast food joint, Chipotle Mexican Grill, alias chipotle. Chipotle encompasses a chain of fast food restaurants. The chain is allegedly accused of breaching the food policy protocol regulations by using dog and cat meat as part of their dishes. The situation has led to the chain facing food safety lawsuit. The ethical dilemma that Chipotle is facing entails the alleged claims on food security and making consumers sick against losing the market share and the shareholders. In this paper, I will provide my insight on the organizational-ethical dilemma that the Chipotle chain of restaurants are facing and how the organization is dealing with the crisis in light of the eight steps model of ethical decision making by Trevor and Nelson.

Key facts about Chipotle

The Mexican chipotle grill has had a rather rough time in the recent past. Just a recap, I did see that Chipotle had been sued by the federal government over compensation of stockholders in the year 2015. The same year and the corresponding lawsuits saw the sales decline by over 14.6% (Blackmore, 2016). Consequently, lawsuits by investors have been imminent. The current scenario is an alleged case of the organization using dog and cat meat as part of their dishes. The situation to me is a scary one since I do not think I can stand the fact that I may have taken a pizza or any meat affiliated product from them. It is reported that the FDA inspectors came across some live dogs and cats and correspondingly saw dead corpses of the same somewhere near the chipotle factory in Denver. The case was reported to the local authorities (Blackmore, 2016). The intriguing and weird question that I keep on asking myself is, “why would such a popular and high ranked chain result to such measures if at all the allegations are true?”

The ethical issue involved

Let me assume for a moment that the allegations are true and have some solid, irrefutable evidence. First, use of dog and cat meat is not legal by any means. If someone was to justify the case since I know of some nations that eat dog meat, then here in our country it would be awkward and unethical. It is expected that any food restaurant used the recommended and expected the raw material to synthesize and prepare the dishes. Failure to observe that is highly unethical and against the law. Inability to follow and keep the ethical guidelines is termed as unethical (Trevino & Nelson, 2014). The public has raised concerns on the same, and there is an imminent situation of conflict which indicates a sign of ethical collapse (Jennings, 2006).

Relevant Individuals and Groups

The key people involved here in my view are the stakeholders and the consumers. In my interpretation, the stakeholders have a lot to lose. If the business collapses entirely, then their investment is in jeopardy. The consumers on the other hand risk disease as a result of the extraordinary dishes they are served at the Chipotle restaurant. Trevino and Nelson, (2014) assert the customers, and the stakeholders are likely to suffer the most. In my view, the leadership has failed to establish and honor the food policy protocol and that is an indication of a failed leadership (Ciulla, 2005).

Possible Consequences and specific Alternative Actions

No company wants to see the good name and reputation go down the drain for whatever reasons. In the case that the situation occurs, companies will try their best to salvage the situation (Lamberton, Mihalek & Smith, 2005). Chipotle Mexican Grill is likely to suffer a significant loss both concerning the clients and the stakeholders. As an alternative, the company is offering the customers vouchers and free meals at the restaurants as a way of reassuring and attracting the customers. Additionally, the firm is holding general meetings with the stakeholders to explain and reassure them of their investment (Blackmore, 2016).

Relevant Obligations from my analysis of the dilemma

The Chipotle chain has a duty by law and by ethics to ensure that they provide their customers with what they promise. Additionally, they also need to engage the stakeholders in meetings and ensure that they have a consensus that does not see the investors pulling out (Clegg, Kornberger, & Rhodes, 2007).

Community Standards of Integrity that provides me with guidance

Service with integrity encompasses my day to day activities at my workplace and other social interactions. Integrity is a virtue that sees one doing the right things, the right manner, the right time, and place. If the Chipotle had observed service with integrity, then they may not have landed at the current predicament (Lamberton, Mihalek, & Smith, 2005).

Possible creative alternate actions

The Chipotle Mexican Grill have a daunting and tricky task ahead of turning the tables around. They have to invent some innovative and highly lucrative tactics. One of the tactics is discrediting the alleged evidence as malicious and false. Probably a plan by the competitors to downplay them. Moreover, they can disregard the accusations and focus on clearing their name while at the same time providing better and quality services to the customers (Hatvany, & Strack, 1980). In my opinion, the strategy turns tables around, though slowly but effectively.

What is my gut telling me?

I have a feeling that the case against the Chipotle restaurants has an imminent malicious background. If I am going to inculcate other additives the main dish of my customers with off the menu items, then I have to be smart. The Chipotle could not have been possibly that careless to leave evidence behind, mostly in an area frequently visited by health inspectors. That is an act of deliberated suicide.

The organizational-ethical dilemma facing the Chipotle group of the restaurant is dangerous in its state. The shareholders and the customers have questions and doubts regarding the overall credibility of the organization. Standards and responsibility are seen to have been lost or neglected by the company. However, in my honest view, the company seems amicably and responsibly responding to the adversity and may soon recover. Some of the positive actions that they are engaging include holding meetings with stakeholders, communicating as needed to the customers and even offering free vouchers for meals and other shopping to the customers. To me, this may just be the beginning of a long path to recovery.

Blackmore, W. (2016, January 9). Chipotle Sued Over Food-Safety Scandal. Retrieved from Take Part: http://www.takepart.com/article/2016/01/09/chipotle-investor-lawsuit. Ciulla, J. B. (2005). The state of leadership ethics and the work that lies before us. Business Ethics: A European Review, 14(4), 323-335. Clegg, S., Kornberger, M., & Rhodes, C. (2007). Business ethics as practice. British Journal Management, 18(2), 107-122. Hatvany, N., & Strack, F. (1980). The impact of a discredited key witness. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 10(6), 490-509. Jennings, M. M. (2006, August). The seven signs of ethical collapse. In European Business Forum (Vol. 25, No. Summer, pp. 32-38). Lamberton, B., Mihalek, P. H., & Smith, C. S. (2005). The tone at the top and ethical conduct connection. Strategic Finance, 86(9), 36. Trevino, L. K., & Nelson, K. A. (2014). Managing business ethics: Straight talk about how to do it right. 6th Edition. New York: Wiley & Sons.

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6 ways organisations deal with dilemmas

Blog, Coaching, Human Resources, Leadership, Learning, Management, Organisational Change, Organisational Development, Research

Following on from the previous post  ‘New research: Organisational responses to dilemmas and emergencies’  in this post I will look at what the research says about the 6 ways organisations deal with dilemmas.

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It has previously been found that there are six main ways organisations deal with these secondary order tensions, paradoxes and dilemmas:

• Denial.  The organisation just doesn’t recognise or see the secondary order tensions, paradoxes and dilemmas and operates as if they don’t exist.
• Cosmetic responses . This is where organisations take action that appears to deal with them, but don’t. For example where they hold a meeting with all the concerned departments and agencies to talk about and agree a set of actions to deal with the issues, without executing the actions required.
• Selection.  This is where the organisation selects which secondary order tensions, paradoxes and dilemmas to deal with and either ignores those that are just too hard to deal with or those that they haven’t got a ready solution to.
• Alternation.  This is where the organisation flops from dealing with one issue or pole of a dilemma to another, but doesn’t actually deal with them together. In effect the organisation keeps switching its focus and swinging between the issues without seeing them as a whole picture. As a result they often fail to see the connections between issues.
• Segmentation.  This is where different departments or units are dealing with and trying to solve different secondary order tensions, paradoxes and dilemmas without coordination.
• Transcendence.  The authors note that this occurs when “when organizations openly acknowledge the dilemma and tensions confronting them, accept it as a paradox, and attempt to work out creative responses. Organizations adopting this approach would emphasize continuous vigilance, adaptability, learning, creativity, improvisation, and “going with the flow.” These organizations would have flexible structures, communication-intensive processes, and experimental approaches to problem solving.”

Usually, because transcendence responses require constant and consistent vigilance and management, they are always in danger of degenerating into one of the other types of responses.

Additionally because denial, selection and cosmetic responses appear to be the least costly, especially in terms of effort, creativity and time, they are the most frequent responses in most organisations. However, as previous research has shown, these three strategies lie at the heart of the failure of most complex inter-agency/inter-departmental responses.

This table shows the properties of each response type:

Transcendence responses appear to be the most costly initially because it necessitates co-operative problem solving and consensus building, which takes time and high levels of engagement.

In the next post I will look at the the conclusions of this research and what it means for your organisation.

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Organizational Ethical Dilemmas

These days organizations are expected to be socially responsible and engage in ethical decision-making. The paper aims to explore the main moral issues companies encounter and examine how they can be resolved. The study is based on the analysis and summarization of the existing literature covering business dilemmas, as well as different aspects of organizational ethics. The author also uses the case of Apple Inc. as an example of a company that abides by certain moral standards and expectations. While making decisions organizations have to consider multiple stakeholders, such as customers, employees, and the environment. There are also benefits of engaging in programs aimed at enhancing the communities well-being. Therefore, companies aspiring to achieve better public recognition should acknowledge these factors during their operations.

Organizations and Ethical Decision-Making

These days organizations purposes and responsibilities are not seen merely through the framework of legal and financial liabilities. Along with the expectations regarding providing quality goods and services, they are viewed accountable for maintaining workplace diversity, supporting environmental protection, and contributing to the public good. In other words, there are specific standards of social responsibility they have to abide by (Duckworth, 2016). Fulfilling these duties entails facing ethical dilemmas at different levels of a company’s operations, but the successful resolution of these issues can positively contribute to its public image.

First of all, it is essential to understand the basic principles of ethical decision-making. Its key element is proper framing, which implies establishing that the problem is ethical even if other responsibilities are involved (Schwartz, 2017). This demands moral awareness, which requires understanding how the decision-makers actions influence individuals, organizations, or the environment (Schwartz, 2017). Therefore, careful consideration of possible outcomes is demanded to choose the most optimal decision for all the parties involved. For companies, these stakeholders include customers, the environment, employees, and communities.

Marketing Strategies and Production Processes

All economic transactions are based on supply and demand, making customers purchasing power, their needs, expectations, and satisfaction levels the main predictors of an organization’s performance. Therefore, companies focus should be on providing their clients with products that are safe to use and comply with their description. It is not merely a question of economic benefit: state laws protect customers rights to safety, to being heard, and being informed (Weiss, 2014). However, while legally regulated, business operations should also be considered from an ethical perspective. These areas include advertising, product safety, and ecological responsibility.

