What do you do if in the stress of crisis you make the right decision, but execute it in a way that discounts the human impact -- which only makes the crisis worse?

Joe Paterno in 2006.

If you are a trustee of Pennsylvania State University, you discover that the window of mitigating flawed execution can close well before you are ready.

Although the child sex abuse crisis at Penn State erupted in early November 2011, and some steps have been taken to try and restore trust, a series of blunders persisted into January 2012 that continued to discount the emotional impact of crisis.

On January 20, 2012, Penn State trustees met and elected new leadership – the officers who had fired iconic football coach Joe Paterno by telephone were replaced. The trustees announced a series of actions that begin to address some of the very human issues the crisis has been about, including paying for victims abuse-related health costs, and employee training on reporting abuse.

Whether the trustees’ new chair Karen Peez, vice chairman of the Bank of New York Mellon, would have tried to enlist Paterno’s support in healing the wound of those anguished by his firing became a moot point. On January 22, 2012, Paterno -- considered the “winningest” college coach in football history -- died of lung cancer that was discovered after he was fired. The wound for students and alumni only deepened.

Going forward, re-uniting the Penn State community and rebuilding trust needs to be less about brand building (“We are Penn State”) and more focused on connecting, particularly with student and alumni stakeholders, around the concept of the university as a learning environment – admitting mistakes and what specifically should have been done differently. Statements like “All of us, including the board, with the wisdom of hindsight could have done things differently,” said by Peez at the trustee meeting January 20, miss the point.

There is a rich opportunity for real dialogue in small and large groups and in university-wide forums about what went wrong, beginning with what is obvious now, without waiting for the results of the five investigations underway (federal, state and internal) including:

-- Students and alumni already know that firing anyone by telephone is totally disrespectful; doing it to someone who was the face of Penn State for 46 years, with whom most had a greater emotional connection than with any of Penn State’s presidents, caused outrage. How the trustees own the mistake non- defensively (as opposed to their justification given January 18, 2011) is a teachable moment and a stepping stone to trust.

Penn State Athletics Web Site - January 23, 2012

-- While respecting all Paterno’s accomplishments, part of the teachable moment is his 2002 leadership failure. He didn’t follow up on information he passed on about a young boy potentially being sexually molested. In his only interview following his firing, it was clear Paterno hadn’t come to terms with the impact of what he failed to do. Understanding that even iconic leaders make mistakes and how mistakes can be avoided is an important discussion topic for students.

-- Saying your administration will stand for transparency and communication to move the Penn State community forward raises expectations you will deliver on it. President Rodney Erickson (promoted from provost to president after Graham Spanier was fired with Paterno) hosted “Town Hall” meetings attended by over 1,000 alumni earlier this month. However, their value was severely compromised when, to the irritation of alumni, he deferred the bulk of their questions, which were about Paterno’s firing, to the trustees who weren’t represented at the meeting. One alumnus commented,  "the guy that’s taking the bullets is not the guy that we need to hear from. It’s the trustees. It speaks volumes that he’s up there and they’re not."

To pass through the crisis successfully, it will be essential for the trustees, the administration, students, faculty, staff, and alumni to own the crisis without PR equivocation. During the “Town Hall” meetings, Erickson told alumni that it “grieves”  him when people talk about "the Penn State scandal." He said it should be called, “the Sandusky scandal,” after the former PSU football coach now facing more than 50 charges of child sex abuse.

Like it or not, Penn State has become another learning lab for crisis and its aftermath. It may be a year or more before the findings of all the investigations on what went wrong are concluded. The criminal trials – Sandusky’s for sexually molesting minors and two former Penn State administrators’ for perjury and failure to report child sex abuse - haven’t started yet.

In the meantime, Penn State has the opportunity to wrestle with important questions that can define whether it will become stronger because of the crisis: questions like what priority to place on the human impact (emotional intelligence and how respect and compassion play out); what is meant and expected by ethical behavior and compliance; what was there about the culture that made the crisis possible;  how to measure the football culture’s impact on the rest of the university; and how to tolerate discomfort with unflattering headlines while the focus is on trust building, not brand building.

Photos: Joe Paterno on sidelines in 2006 via Wikimedia Commons; Paterno on GoPSUsports.com.

Gael O’Brien is a Business Ethics Magazine columnist. Gael is a thought leader on building leadership, trust, and reputation and writes The Week in Ethics.

It’s been quite a field day for those of us engaged in the responsibility “business” or who are passionate about the paradigm shift in consciousness now underway.

As some consistency in a better direction takes hold regarding the economic recovery, the trickle has become an avalanche. The disturbing revelations out of Penn State’s “Happy Valley” and Syracuse University are part of a series of sorry stories in the ongoing saga of breached trust and confidence among peoples, institutions, and their leaders.

A quick recall brings to mind a few that only scratch the surface: Rupert Murdoch and the News Corp hacking episodes; municipal management and law enforcement of the “Occupy” squatting; the dubious personal behavior of presidential hopeful Herman Cain; the terminal nepotism of televangelist Robert Schuller in bankrupting his Crystal Cathedral Ministries; the “hijacking” of Congressional due process in the debt debate; and the pervasive credibility deficit of big banks while financially-stressed homeowners struggle to hold onto their mortgages.

It’s now looking like a bad B movie in which one implausible charade after another is woven together in a sub-text of absurdity that attempts to culminate in an “ah ha” moment to make singular sense of it all for a world of good. Any lasting revelation, however, will need to come from a long gaze in the mirror.

In his 2010 Rolling Stone investigation of the role Goldman Sachs and the investment banking industry played in the economic crisis (“The Great American Bubble Machine”), journalist Matt Taibbi made the enlightening, however troubling, point that certain powerful entities took advantage of “an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism” to seize advantage, knowing that in “a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.”

Alas, the underlying lesson is laid bare: It is possible that we have been, to a great degree, victims of our own self-assurance about our leaders and the integrity of our institutions? Is it reasonable to expect our leaders to conduct themselves ethically and uphold a standard of competency as a moral imperative?

