Does 7th Grade Math Class Teach Better Ethics Than Harvard Business School?
By: Steve Mesler
Tags: Olympics, Leadership, Leadership Development, Covid 19, Decision Making

Part 3 of 5 of a series of short essays on the decision-making process for leaders across business, sport, and education. View Part 2: The Hidden Bias That’s Stopping You From Making Good Decisions in Unprecedented Times here.

There was a time in my life when the “tough” decisions weren’t all that tough.

Deciding how tough we were going to look for this picture took a lot of energy… (circa 2009)

In sport, you have a pretty clear template for decision making. The rules are the rules, and the outcomes of your decisions (like whether you choose to follow those rules or not) are usually pretty easy to see.

If you clearly break a written rule, that’s cheating.

If you take prohibited performance-enhancing drugs, that’s doping.

There’s no grey area — the rules are clear and observable. You follow them, or not.

In earlier articles, I discussed the paradox of decision making in crisis (the harder the situations, the easier the decisions) and the pitfalls of leaning too heavily on experience, both of which amount to the idea that leaders have to be more thoughtful than ever with their decision-making. Because unlike sport, most of us don’t have a clear template to follow. Especially in times shaped by unprecedented events.

For the early part of my adult life I looked at the concept of “business ethics” as a bit of a joke. I lived my life with integrity (outside of the business world), but when it came to decisions that needed to be made, results and outcomes were number one. To be clear: that DOES NOT mean I had a desire to cheat or make decisions that inevitably harmed others. But ethics weren’t the first consideration. After all, the 90s movies I grew up on — like Billy Madison and Austin Powers — laughed at the very concept of business ethics.

Pop culture at that time made “business ethics” seem like an oxymoron. And I bought in.

Bradley Whitford, one of my favorite actors of all time, played a ‘not-so-ethical’ businessman in Adam Sandler’s Billy Madison. For those old enough to remember — it was 1995! (can you believe that?)

Fortunately, the game has changed and I have evolved.

People expect more of their leaders today.

To make good decisions, we need to make ethical decisions. That requires working with transparency, and putting ethics at the beginning of our decision-making process.

Here’s what that means.

1. Treat your decisions like seventh-grade math class

What did we need to do in seventh-grade math class with Mr. Soffin? We had to SHOW OUR WORK.

My Seventh Grade Math Teacher, Mr. Barry Soffin, with two of his kids during the 1980’s. (credit: Daniel Soffin)

Little did I realize that Barry Soffin, my seventh-grade math teacher, was doing two things at once.

First, he was making sure my fundamental approach to the problem was right— he was aiding me in being able to replicate the solution if any of the variables changed. Second, he was making sure I, at worst, didn’t cheat or, at best, didn’t just randomly guess.

Today, how we arrive at our decisions is weighed and evaluated just as much as the outcomes of those decisions.

And that is where I see many current leaders struggling.

Credit: “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.” — from What’s so Funny about Science? by Sidney Harris (1977)

The old school mentality assumes that the end will justify the means. The thinking goes something like this: if we ultimately make the right decision, the public will be alright with however we got there.

But in today’s world, the means are just as important as the end.

The public expects and demands transparency throughout our decision-making process. Without it, you’ll lose out on their trust and support. (For small business leaders, sometimes think: “the public” = our employees.)

We live in a world where the President updates the public 33 times PER DAY* on his Twitter feed. He provides us every waking thought that runs through his mind. Whether we like it or not, it’s now what we expect from our leaders.

We can see a similar trend with the reporting on a COVID-19 vaccine. I recently watched Anthony Fauci on CNN, and my heart lifted as he talked about vaccine success rates. In the past, the Director of NIAID might not have clued us into every step of vaccine progress — he might have waited to announce when the vaccine was available. But now, we’ve become accustomed to regular updates.

Transparency in the process will help the outcome of that process.

Just like in seventh-grade math class: if we didn’t show our work, we didn’t get full credit. Whether we’re a leader of 15 or 1,500 people, or making decisions on behalf of an international community, we need to show our work. Without it, we won’t get full marks, no matter the outcomes of our efforts.

And while this might sound like extra work, it’s a good thing. Because committing to transparency also commits us to putting ethics first.

2. Make ethics #1 in your decision-making process. (This is where Harvard is wrong.)

When I was doing some research for this piece, a simple Google search led me to the Harvard Business Review decision tree below. It’s actually the first image that came up in my search.

Spoiler alert: I think this model, and the fact that it’s considered an anchor of business ethics at one of America’s most prestigious business schools, should deeply bother us.

Credit: Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.

After speaking with my friend Leah Howard, who graduated with an MBA from Harvard Business School this past spring and is now a Senior Manager at Hello Fresh, I learned that the above model is still being taught today. The piece it’s connected to (a 2003 article entitled “The Ethical Leader’s Decision Tree”) was written by Constance E. Bagley — a respected business ethics researcher at Yale.

As you can see, Bagley’s tool for ethical decision making basically goes like this:

LEGALITY → PROFITABILITY → ETHICS

If that seems somehow backwards to you, it does to me too.

I asked Leah about this, and she reminded me that this model is in place because that’s the way the current financial system is set up.

“Companies have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value,” she explained. “If you’re the CEO of a pubic company, you are entrusted with public funds. So one of your tenets has to be to maximize shareholder value. And if you’re not doing that, you can be sued.”

I’d argue that unethical decisions can ultimately put shareholders at risk, especially given the transparency that is expected from businesses and leaders today.

That said, I’ve seen this model show up in many leadership spaces, not just public companies.

I’ve seen this style of decision making play out countless times in meetings and boardrooms, including those where fiduciary duty is not a concern. First, we consider the legal consequences, then the business consequences, and then we question and weigh the ethics.

When we use this model, we naturally skew ourselves towards potentially unethical decisions. By the time we question whether an idea is ethical or not, we’ve likely got a TON of sunk costs… We’ve spent our time and our finances, and committed our psyche to the idea. As a result, we’re now skewed towards wanting the affirmative decision to be made and we end up forcing ourselves into unethical decision paradigms.

But if we’re going to make ethical decisions, I’ve found a quick shuffle of the flowchart accelerates the decision-making process and ensures decisions are based on the value-set I want:

ETHICS → LEGALITY → PROFITABILITY

It can be that simple. We’ve got to first ask: is this decision ethical? “Should” we do it?

If the answer is no, we save time, energy, brainpower, and potential risk in exposing that we even considered an unethical decision… or just as bad, that we role modeled to our company that our values don’t come first.

If we ask “is this the right thing to do” first and the answer is yes, then we are free to move into the legal and business options without an elephant in the room we have yet to address.

We need to horizontally reorder the old “ethical” model that treated ethics like our final decision-making backstop.

The new model looks something like this:

If we begin with a clean slate, we can choose to only invest time and resources into decisions we know to be ethical and therefore worth pursuing. We won’t waste time on anything that doesn’t meet our ethical standards.

Plans are often imperfect — especially these days. But if we at least know we’re operating as ethically as possible, we can feel more confident carrying out the imperfect plans we’ve made.

In Part 4 of this series, we’ll explore what that looks like.

Steve Mesler is an Olympic gold medalist and 3-time Olympian in the sport of Bobsled, a member of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee Board of Directors, and is the co-founder of the international award-winning non-profit education organization Classroom Champions.