Ethical Advertising

Many discussions surround the issue of advertising. Companies are legally obliged to give accurate information regarding the product or service they provide (Weiss, 2014). However, they often employ various misleading tactics during their marketing operations which, while not being necessarily punishable, are still rather questionable. For instance, nowadays, with the increase of health-conscious consumers, many companies add “sugar-free” labels to their packaging hiding sugar under lesser-known names (such as dextrose, fructose, maltose). In other cases, clarification is written in a small font that is hard for most consumers to read. While from a legal perspective, it may be considered customers responsibility to educate themselves or be more careful; it is an ethical obligation of an organization to give accurate, easily accessible, and understandable information about the product. Moreover, deceiving clients is unlikely to be an efficient long-term strategy since it undermines trust.

Potentially-Harmful Products

Another ethical issue is connected to advertising such products as fast food, cigarettes, and alcohol, which are associated with many diseases, including obesity, diabetes, addictions, and lung cancer. Many concerns have been expressed regarding certain marketing strategies that glorify unhealthy behaviors, such as consuming high-calories foods or drinking alcoholic beverages (Weiss, 2014). Such advertising can be particularly dangerous if directed to teenagers who tend to be more vulnerable to external influence (Weiss, 2014). Parents raise particular concerns regarding pop-up ads online (Weiss, 2014). The companies should understand that if they advertise potentially harmful products to youngsters, they are not merely dealing with a way to increase sales. From a long-term perspective, it makes them responsible for growing figures in child obesity and alcohol consumption among adolescents.

Safety Concerns

Some products may also have certain defects posing a danger to consumers. It is a legal issue, though surrounded by discussions related to the extent companies should be held responsible for the harm caused by their goods (Weiss, 2014). However, it is also a moral obligation of a trader to make sure their customers are safe. Therefore, having learned about a potentially harmful defect, they should recall their products (Weiss, 2014). For instance, in 2019, Apple recalled some of its 15 MacBook Pro laptops due to a battery fire risk (Gibbs, 2019). Such actions not only help to ensure that the clients are safe and no lawsuits would follow, but it is also an ethical decision that supports the company’s reputation.

Environmental Protection

Organizations should also be accountable for the impact they have on the environment. It is estimated that significant damage to ecology is done through irresponsible production processes (Weiss, 2014). Damage caused by human activity, including greenhouse emissions and uncontrollable use of limited resources, contributes to increases in heart and respiratory diseases and is also linked to climate change and water scarcity (Weiss, 2014). Thus, protecting nature concerns individual lives and societies as a whole. Therefore, companies (which have more resources to harm and more resources to help) should also be aware of their environmental impact. As environmental awareness increases, many businesses start to employ green marketing strategies (such as eco-friendly packaging) using it as a competitive edge (Mahmoud, 2018). However, it should not be merely a way of attracting clients – their actions must align with the principles of sustainability.

Creating Respectful Workplaces

Apart from responsibilities towards customers and the environment, companies have moral obligations to their potential and current employees. They are expected to provide equal opportunities for all applicants and create safe and respectful workplaces for their employees, supporting and enhancing diversity. It is essential to eliminate any differences in status between demographic subgroups (Guillaume et al., 2017). A person’s position in a company should be only influenced by their merit and contribution.

Enhancing Diversity

These objectives can be achieved by developing effective diversity management strategies including recruiting practices aimed at attracting candidates from different backgrounds. However, merely employing people of diverse genders, races, and sexual orientations without creating an appropriate corporate culture is unlikely to be beneficial both for the company and its new staff members. Therefore, many organizations now provide diversity training to raise awareness regarding widespread biases and foster tolerance and better communication (Shaban, 2016). Managers must help their employees to understand and accept their differences (Shaban, 2016). As Guillaume et al. point out, positive attitudes towards diversity and “task and team-related competencies and motivation” are essential for creating respectful and productive workplaces (2017, p. 296).

Leadership also plays a crucial role – managers should avoid expressing any biases and personally contribute to cultivating tolerance and equality (Guillaume et al., 2017). Many global companies also have training programs aimed at different minorities, helping them improve their skills and qualifications. This can ensure that people of a background that made it difficult for them to receive education and training similar to others are provided with an opportunity for professional development.

Apple’s Example

These days the majority of successful companies foster and develop diversity. Creating inclusive teams fulfills their moral responsibilities towards their communities and is also suggested to improve their performance by attracting more talent (Lambert, 2016). One of the leading companies in the world of technology, Apple Inc., also puts a great value on diversity linking it to better innovation (Apple, 2018a). Its recent hiring statistics show that human resources managers try to attract more people from different minority groups (Apple, 2018b). They also claim to have achieved equal pay for similar roles and performances in every country they operate in (Apple, 2018a). Such strategies help to ensure that the company attracts a positive public image by taking care of one of its main stakeholders – employees.

Corporate Volunteer Programs

Benefits to companies.

Another way to provide for better life satisfaction and engagement of workers is through organizing corporate volunteer programs. Such initiatives are aimed at creating a coordinated approach to providing employees with opportunities to contribute to the public good. Some activities they can be involved in include “after-school reading programs, working in homeless shelters, constructing low-income housing, cleaning up community parks” (Longenecker et al., 2012, p. 10).

There are several practical reasons why companies may cultivate such practices. Research shows that employees participation in volunteering contributes to increases in media exposure, brand recognition, and customer loyalty (Longenecker et al., 2012). Moreover, working for the same cause can help employees to bond together widening networking possibilities (Longenecker et al., 2012). Research also shows that such programs increase employee engagement, consequently leading to better performance (Caligiuri et al., 2013). Also, performing different roles while volunteering can help them to improve their organizational or emotional skills.

Benefits to Employees

In addition, there are significant ethical implications of organizational volunteering. As Duckworth (2016) emphasizes, it is critical to remember that employees are also community members. Therefore, working for its benefit can increase employees happiness and life satisfaction, providing them with opportunities to do something meaningful for society. Also, as community members, employees have their own experiences, which make them capable of or interested in improving certain aspects of social life. Moreover, allowing employees to suggest and develop their ideas can help to increase the social responsibility of an organization as a whole (Duckworth, 2016). Therefore, it will enable companies to use their resources to contribute to the public good.

Corporate Volunteering Organization

However, to derive these benefits, it is important to ensure that corporate volunteering programs are organized well. Caligiuri et al. suggest that to obtain long-term benefits for companies, NGOs, and individual employees, companies should “select volunteers for their technical skills (and put them in assignments where they can use them), to provide them with an opportunity to further develop their skills, and to assign them to NGOs that have the tangible resources to sustain the volunteers’ projects after the volunteers leave so the “sense of purpose” among the volunteers is high” (2013, p. 856). Knowing that their contribution will be meaningful in the long run, even if they would not be able to continue working for that cause, can significantly improve volunteers motivation.

Thus, while performing their legal and economic operations, organizations also have to consider multiple ethical dilemmas. They should identify the main stakeholders and how they would be affected by the chosen course of action. In many cases, companies negligence or intention to deceive can harm their clients, employees, or the environment. However, they also have a lot to offer: unique resources they can use to improve individual lives or contribute to the public good. Successful companies these days understand their responsibilities, try to adjust their decision-making process to be more ethical, and take actions to give back to the community.

Apple. (2018a). Inclusion and diversity . Web.

Apple. (2018b). Employer information report EEO-1 . Web.

Caligiuri, P., Mencin, A., & Jiang, K. (2013). Win–win–win: The influence of company‐sponsored volunteerism programs on employees, NGOs, and business units. Personnel Psychology , 66 (4), 825–860.

Duckworth, H. A. (2016). Social responsibility should be participation essential. The Journal for Quality and Participation , 38 (4), 39–40.

Gibbs, Samuel. (2019). Apple recalls 15in MacBook Pro laptops over battery fire risk. The Guardian . Web.

Guillaume, Y. R., Dawson, J. F., Otaye‐Ebede, L., Woods, S. A., & West, M. A. (2017). Harnessing demographic differences in organizations: What moderates the effects of workplace diversity? Journal of Organizational Behavior , 38 (2), 276–303.

Lambert, J. (2016). Cultural diversity as a mechanism for innovation: Workplace diversity and the absorptive capacity framework. Journal of Organizational Culture, Communications and Conflict , 20 (1), 68–77.

Longenecker, C. O., Beard, S., & Scazzero, J. A. (2012). What about the workers? The workforce benefits of corporate volunteer programs. Development and Learning in Organizations: An International Journal , 27(1), 9–12.

Mahmoud, T.O. (2018). Impact of green marketing mix on purchase intention. International Journal of Advanced and Applied Sciences , 5 (2), 127–135.

Schwartz, M. S. (2017). Business ethics: An ethical decision-making approach . John Wiley & Sons.

Shaban, A. (2016). Managing and leading a diverse workforce: One of the main challenges in management. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences , 230 (1), 76–84.

Weiss, J. W. (2014). Business ethics: A stakeholder and issues management approach (6 th edition). Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

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More From Forbes

Eight common ethical dilemmas business owners face (and how to overcome them).

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Ethical dilemmas are commonplace in society, but when a business experiences one, the impact (and potential fallout) can have a wide reach.

In many cases, ethical dilemmas are challenging to work through because the risk and reward aren't as clear-cut as other types of decisions. This complexity becomes even more convoluted with businesses, as other businesses, customers and employees can all be affected. Below, eight leaders from Young Entrepreneur Council examine some of the more common ethical dilemmas business owners may face and offer their advice on how to overcome them.

Young Entrepreneur Council members offer their tips for how to overcome these ethical dilemmas.