This question is asked in jest as we should inquire: What can we realistically expect from those who step in to take on such expectations if they are destined to falter from a futile attempt to live up to ideals projected largely by the gap that has resulted from our own abdicated responsibilities?

While there is no excuse for the breaches in trust and confidence brought about by the individuals and institutions that have failed us so acutely, it is also irresponsible to dismiss outright our own role in engendering a culture of duplicity, incompetence, and corruption as if it all could manifest from unsupported solo acts. The now daily drone of news in the Penn State and Syracuse University scandals is particularly illustrative of such abdicated responsibility as more witnesses point to an institutional culture of benign neglect (at best) – or one that promoted an insidious cover up.

How could any of these recent headlining violations reach so far and wide without a system that conspired, however unintentionally, to enable and empower them?

I don’t suggest for a minute that we start blaming the victims for these gross violations of ethical and moral standards but if we are serious about preventing future inflictions, than perhaps we should take stock of the common themes that run through it all. And take back the power that we so readily relinquished.

How we got here

There are many explanations as to how we came to our current state. Here are a few to ponder:

For too long we bestowed blind deference to celebrity out of a need to project unrealistic ideals on others whose own flawed humanity rendered them incapable of consistently fulfilling them.

By engaging in the entertainment of trumped-up and exploitive ‘wedge’ politics, we rendered as old fashioned the substantive debate of critical public policies.  In avoiding responsibility for doing the heavy lifting of personal consciousness that leads to enlightenment about the valid truths of others, we encouraged a culture of easily digestible, sound bite depictions that served our own misconceptions and ignorance.

In accepting manufactured credentials and pandering to values “check lists” as qualifiers for leadership, we failed to establish real-world measures for competency and integrity that tested our leaders on the hard choices for the good of the whole - instead of those driven by self-preservation and political expediency.

Conversely, what common themes run through the behavior of the alleged offenders? More than a few come to mind:

• The pursuit of self-aggrandizement, through a ‘negotiated state’ of limited consciousness, that negated the consequences of their behavior upon the very stakeholders and system that made their success possible
• Delusional overconfidence that tripped into blinding arrogance, engendering fear among subordinates and discouraging the truth-telling that’s essential for responsible decision-making
• A fixated world view that did not accommodate contrarian perspectives and was defended by a distorted understanding of context (group think)
• A relentless drive for self-preservation and power perpetuation that was disguised as protecting the interests of the institution
• A misread of one’s success and its accompanying increase in stakeholder trust and confidence as ‘permission’ for invincibility, which led to unchecked risk-taking
• Complacency resulting from market or industry dominance in the former era of historically high barriers to entry and less access to information
• Playing all sides of the investment equation, in opposition to the interests of your primary client, to ensure your own success regardless of the outcome
• Shifting from the ethical practice of avoiding conflicts of interest to a policy of leveraging such conflict as ‘opportunities’ to manage

The road that must be traveled

How can things be made different going forward? Most polls indicate Americans are now convinced that indeed things will be different. Too many of these scandalous events will likely become game changers of yet-undetermined proportion.

Returning to the pre-recession manic state of leveraged, irresponsible consumption is not an option. Are we on the cusp of an era of prolonged, responsible materialism? If so, what will it look like and how will business leaders adjust their competitiveness in a reset marketplace framed by a greater priority on public interest values?

Beyond these concerns are others that I keep hearing more people expressing. Never mind the obvious – that we will have to be smarter about our money and where we put it, how we use it for personal wellbeing, or whether to heed a moral call and reach out to those less fortunate for the collective sustainability of the whole.

Many economists believe that we are now enduring a somewhat painful but necessary transition from consumer-driven growth – premised upon acquiring, consuming, and amassing material assets – to growth that is driven by a healthier proportion of actually making things (TBD), exports, and an improved trade balance.

The most perplexing question before us is: What will be so different in our thinking and behavior that will initiate authentic transformation to this new responsibility paradigm? Regardless of your view of the ‘Occupy’ movement for example, perhaps its one definitive success is in having changed the national conversation.

Concurrently, the breach in trust and confidence that continues to plague the financial sector shifts into fast-forward the call for formalizing measurement of the social, economic, and governance activities of certain industries and professions – certainly those which serve as critical hinges to the stability and functionality of the whole system. The ongoing struggle to fully implement Dodd-Frank is one snapshot of the terrain ahead of us.

No easy street to better ethics

Dismissing the necessity for consistent, ethical practices will blind companies to their implicit social contract with constituent communities. While shareholders want a good return with strong valuation and upside stock potential, they recognize the severe price to be paid when business strays from its alignment with public interest values in a now stakeholder-driven society.

Conscious leadership is the path to clarity. It is during the best of times that leaders need to build up the savings bank of reputation equity and credibility. Ethical lapses that remain unaddressed lead to imbalances and injustices. They accumulate and become self-perpetuating, often tempting corruption and other acts of acute destruction.

Ethical Corporation, an independent research and conference firm that provides competitive intelligence for business sustainability, regularly polls senior ethics and compliance executives from a cross-section of sectors as to what they perceive are their greatest current challenges. In one of its recent surveys, the top three answers came from 35% of responses received from such companies as Tata Steel, GE, DHL, Imperial Tobacco, Transparency International, Teco Energy, Weatherford, Novo Nordisk, and Marriott International.