1. Supporting Other Businesses When Money Is Tight

Sometimes business owners have to choose between keeping costs down to survive and supporting other businesses. This is a difficult choice to make and one with significant impact on different people. It helps to find alternative ways to do your part in helping other businesses. It doesn't always have to be about money. If you want to support other businesses and avoid losing money, you could cross-promote other businesses or help in different ways. Keep an open mind and keep looking for solutions and you could come up with interesting ways to help your business and others around you. - Syed Balkhi , WPBeginner

2. Compromising On Product Quality

Compromising on product quality is usually the first place business owners go to make a few extra bucks. Cheaper cost of goods sold looks great on a spreadsheet, but the reality of the situation is your customers will notice. In most industries, the goal is to maximize the lifetime value of the customer. It is very important to put your best foot forward with your product quality and not try to cut corners. If there’s a manufacturing error, don’t sell it. If the software is buggy, don’t ship it. If the food isn't cooked right, send it back. It’s always financially beneficial in the long term to do the right thing. Give the customer the highest quality you can for the money they’re paying you. - Michael Fellows , Patriot Crew

3. Offshoring Your Manufacturing

I once consulted with an entrepreneur who was passionate about manufacturing in the U.S., but who unfortunately found out through market testing that the customers could only tolerate a price point that was too low for this manufacturer to provide. So their ethical dilemma was whether or not to offshore their manufacturing. In the end, they came to terms with the market price, and then, while they chose to manufacture offshore, they ended up forming a strong relationship with the provider and built up enough trust in ethical practices. This was the only way for the small brand to take a toehold in the market. Once they gain enough traction, they hope to move their operations back to the U.S. and command a higher price point. - Kaitlyn Witman , Rainfactory

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4. Letting Clients Go

Walking away from toxic clients can be a common ethical dilemma. It's hard to know what the right thing to do is if they are bringing good income into your company and there are contracts signed. But if it's a toxic relationship, boundaries need to be set. If those aren't working, the relationship needs to end—as difficult as that can be. - Diego Orjuela , Cables & Sensors

5. Responding To Employee Social Media Behavior

The question of how to respond to employees' social media behavior outside of work is a difficult one. It's sometimes hard to draw the line. It's entirely justifiable to fire an employee over poor behavior on their personal social media accounts, but it's sometimes tricky to determine exactly when that line is crossed. In today's day and age, there's no excuse for crossing a boundary on social media. Internet etiquette is taught to everyone these days. So if your employee, no matter how valuable they are, crosses a line into propagating hate speech or is discriminating against a particular community of people, then I'd let them go. - Amine Rahal , IronMonk Solutions

6. Keeping Employees Because Of Seniority

Keeping employees around because of seniority is an ethical dilemma. It's normal for business owners to feel that they should be good to people who have been around a company for a long time. However, the people who got you to where you are today are not necessarily the ones who are going to get you to where you need to go in the future. It can be counterintuitive and downright heartbreaking, but keeping people around too long is actually unethical. Business owners may want to keep a "family" atmosphere within their team, but as Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, says in his book The Alliance , teams are gauged on performance, and you can be cut from the team. Having people on the team who are incompetent destroys the morale of the competent ones on the team. Know when to terminate! - Matt Wilson , Under30Experiences

7. Accepting Job Applicants From Competitors

We recently had an implementation consultant apply to our firm who was coming from another firm in a similar space. The applicant was willing to jump ship without notice and even threw out that some clients would probably come with her. While it could seem easy to take a person with such experience, how they treat their former employers is how they will also treat you one day. If things don't feel right in your gut before day one even happens, it may be best to steer clear. - Marjorie Adams , Fourlane

8. Creating Honest Marketing

Being honest with your marketing message is one of the biggest ethical dilemmas that the modern business owner faces. A casual review of your social media feeds will quickly reveal that using unethical manipulation, misleading your market and overpromising benefits is still rampant across industries. The good news is one of the best ways to stand out in your marketplace is to actually care about your customers and tell the truth. Instead of rushing the sale, what I’ve found that works really well is to show your marketplace that you can help them by delivering valuable content that actually helps them solve real challenges they're having. By doing this, you generate incredible amounts of goodwill and trust with your market and this trust leads to more sales over a longer period of time. - Joe Stolte , The Tractionology Group

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An Organizational Dilemma - Essay Example

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Extract of sample "An Organizational Dilemma"

This essay seeks to analyze a critical way of handling ethical issues in any organization by using an example from General Motors. The methodology used herein is derived by Trevino and Nelson (2011). Steps of Handling Ethical Issues Now that ethical issues will always appear in a business organization, it is only obvious that every manager has the responsibility of handling the issues sensibly. This means they should be handled in a manner that compromises little but at the same time achieves a great deal for the business.

In that light, the eight step model developed by Trevino and Nelson (2011) seeks to ease the task of managers in ensuring that all the key players, who are; the customers, employees, shareholders and the community in which the business operates, are all at a satisfactory level. Step One: Gather the Facts According to Trevino and Nelson, this is quite a critical yet unpredictable part of addressing the ethical issue (2011). At this level, the management is required to collect the points of view of the customers, employees, shareholders and the community. . Step Two: Define the Ethical Issues This is an analysis of the results obtained in step one.

The management interprets the meaning of the facts gathered in relation to the organization. This identifies the genuine issues from the bluffs. For instance, a GM customer who claims that there is no customer help centre in South Africa is considered to be bluffing since there are a number of them. Step Three: Identify the Affected Parties The opinion or complaint of one party could be a whole network that affects more than just that one party. This step enlists all the parties affected by a single issue.

For instance, GM was considered to be a key pollutant in 1978 by producing 80 different toxic fumes. This not only affects the community around it but also the employees working in the factory. Step Four: Identify the Consequences These could be considered as either long-term or short-term effects of the particular issue highlighted by the preceding steps (Trevino and Nelson, 2011). This means that some effects are felt for a long period of time while others are only felt for a short time. These effects can also be viewed from the perspective of how much damage they cause to the stakeholders.

For example, the GM pollution of 1978 was said to cause adverse respiratory complications for the society around it, including school children. With this, the management is charged with the responsibility of providing actions that can solve the situation both in the long term and short term. Step Five: Identify Obligation for each Action Contemplated This means that the management is required to know if any of the actions contemplated in step four is implemented and the implications thereof to

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Ethical Dilemma in Healthcare Administration Essay (Article)

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Introduction

Ethical dilemma, health care ethics, solution to ethical dilemma.

Healthcare administration faces ethical dilemma in providing prime health services and maintaining the economic status of the healthcare system concurrently. The administration must stringently balance health services and economic issues that are intrinsic to the healthcare system.

Hornbeak explains that, health care administrators have critical role “…in overseeing the moral conduct and missions of their institutions while at the same time maintaining the economic viability of those institutions, but these two major functions can clash and create dilemmas that complicate the practice of health administration” (2011, p. 1).

The ethical issue regarding economic viability of health care institutions elicits ethical dilemma where two views arise. The first view questions how health care institutions can ethically concentrate the administrative functions on the issues of health only and remain economically viable and sustainable at the same time.

The second view ethically doubts the administrative capacity to juggle both health care and economic issues, without compromising the primary role of offering quality health care in the society. Therefore, how does the health care administration resolve the ethical dilemma amidst demands of quality health care and economic constraints?

Health care systems have a noble responsibility of ensuring that they provide quality health care services that are affordable and accessible to all people. Other responsibilities such as integration of business practices into the system seem to have encumbrance effect that would lead to compromised health care services.

The integration of business practices into the health care system has elicited ethical concerns that have resulted into ethical dilemma in the administrative responsibilities. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) “expanded its patient rights standards to include requirements for assuring that hospital business practices would be ethical in 1995” (Laura, Cherry, & Darragh, 2009, p.1).

JCAHO established ‘patient rights and organization ethics’ that classified two types of ethics involved in health care administration; clinical and business ethics. Clinical ethics govern the relationship between healthcare and patients while business ethics deal with the relationship between health care and its suppliers.

Currently, the health care system is struggling to resolve the ethical dilemma that threatens to stall provision of quality health services and sustainable utilization of health care resources. Ethical concerns root for the distinction and separation of clinical ethics and business ethics in order to avoid complications of the responsibilities in the health care system.

Laura, Cherry and Darragh argue that, “while marketing and admission practices are seen as issues related to ‘business’ they can lead to unneeded admissions or demand for unneeded services, both of which can unnecessarily expose the patient to the risk of side effects or complications” (2009, p. 2).

Without clinical and business ethics to streamline the relationship between essential and non-essential health care services, the business aspect would take precedence since profits is the ultimate objective. On the other extreme, stringent clinical ethics may render health care system economically unviable resulting into poor healthcare services. Therefore, health care systems have great challenge of resolving the ethical dilemma that threatens the quality provision of services and sustainability of resources.

Historically, healthcare system has been focusing on the clinical ethics while neglecting the importance of business ethics. By doing this, the healthcare system erred because “…it sought to deal with specific clinical ethical issues before assessing the ethical organization life and ethical infrastructure of the whole system which has affected the resolution of the ethical dilemma” (Silva, 1998, p.26).

Clinical ethics govern the relationship between the healthcare system and the patient by ensuring that health professionals do not comprise the quality of health services that patients receive.

According to healthcare professional ethics, the primary goal of any health institutions is provision of quality, affordable, and accessible health care services that improve health standards of the people. However, integration of business ethics into the healthcare system is a threat to clinical ethics.

Although the primary goal of the health care system is provision of quality services, it is impossible to sustain the use of available resources without venturing into business.

Health institutions are in strategic position to conduct lucrative businesses aimed at improving the quality of services they offer to patients. Faced with this truth, healthcare administrators have a challenge of balancing the clinical and business ethics because there is tendency to neglect clinical ethics and concentrate on the business ethics.

Healthcare institutions have become business oriented in the United States since “…health care organizational culture has shifted from a service oriented one to a monetary oriented one characterized by product lines, stocks, profits, competition, megamergers and, ultimately, survival” (Silva, 1998, p. 3).

The survival of the health care system may entail increasing the costs of services, falsifying diagnoses, admitting or discharging patients unprofessionally with the prime objective of earning profits.

To address the ethical dilemma in the healthcare system involving clinical and business ethics, the administration should focus its attention on building cultural and ethical infrastructure to regulate all activities in a health organization.

In addition, the administration should instill ethical principles to healthcare professionals at all levels of the organization through education and strong leadership that advocates for the postulated ethics.

Silva argues that, “in any attempt to change the values of an organization … the contents of the existing organizational culture must be dealt with directly for positive change to occur” (1998, p. 4). Therefore, the issue of clinical and business ethics calls for cultural and ethical infrastructure for it to have a lasting solution.

The resolution of the ethical dilemma requires an overhaul of organizational culture and ethics. Change in cultural and ethical infrastructure is imperative as it provides professional environment where ethics guide all healthcare practices.

Corporate leadership is not enough to transform cultural and ethical infrastructure because “not only the leaders but also the followers must ascribe to common, sound, and shared ethical values, just as unethical leadership can taint followers, morally tainted followers can impede or stop the goals of ethical leaders” (Laura, Cherry, & Darragh, 2009, p. 7).

Therefore, transformation of the cultural and ethical infrastructure needs concerted efforts of both the administrative and health professionals.

The ethical dilemma in the administration of healthcare system is affecting the delivery of quality services and sustainability of the health resources available. The healthcare system administrators face the challenge of striking a balance between clinical ethics that seek to provide standard services to the patients and business ethics that take care of the sustainability of health resources.

Since both clinical and business ethics are critical in the healthcare system, cultural and ethical infrastructure is essential for the resolution of the long-standing ethical dilemma and the realization of defined administrative roles.

Hornbeak, J. (2011). Health Administration Ethics. Spring Journal, 12, 1-10

Laura, J., Cherry, N., & Darragh, M. (2009). Organizational Ethics and Health Care: Expanding Bioethics to the Institutional Arena. National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature, 9(5), 1-14.

Silva, M. (1998). Organizational and Administrative Ethics in Health Care: An Ethics Gap. Online Journal of Issues in Nursing , 16, 1-11.

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How do organizations deal with tough leadership dilemmas?

When leaders find themselves having to deliver on two goals simultaneously, where the pursuit of one seems to hurt the other, they face a dilemma; like when striving for short and long term performance, or chasing both innovation and productivity, or investing at home to protect the core business while simultaneously investing abroad to drive future growth.

Professor Chakravarthy points out that managing dilemmas is harder than making decisions, no matter how complex the latter may be. Unlike a decision where there is a singular purpose to be served; a dilemma requires trading off between two competing goals. There is regret no matter which goal is under served.

“The easiest way to manage a dilemma is to drop or weaken a goal,” Professor Chakravarthy said. “But if the twin goals are important to the long term success of an enterprise top management must persist with them and have within its ranks a champion for each.”

Top management must also ensure that there is good progress against each of the goals, even as it subtly moves the relative importance of one goal over the other based on the changing context of the firm’s business.

Some of the other prerequisites for successfully managing a dilemma include:

• Metrics and rewards for progress against both goals. Often the control system used in the firm is biased towards just one of the goals served, e.g. financial performance over environmental performance.
• Front line managers who are passionate about the twin goals being served and are on the constant look out for new innovative solutions that can help achieve both simultaneously, e.g. improving financial performance through energy conservation.
• Mid-level executives who provide hands on coaching to the front line managers as they struggle to strike the right balance between the twin goals. It is difficult to codify ex ante what the right approach is to achieve this balance. A lot of judgment is called for. That can only be provided through the close engagement of mid-level executives in the process.

Professor Chakravarthy recently facilitated a Senior Executive Roundtable at IMD, Singapore.

Learn about the new session of  High Performance Leadership (HPL)  taking place in Singapore this April.

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Today’s Most Critical Workplace Challenges Are About Systems

• Ludmila N. Praslova

So why do leaders tend to focus on individual-level solutions?

Critical workplace issues — e.g., the problematic quality of leadership within organizations, the threats to employee mental health and well-being, and the lack of belonging and inclusion — are primarily attributable to systemic factors embedded in organizational cultures and processes. And yet, many of these and other issues are still mainly addressed on the individual level. Why do organizations keep investing in remedies that don’t work and have little chance of working? An automatic bias in how we perceive and explain the world is a likely culprit. The author explains how that “superbias” manifests — and what leaders can do to combat it in their organizations.

W. Edwards Deming , a forward-thinking American who  helped engineer the Japanese economic miracle and was the father of the continuous quality improvement philosophy,  wrote that 94% of issues in the workplace are systemic. Only 6% are attributable to individual-level, idiosyncratic factors. Improvements, therefore, should also focus on systems — not individuals.

• Ludmila N. Praslova , PhD, SHRM-SCP, uses her extensive experience with neurodiversity and global and cultural inclusion to help create talent-rich workplaces. The author of The Canary Code , she is a professor of graduate industrial-organizational psychology and the accreditation liaison officer at Vanguard University of Southern California. Follow Ludmila on LinkedIn .

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The loneliest job? How top CEOs manage dilemmas and vulnerability

For many leaders, assuming the role of CEO is a key career goal and the culmination of decades of hard work. The CEO role is also among the most challenging and demanding positions in any organization—particularly during times of uncertainty and upheaval.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Gautam Kumra , Joydeep Sengupta , and Mukund Sridhar , with Janice Koh and Jennifer Chiang, representing views from the McKinsey Center for CEO Excellence.

About 100 CEOs have passed through the McKinsey Center for CEO Excellence (MCCE) leadership program since it launched in mid-2022 (for more information on the MCCE, see sidebar, “About the McKinsey Center for CEO Excellence”). These senior leaders—representing companies from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East—have openly shared their triumphs and struggles with us. In a previous article, we shared provisional results from our proprietary CEO Excellence Assessment Tool (CEAT), a self-assessment survey designed to capture CEOs’ aspirations and behaviors. 1 Gautam Kumra, Joydeep Sengupta, and Mukund Sridhar, “ CEO excellence: How do leaders assess their own performance? ,” McKinsey, February 13, 2024.

About the McKinsey Center for CEO Excellence

The McKinsey Center for CEO Excellence (MCCE) is McKinsey’s dedicated offering for CEO development. The MCCE is anchored on the six dimensions described in CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish The Best Leaders From The Rest (Scribner, March 2022), written by McKinsey senior partners Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra. These six dimensions—setting the direction, engaging with the board, aligning the organization, mobilizing through leaders, connecting with stakeholders, and managing personal effectiveness—are further broken down into 18 behaviors (exhibit).

The research underpinning the book is based on more than 20 years’ worth of data on 7,800 CEOs from 3,500 public companies across 70 countries and 24 industries. 1 “ CEO Excellence ,” McKinsey, accessed July 8, 2024.

The flagship MCCE journey involves a nine-month CEO Excellence program, tailored to help CEOs elevate their performance and reach their full potential. Each MCCE cohort brings together an exclusive group of CEOs, carefully curated from diverse industries and regions, and offers an unparalleled opportunity for executives to learn from experienced senior CEOs, engage with like-minded peers, and obtain feedback on their leadership style and behaviors.

This article complements that quantitative data with rich, qualitative insights gleaned from our discussions with MCCE participants about the inevitable moments of uncertainty they face during their tenures. 2 All direct quotes included in this article are based on qualitative interviews. Often, these uncertainties are rooted in one or more of five common dilemmas. Each dilemma concerns a time when CEOs are required to strike a balance between multiple desirable outcomes, which may be—or appear to be—incompatible. How, for example, do CEOs walk the line between preserving the core of their business and innovating for the future? How can they deliver short-term results while investing in long-term organizational health? How do they preserve a personal identity while fully immersing themselves in their role?

By illuminating lessons learned by CEOs during these difficult moments, we hope to shed light on a seldom-discussed side of the CEO experience. The CEO journey can be lonely, and even the most successful CEOs experience moments of doubt and vulnerability. We hope this article sparks an open conversation about the many overlapping challenges facing today’s CEOs as well as the tactics and structures they can use to bolster their performance at work and maintain a sense of personal well-being.

Five dilemmas for today’s CEOs

CEOs make many decisions—large and small—every day across a broad range of issues. This frequently entails optimizing multiple possible outcomes and juggling difficult trade-offs. Managing these decisions is central to the CEO role, which “sits at the intersection of all contradictions.” 3 Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra, CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest , New York, NY: Scribner, 2022. Our conversations with CEOs suggest that these decision moments most often involve one (or more) of five key dilemmas (exhibit).

Dilemma 1: Preserving the core while innovating for the future

Preserving the core of the business is paramount for most CEOs, because of a desire to respect the history and business value of established brands. Klaus Kleinfeld, former chair and CEO of Arconic and former president and CEO of Siemens, said, “When a company is over a hundred years old, a lot of people have done a lot of things right. I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. People who have been there before me made the decisions that benefited me.” At the same time, the CEOs we spoke to are aware of the fast-changing context in which they operate—especially in Asia—and the need to continually innovate to future-proof their organizations and maintain their market positions.

Balancing these two important aims can be particularly challenging for second- and third-generation CEOs running family businesses, who wish to preserve the family legacy while necessarily innovating for the future. For example, when the CEO of a family business in Southeast Asia sought to transform the business to avoid losing market share, one of his biggest hurdles was gaining buy-in within the family. He was eventually able to bring all stakeholders along by ensuring that his top team—a careful balance between the “old guard” and new professional hires—co-owned the company’s new mission statement. Gaining alignment required many iterations and numerous town halls to broadly communicate the updated vision. The result? A more customer-centric and data-driven organization, underpinned by traditional family values.

Managing this dilemma can also be challenging for publicly listed companies. One manufacturing company CEO had to allocate resources between two businesses in his company’s portfolio. The first was a huge revenue driver but with shrinking demand. The second business was in a fast-growing segment but required massive investment and was losing money; gaining a foothold in the market required an aggressive pivot, including retraining or replacing existing talent.

Gail Kelly, former CEO of the Westpac Group, stressed that innovating and preserving the core are not opposing goals. “The core is the heart of the business,” she said, “and businesses should keep innovating in the core to deliver and sustain performance, while simultaneously building new businesses. Preserving the core requires continued innovation.” A CEO can pursue thoughtful and strategic innovation to grow the company without taking excessive risks, while honoring its history and preserving assets, value, and a legacy of success.

Dilemma 2: Delivering short-term results while investing in long-term performance

CEOs want to ensure they are “doing right by the company” in the long term and making the difficult decisions that will create sustainable value. At the same time, however, they are constantly subject to contradicting views from the board and other stakeholders and are pressured to boost short-term value in ways that may not position the business for long-term success.

A focus on short-term success can be particularly alluring during challenging times. One CEO led his company through a far-reaching company transformation, resulting in a record-breaking 2022, but then faced a broad range of industry-wide difficulties in 2023. It was “difficult to stay on track with the transformation,” he told us. “I know what I’m doing is right, but the results are not coming through.”

Optimizing for the short term can be a risky strategy, too. Peter Olson, former CEO of Random House, regretted not thinking more about the process of merging two publishing houses: “I focused too much on making short-term targets and not enough on culture and talent development.”

Where short- and long-term goals compete, CEOs that opt to steer a steady long-term course may be positioned to withstand other pressures. Building and maintaining wider support in the chosen long-term strategy can help CEOs navigate pressure.

In many cases, however, short- and long-term goals can be distinct or even self-reinforcing. As Gail Kelly put it, CEOs need both a short-term and a long-term focus: “CEOs need to have a portfolio of projects, some of which will deliver in the short run, and others of which will deliver over the longer term,” she said. Kelly argued that clear and transparent communication with investors and the board is critical throughout the process. CEOs need to avoid overpromising and underdelivering and be up-front if a project is taking longer than expected or needs more investment.

Dilemma 3: Managing a team of individual stars versus maximizing collective performance

The CEOs we spoke to wanted to support each individual on their senior leadership team in performing at the top of their potential and getting opportunities to build and exhibit their distinctive strengths. At the same time, CEOs need to optimize the performance of the team, which may require them to focus on not only people or relationships but also skill sets.