The top ten challenges identified are:

• Getting employee buy-in and commitment for true ethical behavior
• Getting support from top management and changing the view of compliance as a cost center
• Fighting against the ‘turn-a-blind-eye’ culture, and the way ‘business has always been done’
• Managing an effective global program that complies with different, sometimes contradicting local laws
• Keeping abreast of legislation and ensuring that new requirements are met
• Managing compliance in a resource constrained environment
• Managing changing stakeholder expectations and avoiding negative publicity as a result
• Increased liability of individual prosecution under a tough legislative regime
• Educating, monitoring, and managing activities of third parties to ensure compliance
• Defining ‘adequate’ for your company’s compliance efforts and knowing you’re doing enough

Let us grow into a sustainable recovery having learned some hard lessons: Elections matter, as they bestow power not only upon the candidate but also their legacy relationships and personal connections. Hard choices require homework. Deference should be judicious. Leadership is a collective succession of everyday acts. Unchecked, concentrated power is a clue to ethics running amuck. Power should never fall far from the tree in your own back yard. Responsibility should be everyone’s business.

Art Stewart, MPM, is President/Chief Strategy Officer of Boston-based Stewart Strategies Group (www.stewartgrp.com). He teaches a custom course on corporate and social responsibility at Emerson College and is a Research Fellow at the Bentley University Center for Business Ethics.

CEOs for all their talents are not magicians. There isn’t a wave of the wand for a quick turnaround or a potion that will drive up a stock price. Or at least there aren’t ones available so far. Short of the disguised super hero, boards have to rely on their due diligence and judgment in assessing the right candidate.

Sometimes that doesn’t work out well.

Reader’s Digest CEO Tom Williams was fired in September 2011, less than five months after he took the job, replaced with a board member; Also in September, Hewlett Packard (HP) CEO Leo Apotheker, fired after eleven months, was replaced by board member Meg Whitman, former candidate for Governor of California and former eBay CEO. Other recent high-profile CEO firings include Carol Bartz at Yahoo! and Ernst Lieb at Mercedes-Benz USA.

In monitoring CEO departures, firings are often cloaked as resignations or retirements, and are under-reported. In the monthly reports done by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas through the end of third quarter 2011, 922 CEO departures were tracked. September’s tally of 108 was the highest since September 2010.

The firing of a CEO and how he or she leaves their position often reveals a lot about them, their bosses, and their organization. At HP and Yahoo, for example, expectations about turnaround progress and financial results weren’t being met. For Daimler AG, Mercedes-Benz USA’s dazzling results in luxury vehicle leadership didn’t excuse the CEO’s failure to meet Daimler’s zero tolerance for ethical violations.

Apotheker hasn’t discussed publically his reaction to how he was fired. He had to have seen the media reports that HP shares rose 7 percent on the rumor September 21 that he was being replaced by Whitman at a board meeting the next day. He is reported to have gone to the meeting prepared to discuss strategy, the meeting’s original purpose.

Immediately upon being fired, Apotheker sent an upbeat email to employees thanking them for their efforts, accomplishments together, and dedication which he said inspired him. His consolation prize? A rich severance package that critics argue perpetuates the practice of rewarding CEOs for failed performance. During Apotheker’s tenure, HP’s stock price dropped $16.00 a share.

In an effort to distance the current HP board from the board 11 months prior that hired Apotheker, the new executive chairman Raymond Lane, went to lengths to point out that most of the 13 board members, including Meg Whitman, were appointed in 2011 after Apotheker’s selection. Lane said the new board evaluated Apotheker and found him lacking in leadership, execution and communication. Lane, sensitive to criticism HP’s board has faced in the past (a 2006 pre-texting scandal and the departure of former CEO Mark Hurd) is positioning the board as being new; however six of 13 members were on the board when one or both issue(s) came before it.

Yahoo has had its challenges. Bartz was hired in 2009 to replace co-founder Jerry Yang and lead a turnaround. Half the board members who voted to fire Bartz hadn’t been on board when she was hired. Shares increased from $12.90 to $13.70 in after hours trading on news of her firing September 6, 2011; financial results were about the same as when she had been hired.

Board chairman Roy Bostock, chair when Bartz was hired, fired her over the telephone when she was out of town on business - not a technique likely to catch on as an effective way to show respect and contain damage. (Yahoo is now pursing potential buyers for Yahoo’s core businesses as well as a CEO search.)

Bartz responded by emailing Yahoo’s 14,000 employees that she’d been fired over the phone by the board chairman. She wished them the best, saying it had been her pleasure to work with them. The next day she gave an interview to Fortune detailing how Bostock had handled the firing. She called the board members “doofuses” and used the salty language she is known for: “These people f---ed me over,” she said.

John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, referred to Bartz’s exit as the “burning the bridge method.” Generally boards and leaders are cautious on the leader’s exit, Challenger said in a recent interview. “These issues are delicate and most people don’t want a messy divorce. The ideal is to do it quietly, and both parties move on.”

What is the best way for a leader to leave? “With grace,” Challenger replied, “because there is usually fault on both sides.”

Some CEO departures seem like the proverbial bolt out of the blue. Mercedes’ Lieb enjoyed a five-year tenure of successful turnaround, great sales results, market leadership, industry respect, and high dealer approval. But that wasn’t the whole story.

In April 2010, Daimler AG and its subsidiaries in Germany, China and Russia pleaded guilty to violating U.S. anti-bribery laws and were fined $185 million. As part of a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department, changes were made in how Daimler handled compliance throughout the world. Changes that apparently Lieb didn’t apply to himself. He is reported to have used company money for personal expenses, disregarding warnings he received.

Lieb was fired October 18, 2011. He remains with Mercedes in a capacity the company hasn’t yet explained. He has made no public statement. Mercedes USA CFO Herbert Werner replaced him, pending finding a permanent replacement. By removing Lieb from his CEO post, Daimler Chairman Dr. Dieter Zetsche sent a message throughout the Daimler organization that achieving outstanding business results doesn’t supersede compliance and ethical behavior.

So what lessons can be drawn from all this?

First, and maybe most importantly, hire the right CEO to begin with. Given the turnover in boards, directors would be well served to read the excellent, and still relevant, 2002 Harvard Business Review article Don’t Hire the Wrong CEO by Warren Bennis and James O’Toole.