A number of CEOs said they had found it difficult to manage individualistic star performers who consistently delivered great results but did not work well with others on the top team. In hindsight, several CEOs cited not dealing with a toxic high performer fast enough as one of their top regrets. The friction and loss of cohesion in the top team often led to serious long-term issues, including the loss of valued team members from the company.

Gail Kelly noted that CEOs sometimes retain an individual for too long instead of admitting that they made a poor choice; however, “if the person is a poor cultural fit, it is better for both the individual concerned and for the organization that the CEO makes the call early.”

A number of CEOs, particularly those whose companies are undergoing transformation, also noted a related dilemma: getting the balance right between long-tenured, loyal employees and new employees who have the skill sets necessary to transform the company but may not fully embrace the company’s values.

Nazir Razak, founding partner of Ikhlas Capital and former chair and CEO of CIMB Group, stressed that CEOs need to effectively manage both types of employees: “Good management starts with who is a ‘missionary’ and who is a ‘mercenary,’ and management and compensation structures will often need to vary. When the business is going well, the mercenary may be the easiest person to put in the role, but you need to have a clear succession plan as you never know when they will leave.”

For Nazir Razak, the most difficult challenge is managing toxic superstars who may have the full trust of the CEO. He has managed this challenge by working with these individuals to see if change was possible and—if not—going out of his way to find the departing employee a new role outside the company. “How you let go of the individual is of utmost importance,” he said. “Everyone in the company is watching your actions as a CEO.” Klaus Kleinfeld believes in a strong selection process, in which performance and values are evaluated at the same time. Once a person has been chosen, he welcomes them with trust. He strongly believes that a sustainable high-performance culture that thrives on improvement and innovation grows best in an environment based on trust and values. However, anyone who significantly compromises the organization’s values must be let go even if they are a star performer—and ideally, in a very visible way so the organization gets the message.

Dilemma 4: Empowering others while maintaining control of outcomes

Delegation is a vital skill for CEOs; empowering others is important for overall company performance and for building and developing leaders. At the same time, CEOs are ultimately accountable for company results and may, therefore, be reluctant to surrender control.

This balancing act can be particularly challenging for new CEOs, who may need to transition from an operator mindset, which was likely required in their previous role, to an orchestrator approach. Even for longer-tenured CEOs, deciding how and where to cede control can be an ongoing challenge. One experienced banking CEO in Southeast Asia admitted he still has trouble stepping away because of concerns that his team might make a mistake. As a result, he regularly stays late in the office to check detailed reports for possible errors.

Balancing delegation with accountability is an ongoing challenge for CEOs. They can help improve the company by creating a structure that allows their teams to fail and learn in a relatively low-risk environment while ensuring appropriate degrees of supervision and oversight.

In addition, assembling a group of trusted direct reports can help CEOs to delegate day-to-day responsibilities and decisions, freeing them up to focus on the big picture. Meanwhile, delegation often improves company performance, as Peter Olson makes clear: “CEOs may think that only they can make the best decisions about anything and everything, but in fact, if you have the right team, each of them will know their area—and make the right decisions—far better than the CEO.”

Even with judicious hiring, role clarity, and appropriate safeguards, organizations make mistakes—a reality that CEOs need to accept. Peter Olson said one of his major challenges as a CEO was “learning to drop the perfectionism and focus on the 95 percent of work that is done well, and not on the other 5 percent.”

CEOs can decide where to retain control and where to delegate based on the specific context. Nazir Razak stressed that CEOs will need to evolve their management style based on the needs of the company: “A period of transformation may call for a more authoritative approach, after which the CEO could relinquish a degree of control,” he said. “Smart CEOs frequently look at themselves in the mirror to see if they are still the right person to manage that business.”

Dilemma 5: Becoming fully immersed in the CEO role while retaining personal identity and sense of purpose

Most leaders want to perform at the highest possible level, which requires an intense degree of focus, commitment, and resilience. This was Peter Olson’s experience: “When I took over the job, the job took over my life,” he said. At the same time, CEOs want to have some sort of a personal life, including maintaining and building personal relationships and pursuing other interests. CEOs we spoke to found that striking this balance was a chronic challenge. This may be especially true in Asia, where rates of employee burnout are significantly higher than global averages. 4 “ Employee mental health and burnout in Asia: A time to act ,” McKinsey, August 18, 2022.

But many experienced CEOs said that at some point, they had realized they needed to find a sustainable balance to excel in their role. As Gail Kelly said, “It’s OK to have a busy or challenging period, but that can’t be your entire CEO career. You need to live your whole life, not just the business part of your life.” CEOs used different strategies to attain this balance. One said he carves out windows of time when he can be fully present at home, rather than having time at home with constant distractions. Many other CEOs expressed the importance of staying “in the moment,” engaging 100 percent in whatever they are doing.

Tips and tricks aside, the CEOs who said they had achieved a balance shared a common attribute: they had found their North Star. Having a sense of mission enabled them to maintain balance, clarity, and purpose. A CEO of a construction company shared his desire to build infrastructure that could support his country’s progress, both economically and socially. Similarly, a retail CEO spoke passionately about wanting to develop the next generation of talent in her country.

Having an overarching mission helps free CEOs from the sense that their job is simply to deliver against a constant stream of KPIs. “CEOs who have found greater balance are those who value the journey more than the destination,” said Fabrice Desmarescaux, leader of Aberkyn Asia and a CEO leadership coach at McKinsey. 5 Aberkyn counselors, who are part of McKinsey’s People & Organizational Practice, are experts in leadership development and transformations, including culture change and M&A. “Chasing targets, whether it’s a share price or a market share, creates a sense of permanent dissatisfaction and the illusion that we’ll be happy when we reach our goal. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Once CEOs are clear on their mission, they often find they have considerable capacity to set, or reframe, targets and KPIs. One CEO spent nine months broadening her company’s initiatives and targets to ensure alignment between her mission and that of the company. She emerged from that journey confident that the new set of KPIs made sense not only for the company but also for society, the environment, and her employees.

Finally, it can be hard for CEOs to bring their full personal identity, values, and purpose to the office rather than conform to the stereotypical notion of a CEO, but full immersion in the role calls for doing exactly that. As Fabrice Desmarescaux said, “The very worst way to lose yourself is to lose sight of your values. Under serious pressure to perform, CEOs can be tempted to cut corners or to adopt legal but unethical practices. This is a slippery slope.” Gail Kelly argued that bringing your complete self to work—and being open about doing so—can be beneficial: “Sharing aspects of your life broadly creates deeper relationships with your stakeholders because they see you as someone they can relate to.”

Important takeaways from interviewed leaders

CEOs are generally dealing with some or all of the above dilemmas simultaneously. A CEO may, for example, be trying to modernize a business while also seeking to empower a micromanaged team or refocus difficult personalities—all while striving to maintain a balanced, purpose-driven life.

The following takeaways may help CEOs and aspiring leaders navigate the inherent challenges of their roles.

• Embrace a ‘both/and’ rather than an ‘either/or’ mindset. Although making trade-offs is fundamental to the CEO role, two (or more) competing outcomes or qualities can actually be compatible—or even complementary. When faced with a difficult trade-off, CEOs should resist the temptation to choose one side over the other. Instead, they should strive to transcend polarities and find a new solution space that satisfies both sides of the trade-off. In this way, polarities can become opportunities. This requires a willingness to be flexible, creative, and transparent in communication, as well as a commitment to continuous learning and improvement. Ultimately, embracing trade-offs can help CEOs build trust, resilience, and sustainable success for their organizations.
• Find your support network and allow yourself to be vulnerable. Leading a company can be a lonely endeavor. CEOs need to ensure they have systems in place to get the support they need. A network of peer CEOs may be a particularly useful source of advice and encouragement. These networks can be formal—developed, perhaps, through training programs or communities of interest—or informal. Crucially, the network must provide a safe space for openness, discussion, and sharing. O. P. Bhatt, former chairman of State Bank of India, counseled, “Vulnerability is sometimes mistaken as weakness, but I think it is a strength because it gives you awareness and, when done with sensitivity, can bring people together in a very positive way.”
• Continually reassess your priorities and keep an open mind. For Klaus Kleinfeld, a North Star can shift substantially over the course of a lifetime but “is a reflection of who you want to be at the end of your life. Having this clarity enables you to shape your own destiny, which is only partially defined by your career.” Peter Olson said that CEOs should be honest with themselves about what they find fulfilling and what tasks and activities they do and do not like, and they should regularly reassess whether their job meets those criteria. He argued, “If it does not, they should spend more time doing the things that bring them the most joy and excitement—their increased enthusiasm will also inspire the entire team.”
• Carve out regular time to reflect and reconnect with your mission. A sense of purposelessness and a misalignment between personal and company mission can have a detrimental effect on job satisfaction and performance. The day-to-day work of running a company can feel relentless, but carving out time to reflect on your personal mission and value to the company is vital to maximizing your impact.

Many leaders will look back on their time as CEO as one of the high points of their career. Few other positions offer equivalent opportunities to meaningfully direct business building, talent development, and broader societal goals. However, even the most successful CEOs will experience moments of doubt and vulnerability. By leaving time for reflection during their tenure, CEOs can ensure they are staying true to their mission and create value on which the next leader can build.

Gautam Kumra is chairman of McKinsey Asia and senior partner in McKinsey’s Singapore office, where Joydeep Sengupta and Mukund Sridhar are senior partners; Janice Koh is director of operations for the McKinsey Center for CEO Excellence (MCCE) in the Singapore office; and Jennifer Chiang is director of learning for the MCCE, based in the Hong Kong office.

The authors wish to thank Alexa Meng, Anna Wozniak, Fabrice Desmarescaux, Lynn Liu, and Salsafia Farulian for their contributions to this article.

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My Personal Ethical Dilemmas

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America Has Too Many Laws

An excess of restrictions has taken a very real toll on the lives of everyday Americans. Their stories must be told.

Our country has always been a nation of laws, but something has changed dramatically in recent decades. Contrary to the narrative that Congress is racked by an inability to pass bills, the number of laws in our country has simply exploded. Less than 100 years ago, all of the federal government’s statutes fit into a single volume. By 2018, the U.S. Code encompassed 54 volumes and approximately 60,000 pages. Over the past decade, Congress has adopted an average of 344 new pieces of legislation each session. That amounts to 2 million to 3 million words of new federal law each year. Even the length of bills has grown—from an average of about two pages in the 1950s to 18 today.

And that’s just the average. Nowadays, it’s not unusual for new laws to span hundreds of pages. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 ran more than 600 pages, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 almost 1,000 pages, and the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021—which included a COVID-19 relief package—more than 5,000 pages. About the last one, the chair of the House Rules Committee quipped that “if we provide[d] everyone a paper copy we would have to destroy an entire forest.” Buried in the bill were provisions for horse racing, approvals for two new Smithsonian museums, and a section on foreign policy regarding Tibet. By comparison, the landmark protections afforded by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took just 28 pages to describe.

These figures from Congress only begin to tell the story. Federal agencies have been busy too. They write new rules and regulations implementing or interpreting Congress’s laws. Many bear the force of law. Thanks in part to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, agencies now publish their proposals and final rules in the Federal Register; their final regulations can also be found in the Code of Federal Regulations. When the Federal Register started in 1936, it was 16 pages long. In recent years, that publication has grown by an average of more than 70,000 pages annually.

From the July 1979 issue: Too much law, too little justice

Meanwhile, by 2021 the Code of Federal Regulations spanned about 200 volumes and more than 188,000 pages. How long would it take a person to read all those federal regulations? According to researchers at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, “over three years … And that is just the reading component. Not comprehension … not analysis.”

Even these numbers do not come close to capturing all of the federal government’s activity. Today, agencies don’t just promulgate rules and regulations. They also issue informal “guidance documents” that ostensibly clarify existing regulations but in practice often “carry the implicit threat of enforcement action if the regulated public does not comply.” In a recent 10-year span, federal agencies issued about 13,000 guidance documents. Some of these documents appear in the Federal Register; some don’t. Some are hard to find anywhere. Echoing Justice Brandeis’s efforts, a few years ago the Office of Management and Budget asked agencies to make their guidance available in searchable online databases. But some agencies resisted. Why? By some accounts, they simply had no idea where to find all of their own guidance. Ultimately, officials abandoned the idea.

Judicial decisions contain vital information about how our laws and rules operate. Today, most of these decisions can be found in searchable electronic databases, but some come with high subscription fees. If you can’t afford those, you may have to consult a library. Good luck finding what you need there: Reported federal decisions now fill more than 5,000 volumes. Each volume clocks in at about 1,000 pages, for a total of more than 5 million pages. Back in 1997, Thomas Baker, a law professor, found that “the cumulative output of all the lower federal courts … amounts to a small, but respectable library that, when stacked end-to-end, runs for one-and-one-half football fields.” One can only wonder how many football fields we’re up to now.

As you might imagine, much in this growing mountain of law isn’t exactly intuitive. Did you know that it’s a federal crime to enter a post office while intoxicated? Or to sell a mattress without a warning label? And if you’re a budding pasta entrepreneur, take note: By federal decree, macaroni must have a diameter between 0.11 and 0.27 inches, while vermicelli must not be more than 0.06 inches in diameter. Both may contain egg whites—but those egg whites cannot constitute more than 2 percent of the weight of the finished product.

If officials in the federal government have been busy, it’s not as if their counterparts at the state and local levels have been idle. Virginia prohibits hunting a bear with the assistance of dogs on Sundays. In Massachusetts, be careful not to sing or render “The Star-Spangled Banner” as “a part of a medley of any kind”—that can invite a fine. The New York City Administrative Code spans more than 30 titles and the Rules of the City of New York more than 50. In 2010, The New York Times reported on the regulatory hurdles associated with opening a new restaurant in the city. It found that an individual “may have to contend with as many as 11 city agencies, often with conflicting requirements; secure 30 permits, registrations, licenses and certificates; and pass 23 inspections.” And that’s not even counting what it takes to secure a liquor license.

To appreciate the growth of our law at all levels, count the lawyers. In recent years, the legal profession has proved a booming business. From 1900 to 2021, the number of lawyers in the United States grew by 1,060 percent, while the population grew by about a third that rate. Since 1950, the number of law schools approved by the American Bar Association has nearly doubled.

Our legal institutions have become so complicated and so numerous that even federal agencies cannot agree on how many federal agencies exist. A few years ago, an opinion writer in Forbes pointed out that the Administrative Conference of the United States lists 115 agencies in the appendix of its Sourcebook of United States Executive Agencies . But the Sourcebook also cautions that there is “no authoritative list of government agencies.” Moreover, the United States Government Manual and USA.gov maintain different and competing lists. And both of these lists differ in turn from the list kept by the Federal Register. That last publication appears to peg the number of federal agencies at 436.

Reflecting on these developments sometimes reminds us of Parkinson’s Law. In 1955, a noted historian, C. Northcote Parkinson, posited that the number of employees in a bureaucracy rises by about 5 percent a year “irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done.” He based his amusing theory on the example of the British Royal Navy, where the number of administrative officers on land grew by 78 percent from 1914 to 1928, during which time the number of navy ships fell by 67 percent and the number of navy officers and seamen dropped by 31 percent. It seemed to Parkinson that in the decades after World War I, Britain had created a “magnificent Navy on land.” (He also quipped that the number of officials would have “multiplied at the same rate had there been no actual seamen at all.”)

Does Parkinson’s Law reflect our own nation’s experience? In the 1930s, the Empire State Building—the tallest in the world at the time—took a little more than 13 months to build. A decade later, the Pentagon took 16 months. In the span of eight years during the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration built some 4,000 schools, 130 hospitals, 29,000 bridges, and 150 airfields; laid 9,000 miles of storm drains and sewer lines; paved or repaired 280,000 miles of roads; and planted 24 million trees.

Compare those feats to more recent ones. In 2022, an op-ed in The Washington Post observed that it had taken Georgia almost $1 billion and 21 years—14 of which were spent overcoming “regulatory hurdles”—to deepen a channel in the Savannah River for container ships. No great engineering challenge was involved; the five-foot deepening project “essentially … required moving muck.” Raising the roadway on a New Jersey bridge took five years, 20,000 pages of paperwork, and 47 permits from 19 agencies—even though the project used existing foundations. The Post reported that in recent years, Congress has required more than 4,000 annual reports from 466 federal agencies and nonprofits. According to the lawyer and author Philip K. Howard, one report on the printing operations of the Social Security Administration took 95 employees more than four months to complete. Among other things, it dutifully informed Congress of the age and serial number of a forklift.

Read: How to fix America’s infrastructure

Not only have our laws grown rapidly in recent years; so have the punishments they carry. You might think that federal criminal laws are reserved for the worst of the worst—individuals who have committed acts so egregious that they merit the attention not just of state authorities but of federal authorities, and not just civil fines but potential prison time. But if that’s your intuition, ask yourself this question: How many federal crimes do you think we have these days?

It turns out no one knows. Yes, every few years some enterprising academic or government official sets out to count them. They devote considerable resources and time (often years) to the task. But in the end, they come up short.

In 1982, the Department of Justice undertook what stands as maybe the most comprehensive count to date. A lawyer spent more than two years reading the U.S. Code—at that time, some 23,000 pages. The best the lawyer could say was that there were about 3,000 federal crimes.

Today, the U.S. Code is roughly twice the length it was in 1982, and contemporary guesses put the number of federal crimes north of 5,000. As the American Bar Association has said, “Whatever the exact number of crimes that comprise today’s ‘federal criminal law,’ it is clear that the amount of individual citizen behavior now potentially subject to federal criminal control has increased in astonishing proportions in the last few decades.”

Part of the reason no one can easily count the number of federal crimes is that our federal criminal code was “not planned; it just grew,” as Ronald Gainer, a retired Justice Department official, puts it. We do not have any single place to which people can turn to discern what our criminal laws prohibit. Sure, there’s Title 18 of the U.S. Code, “Crimes and Criminal Procedure.” But in truth, criminal laws are scattered here and there throughout various federal statutory titles and sections, the product of different pieces of legislation and different Congresses. Really, our federal criminal law is, Gainer writes, “a loose assemblage of … components that were built hastily to respond to perceptions of need and to perceptions of the popular will.”

That’s not the only confounding factor, though. Many federal criminal statutes overlap entirely, are duplicative in part, or, when juxtaposed, raise perplexing questions about what they mean. Take fraud. We have a federal mail-fraud law. We have a federal wire-fraud law. We have federal bribery and illegal-gratuities laws. We also have a federal law forbidding the deprivation of “honest services,” though no one is exactly sure what it does (or does not) add to all those other laws about fraud. On top of all this, more new laws criminalizing fraud are proposed during just about every session of Congress.

Once more, Congress’s output represents just the tip of the iceberg. Our administrative agencies don’t just turn out rules with civil penalties attached to them; every year, they generate more and more rules carrying criminal sanctions as well. How many? Here again, no one seems sure. But estimates suggest that at least 300,000 federal-agency regulations carry criminal sanctions today.

If you were to sit down and read through all of our criminal laws and regulations—or at least flip through them—you would find plenty of surprises. You would learn, for example, that it’s a federal crime to damage a government-owned lamp in Washington, D.C.; consult with a known pirate; or advertise wine by suggesting its intoxicating qualities.

The truth is, we now have so many federal criminal laws covering so many things that the legal scholar John Baker suggests that “there is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime.”

Numbers tell part of the story, but only a part. Today, the law touches our lives in very different ways than it once did.

In the past, the rules that governed what happened in our homes, families, houses of worship, and schools were found less in law than in custom or were left to private agreement and individual judgment. Even in the areas of life where law has long played a larger role, its character has changed. Once, most of our law came from local and state authorities; now federal law often dominates.

Consider just a few examples here. In the past, a seventh grader who traded burps for laughs in class might have been sent to the principal’s office; these days, law-enforcement officers may make an arrest . A 24-year-old who downloads academic articles that don’t belong to him isn’t just reprimanded; now we threaten him with decades in federal prison . On a more systemic scale, consider that for most of our history, responsibility for educating the young and setting public-school policy rested almost completely in the hands of parents and local and state officials. Until 1979, the federal government didn’t even have a Cabinet-level Department of Education. Now that federal agency employs more than 4,000 people and has an annual budget of almost $70 billion. Although it shares much of that money with states and local schools, often it does so on the condition that they comply with an ever-growing list of federal mandates.

What’s responsible for the changing character of our law? No doubt it’s a complicated story, and we live in a complex world. But just consider what America looked like when Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the country in the 1830s. As the historian Niall Ferguson has observed, Tocqueville “marveled” at the way early Americans “preferred voluntary association to government regulation.” As Tocqueville himself recorded, “not only do they have commercial and industrial associations … they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books … [and] create hospitals, prisons, schools.” In short, Tocqueville concluded, “everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.”