Turnaround situations have little margin for error so how a board and CEO work together requires a unique partnership. Neither the executives nor the directors came off well in the Yahoo and HP examples. Each turnaround has to balance the urgency of expectations against the reality in which a CEO needs to create success. In the search for the winning strategy, how Yahoo and HP directors work with their changes in leadership this time around will reveal what, if anything, has been learned.

Shareholders aren’t served by blame games – where leaders call boards incompetent or boards make leaders scapegoats. If directors and leaders don’t take the time to develop the skills to work through difficult conversations in the boardroom, the issues when they surface in the media undermine confidence in the company.

Modeling and following ethical standards matter. Lieb apparently didn’t understand what was at stake for Daimler in needing to raise the bar on its adherence to compliance and ethics.

Just as there is no magic wand to deliver results, there is no short cut to understanding what is expected. Leaders rise and fall on how they get that message.

Gael O’Brien is a Business Ethics Magazine columnist. Gael is a thought leader on building leadership, trust, and reputation and writes The Week in Ethics.

I have noticed an interesting correlation. As the economy worsens and the job cuts intensify there is an increase in anger, irritation and anti-social actions.

I am not referring to riots or violence. I refer to the gradual eroding of the basic social niceties.

Calls are not returned. Conversations are strained. Raises and bonuses are decreased with expectations of longer hours.

As the global economy stagnates and seemingly worsens, and job cuts are announced daily, tensions continue to rise. Frustration, irritation and the loss of common decency pervades. It has truly become a dog-eat-dog environment.

As an executive recruiter in the field of compliance, I find that the expectations of hiring managers and those of candidates are often incongruous. Candidates have become increasingly disillusioned and aggravated by their treatment during the job search process. Calls are not returned, conversations are strained, and the potential for raises and bonuses become fewer and far between, coupled with the additional gift of much longer and more intense hours.

If this weren’t bad enough, external factors are making life even more unpleasant. Fewer jobs equal less overall tax revenue and therefore decreased social services. Our infrastructure, school systems and law enforcement agencies, to name just a few examples, are all suffering. The decline in the stock market means that 401ks are now 201ks. Houses are increasingly underwater, both figuratively and literally. We are seemingly bombarded with bad luck everywhere we turn.  This spills over to the job market.

Firms are cautious, perhaps even afraid to hire. They interview more people over a longer period of time, and typically do not give much feedback, if any. Of course, this makes a certain amount of sense if the firm is not interested in the candidate. This is not because firms are inconsiderate, but rather because they are overwhelmed with applicants. The crazy development is that now it is common for firms to not even contact ideal candidates. More and more, firms are closing searches out of fear of what the future may bring. Conversely, they may put searches on hold until the next cycle of layoffs, hoping that maybe they can find someone better for cheaper, someone who will be desperate for any opportunity. Of course, the firms will not reveal this to the candidate, unfortunately leaving the poor individual in the dark.

On the other side of the table, candidates seek more money than firms are willing to offer because they are afraid to move to the next Bear Stearns.

We’ve come to an impasse, where the worker loses out. Though everyone ponders the frightening thought of working more hours for less pay for more years, they are absolutely terrified of making a potential career move should the new opportunity turn out to be a dud. Meanwhile, their “secure” jobs may be cut or relocated to Mumbai. There is really no recourse in this economy.

I am guilty as well. I receive more and more resumes each day, with heartbreaking stories behind every page. I’d like more than anything to be able to place each and every one of the hundreds of traders, brokers and the vast array of other financial services professionals trying to move into compliance because their jobs are sent abroad or replaced by computer models, but I simply cannot. And that’s just it; these candidates are professionals, all very intelligent, hard working and certainly capable individuals. Yet it is impossible to keep up with the demand, so much so that I often cannot find the time to even chat with some of these individuals let alone find them jobs.

It is a challenging time. While I do not have all the answers, I am confident in the bright prospects for Compliance professionals in an otherwise dark environment. In light of the new rules and regulations, backlash against Wall Street, and past scandals, there is and will continue to be a demand for their services. Although the road may be rocky, long, and not always straight forward there are opportunities.

Jack Kelly is Managing Director of Compliance Search Group and Publisher of CompliancEX, a web site where this article was first published.

It’s a maxim you’ve likely heard repeated enough through the years that it became a mantra if you followed it – or a cliché if you failed to heed the wisdom of its simplicity: Walk your talk and the rest will follow.

Right now, business leaders are struggling to maintain grounding in an era of unprecedented upheaval of status quo assumptions and a dismantling of the historic "establishment" prerogatives.

If you look more closely at any number of marquee businesses that broke new ground and disrupted their universe, or innovators who pioneered a new game or at least altered its rules, a common theme emerges: The organization and its leaders, for the most part, modeled and fashioned the change their inventiveness inspired.

Now no one individual or business entity is perfect. However, in the new environment of hyper scrutiny, increasing regulation, vigilante-styled consumer retribution, “occupy” public protests, and overnight reversals in public trust and confidence – do you think you can improve your competitive position without consistently modeling what you stand for? Whether it is in your personal leadership behavior, your organization’s culture or your brand’s engagement with all stakeholders, closing the walk-talk gap should be a top priority.

Start with the Ego Impulse of Success

Dave Balter, the once high-flying chief executive of the social marketing company BzzAgent, who sold his company last May to Tesco’s Dunnhumby for a reported $60 million, chronicles his near demise in a recent article for Inc. magazine: “The Humility Imperative: CEOs, Keep Your Arrogance in Check.”

In a frank and admirable confession, Balter admits his out of control ego almost destroyed the flourishing word-of-mouth pioneer image he labored long and hard to build. Imploring every entrepreneur, CEO and leader to find humility, he advises to “dig a hole, throw your ego into it, and pour concrete on top.”

BzzAgent clients included some of the biggest companies in the world and had been featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine as well as being the subject of two Harvard Business School cases. Balter was called a genius and while his ego provided the confidence to be a great leader, he had to learn the hard way that a chief executive is not God.