These days, many of those old civic bonds are fraying. In his book Bowling Alone , Robert Putnam reports that “both civic engagement and organizational involvement experienced marked declines during the second half of the twentieth century.” In recent years, those declines have “continued uninterrupted.” A few decades ago, more than 70 percent of Americans were members of a church, synagogue, or mosque; today fewer than half are. According to the Elks, a fraternal order that includes six presidents among its past members, the organization has “struggled” in recent years “with [a] massive decline in membership.” The Freemasons have shed 3 million from their ranks since the 1950s—a 75 percent drop.

Accompanying this decline in civic association, we have experienced a profound decline in trust in one another. We are less inclined to respect or even tolerate different ideas about how to live, raise children, and pray. Studies show that we consider those who disagree with our own political views to be “immoral” or “unintelligent.” In one recent survey by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, roughly half of voters expressed the view that individuals who support “the other party” pose “threats to the American way of life”; about 40 percent said the use of violence may be warranted to “prevent” those who hold competing views “from achieving their goals.” Rather than trust individuals to judge what is best for our own happiness, health, and safety, we have become comfortable doing what the “experts” tell us—and comfortable with forcing others to do the same.

It’s hard not to wonder whether the explosion in our laws owes at least something to these developments. After all, when trust in individual judgment, civic institutions, and social norms fades, where else is there to look for answers but the law? Perhaps, too, the law does more, and does more at the national level, because it can. Communication across the continent has become a simple thing; so has the capacity to store and search large amounts of information and monitor the movement of individuals—all of which allows authorities to direct and track compliance with their rules in ways that were unthinkable even a generation ago.

Whatever the combination of causes, one thing seems clear: If in this country law has always been king, its empire has never been so expansive. More than ever, we turn to the law to address any problem we perceive. More than ever, we are inclined to use national authorities to dictate a single answer for the whole country. More than ever, we are willing to criminalize conduct with which we disagree. And more than ever, if elected officials seem slow to act, we look to other sources of authority to fill the void.

The explosion of law has taken a very real toll on the lives of everyday Americans. Their stories must be told.

Early one morning in 2010, Sandra Yates was doing laundry when she noticed something alarming: Seven agents in bulletproof vests, hands primed on holstered guns, were approaching her bungalow on Anna Maria Island, Florida.

It turned out they were looking for her husband.

“He’s out crabbing,” she told them, mystified by what they could want with John, a 58-year-old commercial fisherman who had worked his way up from deckhand to captain of his own small crew. Sandra and John had met as teenagers 36 years earlier in Ohio. John’s father owned a bait shop, and together father and son spent many weekends fishing on Lake Erie. As Sandra put it, John “more or less grew up on the water.” The couple married, had a child, and moved to Florida to follow family and stake out a new life. John got a job doing what he loved most—fishing—while Sandra worked as a paralegal. By the time the agents showed up, the couple had lived in Florida for more than 28 years.

When Sandra called John to let him know that officers were looking for him, he was just as confused as she was. After all, he had a nearly blemish-free record as a fisherman, and he couldn’t remember having done anything that might interest the authorities. John remained just as confused when he returned to shore and agents handcuffed and transported him two hours away to Fort Myers for booking.

There, John finally learned the charges against him. Among other things, he stood accused of violating the federal Sarbanes-Oxley Act and faced a potential term of 20 years in prison.

Now, you might be wondering: Sarbanes-Oxley? Isn’t that some sort of law about financial crimes? If you poke around the internet (as Sandra did late into the night after her husband’s arrest), you will find the law described as being designed “to help protect investors from fraudulent financial reporting by corporations.” You will also learn that Congress adopted the law after a financial scandal brought down the accounting firm Arthur Andersen. Some say the firm engaged in a document-shredding frenzy after being tipped off about an impending federal investigation into work it had performed for its client Enron.

All of that might lead you to ask: What does any of this have to do with a small-time fisherman?

The story starts back in 2007. One day, while John was fishing in the Gulf of Mexico on his boat, The Miss Katie, a state wildlife agent (cross-deputized by federal authorities) came alongside. As John tells it, the agent boarded the boat for a “safety inspection” and then asked John to open up the fish hold. The agent said he wanted to measure the fish—all 2,000 pounds of them.

Read: Why there are too many patents in America

After spending hours rummaging through the pile, the agent declared his verdict. According to his measurements (which John disputed), 72 red grouper were under the 20-inch harvesting minimum set by then-current federal regulations. True, even by the agent’s count only three fish were under 19 inches, and each was at least 18.75 inches. But all the same, 72 undersize fish it was. The agent ordered John to store the undersize fish in separate crates, issued a citation, and left.

After John returned to dock a few days later, the agent measured the fish again. This time, though, the agent found 69 undersize fish, not 72. What’s more, the agent’s individual measurements didn’t quite match those he had taken days earlier while on board. From that and other evidence, the agent grew suspicious that the fish at the dock were not the same fish he had measured at sea. Still, nothing seemed to come of it. John didn’t hear anything more from authorities for almost three years—that is, until the day armed agents showed up at his front door.

At this point, you still might be wondering what any of this has to do with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. As John learned after his arrest, that law was written in broad terms. The act doesn’t just make it unlawful to destroy financial records or documents “with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence” a federal investigation. It also prohibits the destruction of any other “tangible object” for the same purpose.

And, according to the government, John had done just that. The government’s theory ran this way: John or a member of his crew must have thrown overboard the undersize fish the agent had identified while out on the water. Before returning to port, the crew must have then replaced those fish with new (and still undersize?) substitutes from the remaining catch. On the basis of this theory, the government argued, John had destroyed “tangible objects”—fish—with the intent of impeding a federal investigation.

John saw things differently. By his account, it was hardly surprising that the agent’s two sets of measurements didn’t quite align. Fish expand and contract when they are moved into and out of cool storage and onto hot decks or docks. According to John, the agent wasn’t exactly a fish-measuring expert, either; among other things, he didn’t properly account for the lengthy lower jaws of red grouper. To this day, John considers the government’s theory that he threw undersize fish overboard only to replace them with new, still undersize substitutes “about the … stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Stupid or not, it turned John and Sandra’s life upside down. In addition to facing prison time, John lost his job—no one would hire a potential felon. He was “contaminated,” as Sandra put it. The couple lost their principal source of income and, soon, their house. They stopped taking family vacations with the grandchildren they were raising and tried to make ends meet by opening a used-furniture store. John refurbished furniture and Sandra painted it. To prepare for trial, Sandra stayed up late into the night researching the law and corresponding with attorneys and agency officials.

It was tough going. The family’s ordeal was not made any easier by the knowledge that federal officials had recently revised their regulations. When the agent boarded John’s boat in 2007, the minimum harvesting size for red grouper was 20 inches. But by the time John was arrested three years later, that had changed. The new rule? Eighteen inches. According to the agent’s measurements, not a single one of John’s fish was that small.

Still, the government pressed ahead with its case. In time, prosecutors offered a plea deal that would allow John to plead guilty to an offense involving the forcible opposition of a federal officer. But John saw no basis for that charge. He wanted to clear his name and insisted on standing trial.

It did not go well. More than a year after his arrest and four years after the agent boarded his boat, a jury found John guilty of the Sarbanes-Oxley offense. At sentencing, the court imposed a term of 30 days behind bars (prosecutors had asked for closer to two years). The court also sentenced John to three years of supervised release, ordered him to submit a DNA sample, and subjected him to other restrictions. The prosecution team issued a press release touting its victory.

By now, it was nearing Christmas 2011. John sought permission to report to prison after the holiday so he could spend time with his grandchildren, 8 and 12 years old at the time. The request was denied. So John sat in prison over Christmas. What’s more, at age 59 he was required to wear an ankle bracelet marking him as an escape risk.

After serving his sentence, John was ready to move on. The case had consumed his family for too long. But Sandra was determined to appeal. She didn’t want government officials to “do to someone else what they did to us.” Even when their appeal failed, Sandra wouldn’t give up. She persuaded John and his attorney (today, a federal judge) to petition the Supreme Court to review John’s Sarbanes-Oxley conviction. It was the longest of long shots—the Supreme Court agrees to hear only about 1 percent of the thousands of petitions it receives every year.

But seven years after that agent boarded The Miss Katie, John and Sandra finally felt a sliver of hope: In 2014, the Court announced that it would hear the case.

Nearly a year later, John was working in the couple’s furniture shop when he learned of the Supreme Court’s decision. By the margin of just a single vote, the Court had ruled in his favor. As the majority saw it, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act may prohibit the destruction of logbooks, spreadsheets, financial records, and other objects designed “to record or preserve information.” But for all its expansiveness, the law does not reach red grouper thrown overboard.

In a sense, it was a huge victory for the Yates family. The highest court in the land had overturned John’s Sarbanes-Oxley conviction. He and Sandra had won all the vindication our legal system can afford.

Still, you might forgive them for seeing things differently. The family’s ordeal had lasted eight years. They had endured proceedings before three courts and 13 different judges. “I feel good,” John said after the Court’s decision. “But you’ve got to look at it from my situation. I’ve already done the time. I’ve already paid the price. I lost a lot of wages because of this”—at least $600,000, he estimates. Really, as Sandra said, “we lost everything we had.” John hasn’t been back on a commercial fishing boat since his conviction. The couple now lives in a triple-wide trailer and depends on Social Security income and the extra jobs Sandra manages to get. Sandra estimates that taxpayers spent as much as $11 million on the prosecution of the case.

What happened to the federal officials who pursued John for all those years? After complaints emerged of “heavy-handed and unfair enforcement” against other fishermen like John, the inspector general of the Department of Commerce launched an internal investigation. His final report dryly concluded that the agency’s enforcement officials had created a “highly-charged regulatory climate and dysfunctional relationship between [the agency] and the fishing industry.” But, he added, the investigation hadn’t been easy. It seems that a key enforcement official had destroyed many of his files during it. (An anonymous whistleblower described a “shredding party.”) We can find no public record of criminal charges being brought against anyone for the destruction of those tangible objects. But when announcing the department’s findings to Congress, the inspector general said the quiet part out loud: How do you think enforcement officials would have reacted “if a fishing company they were investigating had done the same thing”?

In 2012, while John was appealing his case, Sandra pleaded her family’s cause to the government this way:

We are raising two grandchildren. We are simple people. The actions of these agents were damaging. These children have been affected also. Monies that would have been for them are gone. They have not even been afforded even family vacations any more … Our lives are forever changed by this, and I don’t believe these officers give a hoot who they hurt or why. [John] is a sixty-year-old man that has been beat up by these rogue agents. Jobs are tough enough to get when you are in your prime. He has been reduced to odd jobs. I am the primary provider for the family and I am old and tired, but I will not lie down or give up. We are meager people and don’t want much, but fair and professional treatment should be mandatory for all.