“My entire style evolved from confident to cocky,” he recalls. “When I interviewed job candidates, I was less conversational and more confrontational... By the time 2007 rolled around I was blinded by my own press and felt BzzAgent was unstoppable... looking back I realize now the only voices I heard were the ones in my head: I made every product decision, shunned investment overtures, and ignored competitors as wannabes and copycats. I believed my vision was untouchable.”

Balter’s experience led to some important lessons in humility. He started operating as a student and a sponge, seeking out input from a wide range of sources and engaging in the conscious listening he had impulsively dismissed: “Disregard the fawning fanboys and king-like power you feel… choose to recognize your place in the universe is no more important than anyone else’s. Have humility, or your hubris will have you,” he implores.

Fostering an Environment for Impact: Check List to Greater Credibility

By becoming more conscious of the factors that reinforce any gaps in your leadership talk (promise) versus your walk (actions), and then developing a method (style) that shepherds rather than imposes, visionary leaders may reinforce the credibility that can inspire your troops to collective greatness – avoiding the pitfalls of ego centricity and its accompanying alienation that Balter warns about.

From our years of guiding C-suite leaders, we’ve developed this checklist to help guide you in confidently emulating a model of responsibility that endears your organization to sharing in the realization of your vision:

Commit to courage. Successful leaders know the job is not for the faint-hearted. If your knees buckle easily, it may not be for you. Real leadership is more a calling of high order, not as much about the power and the glory. Follow-through and fulfillment are its hallmarks: do what you say you’ll do and act according to who you profess to be.

Authenticity breeds confidence.  Authentic leadership is about staying real. That requires integrity. Make sure your ethical house is in order, which in turn will reduce the fear of competitive vulnerability.

Develop a plan and stay fluid. You go nowhere fast without a strategy. First, commit to your vision, which should be rock solid. Then develop a fluid strategy to navigate the vision. Fluidity is an operating mode that enables you to course-correct as you progress toward the decisive outcome.

Watch out for pretense.  Authentic leaders don’t need the pretense of appearing too busy to be attentive and responsive. Being “unavailable” to lend credence to the concern of the moment by providing undivided attention creates an avoidance syndrome that can infect the organization. Recent history has shown us how the “What I don’t know (or don’t have time to know), I don’t have to deal with” syndrome can play out. If you think you are giving away your power by responding to people in the moment, you have no power worth protecting in the first place.

Don’t do ‘group think’.  Don’t imply endorsement of the assumed way of thinking by doing nothing when subordinates engage in the ‘group think’ behaviors of rank-and-file politics. Do you know of anyone who got to the head of their game thinking like everybody else? If you want to inspire, acquire unconventional wisdom.

Resist the temptation to pull rank.  Confident leaders don’t need to pull rank or maneuver behind “protocol” when tough issues must be dealt with. They jump into the deep end directly (but not head first!). Today’s shepherd leaders flourish within horizontal organizations of mission clusters rather than authoritarian ‘divisions’ of hierarchal, centralized authority.

Trust the deputies you surround yourself with. Real leadership is cemented by a front line constituency: your trusted inner circle of expert deputies. If convinced you are the smartest person in the room, you are in big trouble. One of the surest paths to failure is to not listen to, or not act upon, the knowledge of the experts you hire to surround yourself with. Don’t micromanage, macro inspire.

Don’t make your inner circle compete for access or attention.  The old style of authoritarian rule creates a climate in which your senior deputies compete with each other for your attention and your allegiance (favoritism). Traditional management pundits theorize this is a good way to build and sustain loyalty, and to draw out the best in each vertical discipline. However, this leadership style can be fatal in the horizontal organization. There are stunning examples of how flawed this model is from the scandals of the past decade; situations primarily spawned by cultures that enabled duplicity.

Deputies who vie for your allegiance in this fashion are likely also competing with each other in areas that don’t serve the organization’s interest as a whole. For example, not sharing proprietary intelligence or not pooling resources for greater cost-efficiencies. Politics is a productivity drain on one of your most vital assets – human capital.

Don’t misinterpret independent thinking as disloyalty.  You can react to ‘out of the box’ thinkers by misreading their passion for contrary viewpoints as disloyalty. For them, having a big-picture perspective requires a large degree of critical analysis to say nothing of the courage required to speak up. This type of employee can be your greatest personnel asset. They are more likely to be authentically concerned about the welfare of the whole as they see their own boat rising with the tide.

Put the right security and accountability checks in place so your true disciples aren’t squelched by your misplaced distrust or paranoia.

Conversely, employees or partners who are plotting self-interested agendas, or who are disloyal for their own gain, are not going to consciously bring attention to themselves. Workplace deviousness is most prevalent in guarded behavior.

Recognize the true contributors to your success.  Confident, secure leaders generously tout the contributions of their deputies. It’s an “us” not a “me” game. Authentic leadership thrives on finding and nurturing the best people, and then getting out of their way.

Don’t let good people go – angry. The old maxim in marketing continues to ring true that one unhappy customer will do more damage to your reputation than ten happy ones will help it. The same is true for employee relationships. If people leave you, especially a star, make sure you part on good terms.

Art Stewart, MPM, is President/Chief Strategy Officer of Boston-based Stewart Strategies Group (www.stewartgrp.com). He teaches a custom course on corporate and social responsibility at Emerson College and is a Research Fellow at the Bentley University Center for Business Ethics.

The captain of a US Airways flight announced the plane was leaving its runway position and returning to the gate, promising more information as soon as possible. We later learned that an argument between two stewardesses in the galley had escalated and one of them called the purser to complain. Some passengers seated in the front rows may have heard the argument.

While the flight was delayed nearly two hours, the captain handled it by providing straight information without spin. The result was proof again that transparency creates trust.

About 30 minutes after the plane returned to the gate, the captain announced that a personality conflict between two crew members was responsible for the delay. He apologized for conduct that was unprofessional and acknowledged with regret that everyone on the plane was being inconvenienced. He indicated the plane would take off as soon as a replacement crew member arrived.

The mood that triggered the initial, irritated groans as the captain began speaking shifted by the time he had finished. One passenger called out he’d be happy to help with the beverage service if it meant leaving sooner. While another chimed in he was willing to forgo beverage service. Some laughed, others got on cell phones to check on connecting flights or adjust schedules with their offices. There was a mild hum as people began talking to those around them about what an odd situation it was – both that the captain was so forthcoming and that a crew conflict had gotten out of hand.

A stewardess left the galley for the rear of the plane and was stopped mid-way by a passenger asking if she was involved or would be leaving. She answered she was staying, but hoped the other person would have to leave; she said she had had “her teeth rammed down her throat” so she notified the purser. That stewardess remained on the flight. When a new  stewardess arrived, the plane took off.

US Airways has traditionally ranked poorly in customer service and on time departures. Ironically, the day after that flight an article cited the airline’s progress in improving its industry ranking over the last three years and its turnaround in service and image.

Later, I asked two United flight crew members if they knew of any instances when flight crew arguments caused a plane to return to the gate.  Neither had ever heard of it happening. Nonetheless, a stewardess pointed out, safety has to be the top consideration on any aircraft. Flight crew members have to be able to work well together and trust each other. They have to deal as a team with any potential medical emergency among passengers or respond to any emergency situation impacting the plane. If they can’t act as a team, passengers are at risk.

Problems are inevitable in business and among employees. However, it is the leader’s response to a problem that determines much of what will follow. On the US Air flight, the captain set a tone that impacted how those negatively affected reacted. He spoke directly about the cause of a problem, told how it was being addressed, apologized, recognized that everyone was being impacted, and then took care of the problem – in this case by taking people to their destination safely.

It is a formula for leadership that builds trust and reputation, a formula we don’t see often enough.

Gael O’Brien is a Business Ethics Magazine columnist. Gael is a thought leader on building leadership, trust, and reputation and writes The Week in Ethics, a weekly column where this article was first published.

Of all the styles and types of leadership, something called authentic leadership seems the easiest to achieve – after all, who wouldn’t want to be, and come across as, the genuine article?

More than twenty years ago leadership guru Warren Bennis wrote that the essence of leadership is “becoming yourself.” As he also wrote that leaders are made, not born, the work-in-progress theory applies here.

Bennis, Kevin Cashman and Bill George are among the leadership experts who’ve been talking and writing about the characteristics and significance of leading authentically; at its core, it involves possessing high emotional intelligence.

Behaviors include self awareness (the power Cashman calls of being real rather than having to be right), listening to hear and connect, living out of one’s values and integrity, and valuing others, bringing people together and inspiring them to create value around shared purpose. George talks about authentic leadership as being essential for the 21^st century leader.

Blake Mycoskie, founder and “Chief Shoe Giver” of TOMS,  is one of many leaders who seem to fit that description. He is focused on building a culture where employees are valued, helped to perform to their fullest ability, and are engaged in shared purpose to create value for others.

The inevitable question: is authentic leadership sustainable and does it make a difference? After all, the memory of the leadership of self involvement, from Wall Street and other sectors fueling the economic meltdown, is still so vivid. Is it possible that a 21^st century leadership can emerge that involves self awareness, emotional intelligence, and authenticity?

Betsy Myers believes it is. In her new book "Take the Lead: Motivate, Inspire, and Bring Out the Best in Yourself and Everyone Around You" she tells the story of a 2006 conference held at the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government where the common sentiment among the dozens of pre-eminent CEOs, thought leaders and academics participating (including Bennis, George, John Kotter, Howard Shultz,  Jack Welch,  Les Wexner,  Noel Tichy,  and Admiral Thad Allen) was that a new leadership of heart and mind was emerging. The paradigm emphasized authenticity, collaboration and caring, she said.

Myers indicated that the conference confirmed three core beliefs that her experience shared: 1) leadership is a function of self knowledge and honest self reflection; 2) the strength of leaders comes from their willingness to ask questions; and 3) leaders draw their power less from what they know and more from how they make people around them feel.

"Leadership is about how you make people feel – about you, about the project or work you’re doing together, and especially about themselves,” she writes. Currently founding director of the Center for Women and Business at Bentley University, Myers was executive director of Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership and also served as senior adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and to President Bill Clinton.

The gems in her book are her stories (personal, political and drawn from business) that illustrate her seven core ideas: authenticity, connection, respect, clarity, collaboration, learning, and courage. They form the roadmap in the leadership journey she describes, which essentially becomes a journey in developing one’s emotional intelligence.

The word “authentic” can be problematic if we let it. It invites the best that is possible as well as becoming trite if overused and undernourished. When it falls prey to posturing it becomes a fad: consider the self proclamations by celebrities, politicians, and online dater wannabes professing “I’ve always tried to just be authentic and real,” (Anderson Cooper) or “I’m authentic” (Michele Bachman) with all kinds of variations in between.

What saves “authenticity” from death by posers is that it isn’t about what leaders say about themselves; it is what the stories told about them demonstrate, about their actions, conversations, connecting, how they handle mistakes, their openness to feedback and disagreement in creating solutions, and their capacity to inspire followers.

Authenticity is essentially tied to a leader’s capacity for self awareness in that moment. It is an organic process. It has to be fed continually by a leader’s willingness to learn about himself/herself and the world.

It is a leadership driven by one’s belief that sustainable business success is built by wanting to deserve and bring about trust, knowing the impact that trust has on the relationships and value created.

Given the challenges that have launched the 21^st century, leaders face pressures and demands that will be met so much more effectively if people feel heard, if connections are made at both the level of head and heart, if shared purpose can be created, if trust can be established: all sustainable elements of authentic leadership.

Gael O’Brien is a Business Ethics Magazine columnist. Gael is a thought leader on building leadership, trust, and reputation and writes The Week in Ethics.