Sandra’s words are powerful, maybe even more so when you consider the fact that there was nothing particularly unusual about John’s case, at least from one point of view. Federal-agency officials had adopted a regulation setting the minimum harvesting size at 20 inches, only later changing it to 18 inches. Another agency official concluded that John had 72 undersize fish on board and 69 at the dock. Meanwhile, Congress had adopted a broad law forbidding the intentional destruction of any “tangible object” in the face of a federal investigation. Without a doubt, a good argument could be made that John’s alleged conduct violated this mix of statutory and regulatory rules.

From another perspective, though, Sandra and John’s experience invites us to consider how well we are doing as a nation in our aspiration to live under the rule of law where ordinary people have room to grow, plan, and make their own way. Yes, our Founders desperately wanted a nation of written laws. But from their study of history, they also appreciated the dangers that follow when lawmaking becomes too easy, when it is a task too far removed from the people, and when laws become too hard to find and too difficult to understand. The Roman emperor Caligula used to post his new laws on columns so tall and in a hand so small that the people could not read them. The whole point was to ensure that people lived in fear—the most powerful of a tyrant’s weapons. Our Founders wanted no part of that for us. As much as they revered written laws, they also knew that when we turn to law to solve every problem and answer humanity’s age-old debates about how we should live, raise our children, and pray, we invite a Leviathan into our lives.

This essay was adapted from Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law .

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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5 takeaways by a longtime NABJ member from Trump’s appearance before Black journalists

Eric Deggans

Former President Donald Trump walks offstage after speaking at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago on Wednesday. Charles Rex Arbogast/AP hide caption

CHICAGO — At first, it felt like watching a slow-motion car crash.

I wasn’t actually in the room when Donald Trump brought his toxic rhetoric to the National Association of Black Journalists national convention Wednesday. But I was nearly there, sitting in a taxicab headed from the airport to the conference at the Hilton Chicago downtown, watching a livestream video as the former president insulted a roomful of Black journalists after ABC’s Rachel Scott opened with a tough question.

Scott asked about several instances where Trump said racist things, from falsely insisting Barack Obama wasn’t born in America to calling Black journalists losers and racist. Trump’s response was a torrent of barely connected ideas, including a complaint that NABJ brought him to Chicago under “false pretenses” because they didn’t work out details to get Vice President Kamala Harris to make a similar, in-person appearance at the convention.

“I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said, drawing scoffs from the crowd. “That is my answer.”

In a flash, it felt like all the predictions critics made of inviting Trump to address Black journalists came true. He was offering his usual torrent of accusations, assertions and insults — some outrageous, most inflated — creating word salad that moderators struggled to fact-check in the moment, raising fears that he owned the organization at its own conference.

As a 34-year member of NABJ, I had my own qualms. Not about inviting Trump — the group has invited the major party candidates for president to its national conferences for many years, to platform questions on issues involving people of color. But, among other things, I objected to seeing an anchor from the right-leaning cable channel Fox News among the three people questioning Trump. (Though I have volunteered for decades as chair of the NABJ’s Media Monitoring Committee, I had nothing to do with organizing Trump’s appearance.)

Trump's planned address to Black journalists convention sparks backlash

And I worried about the optics of a Black journalists group offering a prime panel spot to a politician who had attacked Black journalists, while the Black and Asian woman also running for president would not appear.

But, after some reflection and talking with other members at the conference, I think the actual impact of Trump’s appearance is more nuanced. Here’s my five takeaways from what happened.

Trump’s appearance pushed NABJ to face tension between its status as a journalism organization and an advocate for fair treatment of Black journalists and, by extension, Black people.

This is an idea I heard from a friend and fellow journalist/NABJ member, and it rings true. As journalists, we jump at the chance to ask direct questions of a former president who has often stoked racial fears, from birtherism attacks against Obama and Harris to false claims about undocumented immigrants.

But our website also notes that NABJ “advocates on behalf of Black journalists and media professionals,” honoring those who provide “balanced coverage of the Black community and society at large.” I’ve always felt that if the media industry can give Black journalists a fair shot, we can help provide more accurate, less prejudiced coverage of everything — particularly issues involving marginalized groups.

That’s why some NABJ members chafed at platforming Trump, with his long history of racist statements, at a conference aimed at reducing the prejudice Black journalists face every day. But I think part of reaching NABJ’s goals involves Black journalists learning how to confront racist ideas; trying to get Trump to explain himself in front of a group of Black media professionals seems pretty in line with that mission.

NABJ President Ken Lemon asserted during the conference’s opening ceremonies later that day that the group is, at its core, a journalism organization. On this day, at least, it’s obvious the journalism side took precedence.

Former President Donald Trump shakes hands with ABC's Rachel Scott, one of the journalists who moderated the event at NABJ in Chicago on Wednesday. Charles Rex Arbogast/AP hide caption

If the goal was to get Trump to reveal his terrible takes on race to the world — mission accomplished.

Lots of media outlets focused on his awful comments on how Harris “suddenly” became Black in his eyes. Trump tried the classic maneuver of turning an opponent’s advantage against them, acting as if the embrace of Harris as a history-making Black and Asian woman in politics was the result of some cynical marketing spin.

“I did not know she was Black until a couple of years ago when she happened to turn Black,” he said. “And now she wants to be known as Black. Is she Indian, or is she Black?”

True enough, the questioners struggled to pin Trump down on exactly why he talks about race the way he does. Or how he can believe such ideas aren’t racist.

Trump attacks Kamala Harris’ racial identity at Black journalism convention

Still, what Trump did say mostly made him look old-fashioned and prejudiced. Will it appeal to his base? Perhaps, but the moment didn’t feel like a strong, confident leader puncturing racial hypocrisy.

It seemed more like the wandering statements of someone who just doesn’t understand America’s modern melting pot of ethnicities.

Sometimes, with Trump, there is value in having an interviewer on hand who he trusts.

Much as I disliked seeing an anchor from a news organization that has won the NABJ’s Thumbs Down Award twice on the panel, Fox News’ Harris Faulkner did get Trump to open up a bit with less-pointed but telling questions.

In particular, when Trump said he thought the vice presidential candidates had “virtually no impact” on election results, he seemed to put into perspective his relationship with JD Vance while belittling the guy he is supposed to spend months alongside in a tight campaign.

There are other journalists from less partisan news outlets who likely could have achieved the same moment. But there is value in having one journalist in the mix who doesn’t immediately raise Trump’s defenses and might provoke more telling responses.

Former President Donald Trump appears on a panel at NABJ on Wednesday in Chicago. From left, ABC's Rachel Scott, Semafor's Kadia Goba and FOX News' Harris Faulkner moderated the event. Charles Rex Arbogast/AP hide caption

Trump is a chaos agent who divides people and divides NABJ

In the end, I was less concerned about how NABJ looked to the world in the wake of Trump’s visit than how it deals with itself.

As news of the panel spread, many journalists spoke out passionately against having him at the conference, reasoning that any appearance would likely benefit him more than the group, platforming his terrible rhetoric about racial issues. Well-known figures like Roland Martin and April Ryan — who Trump criticized when he was president — spoke out; Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah quit her post as convention co-chair amid the controversy.

There are also tough questions about why the group couldn’t work out an arrangement to have Harris appear at the convention virtually, given that she was flying to Houston for the funeral of friend and sorority sister Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee.

Considering the intense emotions at hand over the coming election and widespread skepticism about coverage decisions by journalists, there’s lots of criticism and bruising assumptions about what happened here.

This is the kind of division that can hobble NABJ in the future as people cancel memberships, decline to volunteer, hold back donations and continue to criticize the group’s direction. I expect the group’s membership meeting, scheduled for Saturday morning, will draw lots of pointed feedback from those who still question the wisdom of welcoming the former president here.

As someone who can attribute almost every major job I’ve gotten to connections made at an NABJ convention, this heightened squabbling is what I fear most — a distraction at a time when job losses and cutbacks in media have made times even more challenging for journalists of color.

In a way, NABJ played Trump’s game — and may have had some success

Another friend noted that Trump — who commands loyalty from GOP voters — has always valued dominating the news cycle, regardless of whether the stories are complimentary. His NABJ appearance ensured everything from the network evening news programs to The Daily Show focused on his comments here rather than Harris’ increasingly energized campaign.

As I saw criticism build over Trump’s visit, I wondered if NABJ wasn’t like a scrappy dog who finally caught a passing car — after years of GOP candidates declining invitations, finally one of the most divisive Republicans in modern politics was accepted. And the consequences of hosting him — particularly when Harris would not appear at the convention — loomed large.

But in the end, NABJ also landed at the top of the news cycle at a time when — as announced by the group during its opening ceremony — the convention drew the largest number of attendees in its history, over 4,000.

Yes, many supporters felt, as I did initially, that the appearance was a train wreck. But NABJ also showed the world three Black female journalists questioning Trump on some of his most provocative statements on race, with telling answers.

In a world where any publicity can be good publicity, that just might be enough.

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Guest Essay

The Christian Case Against Trump

By Eliza Griswold

Ms. Griswold is the author of “ Circle of Hope: A Reckoning With Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church .”

In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13, a video with images of Jesus crowned with thorns, blood running down his face, followed by photos of the former president circulated on social media. Days later, at the Republican National Convention, the evangelist Franklin Graham endorsed Mr. Trump from the stage, saying that “God spared his life.”

But the idea of Mr. Trump as chosen by God has infuriated those evangelicals who believe that he stands in direct opposition to their faith. Their existence highlights an often-overlooked fact about the American religious landscape: Evangelicals are not a monolith.

The troubling ascendancy of white Christian nationalism has galvanized evangelicals for whom following Jesus demands speaking truth to power, as well as building the kingdom of heaven on earth in actionable ways. In 2024, this includes mobilizing voters against the former president.

Although this broader evangelical movement is often referred to as the evangelical left, it adheres to no party. “This isn’t about being a Democrat or a Republican,” Jim Wallis, an evangelical Christian pastor, author and justice activist, told me. Instead believers like him say they refuse worldly labels and division.

They also believe that they can sway enough of their fellow evangelicals, along with other people of faith, and low-income Americans, who historically have had much lower voting rates than other groups, to swing this presidential election against Mr. Trump.

“The so-called evangelicals who support Trump have a Jesus problem,” Bishop William Barber II told me. Jesus advocated tirelessly for the poor and warned that nations would be judged “by how we treat the hungry, the sick, the incarcerated and the immigrant,” Bishop Barber said.

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