In a Gallup poll released last week, 64 percent of Americans surveyed expressed a great deal/quite a lot of confidence in small business compared to 19 percent who felt the same about big business. This isn’t new information – small business has consistently inspired more trust than corporations.

In increasingly uncertain times globally, how serial entrepreneurs (those who are continually putting ideas in action) think and act offers models for navigating the unknown as well as handling potential ethical conflicts.

Emerging extreme weather patterns, erupting political unrest and global financial market volatility are some of the issues that are forcing business leaders to operate against the backdrop of the unknowable, where using the past to help predict the future is increasingly inadequate. This is far less of an issue for serial entrepreneurs.

Take for example an article in the latest Harvard Business Review offering adaptability as the new competitive advantage for big business in an era of risk and instability. It advocates experimentation, as a way around the current limits of forecasting, and embracing failure’s lessons.

These are concepts that are part of serial entrepreneurs’ DNA. The inevitability that these approaches may be seen as increasingly valuable within large companies – and how that will impact more traditional cultures – offers corporations, not already doing so, the opportunity to approach challenges differently.

The extensive research and writing about how serial entrepreneurs think and solve problems done by Saras Sarasvathy shifted focus away from the story of highly individualistic founders and the companies they created to common aspects of their thought process. This invites the question of whether the process that works for serial entrepreneurs can apply to the rest of us.

When Leonard Schlesinger became president of Babson College in 2008, he invited Sarasvathy, who teaches at the Darden School of Business, to campus to meet with him and faculty members as part of the ongoing conversations Babson began on what entrepreneurial thought and action can mean at the institution.

There have been many byproducts of this focus, including a book due out this fall by several faculty, The New Entrepreneurial Leader, which captures entrepreneurial thought as a method.

Another outcome is a book Schlesinger has been writing. His process actually mirrors entrepreneurial thought in action: in the face of the unknown, take a small step forward, pause to see what is learned, determine what you can afford/want to pay to play, bring others along, incorporate that learning into the next step, and build off the unexpected. The bottom line: Act, Learn and Build.

For example, Schlesinger and his co-authors Charles Keifer and Paul Brown tested their ideas, language, and listened to stories in a series of free two-day courses taken by 300 entrepreneurs. Armed with that information, the three men collaborated on a book that was written in seven weeks which they called, Action Trumps Everything: Creating What You Want in an Uncertain World. It was made available as a free PDF on the website and readers were encouraged to leave feedback.

In December 2010, they published a limited edition of the book for Babson alumni and friends, again encouraging feedback on the website. They have coined the expression CreAction -- acting your way into the future you desire by taking small, smart steps. Expanding and revising the book, this year, they’ve added input from another 200 course participants. They will turn the manuscript over to Harvard Business Review Press next month and the book will be published in February under a new title.

In an interview with Schlesinger this month, I asked if there was anything different about how the first 300 men and women, who were course participants, responded to ideas or provided insights on how men and women entrepreneurs might lead differently.

He indicated it was a lot easier for the women to extend the ideas to all aspects of their life. Whereas the men were more focused on using the ideas either for their current venture or a transitional venture, wanting to know exactly how those ideas would help them.

“As we got into the conversations,” Schlesinger said, “women found much more in the way of natural linkages of action not only to their ventures, but to their friendships, relationships, to their families; and really enriched the conversation in meaningful ways that quite honestly got me to the point of thinking quite seriously about my presidency, about my own role, that what we are talking about is a way to live, not a way to work.”

I asked Schlesinger how ethics impacts entrepreneurial thought and action. While there are many answers, something that cuts across curriculum and life is a program, Giving Voice to Values,  he brought to Babson two years ago when he recruited Mary Gentile.  The curriculum is being taught in universities on six continents.

Embedded in Action Trumps Everything, and Giving Voice to Values, Schlesinger said, is the notion that practice makes better.  In addition to advancing what is going on in ethics education, he indicated, Gentile’s work builds a practiced-base methodology that goes alongside the discussion method; it increases the likelihood that when people confront a real situation, they will have had enough practiced-based scenarios that they’ve worked through from their own experience and reflected on that natural behavior comes more easily.

“I don’t think 25,000 more hours of teaching people the difference between right and wrong is going to make much progress,” Schlesinger said. “Most of these people actually do know at the core the difference between right or wrong and they know what to do with it. They know how to intellectualize what they would do with it. They just don’t know how to deal with it in real time in a real place. When confronted by a situation and no experience and no practice, they default to places where they have never been. That is where you find people cutting corners, taking short cuts, and doing stupid things.”

Referring to Malcolm Gladwell’s pronouncement in Outliers that greatness in any profession comes from 10,000 hours of practice, Schlesinger added, “there is a certain truth there and that truth is embedded in Mary’s program and its adaptability for use across different platforms.”

Serial entrepreneurs have a thought methodology that is available to any of us that can be used in the face of an increasingly unknowable future. The process of taking small steps to act, learn and build from essentially thwarts paralysis, being overwhelmed or being stopped by obstacles – three circumstances where good decisions are not likely to be made.

The key is that action provides evidence, and with the evidence of experience, as well as a practiced-based approach in curriculum and in how one approaches one’s life, there is greater clarity around self-knowledge, purpose, trade-offs, and one’s boundaries. With the clarity, greater transparency is possible, which can lead to a greater capacity to earn others’ trust.

Evidence allows the road ahead to seem more knowable.

Entrepreneurial thought and action -- becoming a way to live, not just a way to work.

Gael O’Brien is a Business Ethics Magazine columnist. Gael is a thought leader on building leadership, trust, and reputation and writes The Week in Ethics.

Leadership journeys often begin by admiring someone else’s leadership style or ability —asking what makes that person successful. Once that process starts, soul searching is unavoidable. How do you stack up to the kind of leader you want to be and what will it take for you to close the gap?

Indeed, the reason there are so many studies, books, theories and workshops on leadership is that as long as we are responsible for results, we face huge challenges that require skills and competencies, vision and innovation. At the core, there are questions about our abilities:  How do we learn to listen to, engage, and inspire others to do their best work? How do we lead ourselves through the inevitable obstacles?

Leadership isn’t just about becoming a CEO. According to Joanna Barsh, a director at McKinsey, only about 35 percent of men and 25 percent of women aspire to a top role in a company. However, whatever one’s professional aspiration, leadership skills are likely required.

Acquiring those skills often isn’t easy for men or women, says Barsh, whom I spoke with recently.  But for women who pursue careers in companies, there is the daunting reality that unless you start your own business, a leadership role can be hard to come by.

For example, at Fortune 500 companies, the percent of women executive officers is 14.4 percent, less than 3 percent are CEOs, and women constitute 15 percent of corporate directors. (In Asia, women occupy 1.8 percent of board seats and in Europe, 12 percent.)

Finding Magic

About seven years ago, Barsh began the Leadership Project – which evolved into the Centered Leadership Project -- to answer a question important to her: “What made other women so wonderfully successful as leaders?” She figured there was some “magic” that if she could find out for herself and pass on to others, she and other women could go further, have a bigger impact and feel fulfilled.

“Imagine,” she wrote in the introduction of her book, published two years ago, “how many more women would make it to the top because these secrets would help them.” How Remarkable Women Lead: The Breakthrough Model for Work and Life, co-authored with her McKinsey colleague Susie Cranston, will be released in paperback in December with a new forward.

The book was the result of videotaped interviews with 100 women leaders around the world who shared stories about how they looked at life and work: how they found  purpose; the optimism and confidence they express; how they overcame obstacles; their openness to feedback and taking criticism; how they approached their career and unexpected opportunities; how they cultivated a sponsor, connected to others, and brought out others’ talents; how they made things happen for themselves and found their voice, and how they recovered from adversity and restored their energy.

McKinsey’s Living Portraits Video Archive,  gives a flavor of the stories told by women leaders all over the world.

As the McKinsey team looked for answers about why the women interviewed shared certain traits, they took into account, and built off, research done by others on leadership, positive psychology, search for meaning, energy and performance, gender differences, networking and bonding, and risk-taking. They also conducted their own extensive quantitative research on men and women to test their hypotheses about centered leadership. The leadership model that emerged has five dimensions: meaning, framing, connecting, engaging and energizing

I asked Barsh whether what she had learned in the five years of research leading up to the book had enabled her to find the “magic” in her own leadership journey. I was also curious about what had been happening with the concept of centered leadership since  the 2009 book was published.

In the last two years, Barsh indicates she has given 150 speeches and received anecdotal feedback consistent with research findings. She’s the recipient of emails from women saying “you’ve changed my life.” The book’s Facebook page posts ongoing research, information, and comments that support the work of centered leadership and reveals a growing fan population.

So far, McKinsey has offered two several-day programs teaching centered leadership for high-potential women leaders sent by their companies. From last fall to this month, 32 women have participated, of whom 11 have since been promoted, Barsh says.

In addition, 50 more video interviews have been conducted, including 17 with men leaders, and more surveys done of men and women executives which show, she says, that men have as much a chance as women to become a master of centered leadership (scoring in the top 20 percent of four or all five of the dimensions of the leadership model) and feel successful in their work and lives.

Mastering Centered Leadership

The men who develop mastery in centered leadership, Barsh says, are the best sponsors for women leaders. “Often women need somebody to push them; leaving their comfort zone is a lot like skydiving,” she says. “The type of sponsor you need will push you out of the plane. Fine to think it is a good idea to sky dive and get up in the plane, but it is a natural thing to want to hang on and not go out the door,” she adds. “This kind of sponsor pushes you out because he knows you can do it and is on the ground before you and spreads out a safety blanket in case you make a mistake.”

I asked her if that is what men need from sponsors? “Yes,” she says, “a good sponsor does this for men.” The challenge, she adds, is that sponsors tend to sponsor people who look like them; to sponsor someone who doesn’t is uncomfortable.

Yet that support makes the journey to the top more possible.

And what of Barsh’s own journey? She acknowledged she is by nature a pessimistic person. She regularly uses framing and reframing, she says, a technique in positive psychology, pioneered by Martin Seligman and utilized by the successful women leaders she interviewed. She is training herself to be an optimist, understanding and living into her strengths, she says. “I’m a living experiment in centered leadership,” she says.

Barsh is also careful to include enough of the work she loves in furthering centered leadership into the mix of her regular consulting responsibilities which keeps her energy high. She comments that now she feels “in her flow.”

McKinsey is also doing research on how women are held back by culture, environment or policies and practices of a company not adaptive to the reality that women have a lot of responsibilities outside of work if they have families, Barsh says.

About the same time Barsh’s book hit bookstores, the American Association of University Professors' magazine published “So Few Women Leaders” based on a study at John Hopkins interviewing 27 senior women on their views of root causes why women are underrepresented in academic leadership positions. While not making claims of how representative these issues are and suggesting further study, the issues in the environment creating obstacles for women leaders in academia echo some of McKinsey’s research on corporate environment.

The problem of underrepresentation is further complicated. Recent studies by Mercer on Women’s Leadership Development surveys in U.S. and European companies indicate that around 70 percent of employers surveyed lack a strategy or philosophy for developing women into leadership roles, and around 40 percent don’t have any activities or programs targeted to the developmental needs of women leaders.

In many ways, that’s astonishing – after all, women make up about half the world’s population.  There’s substantial evidence that institutions that put a priority on developing talent from throughout the organization, especially mindful of under-representation of women and minorities in management and top roles, will inevitably create a stronger leadership pool and a stronger company.

So what happens while institutions catch up with where they need to be? The personal journey of leadership continues because it is also about leading oneself, even in environments that may not yet be hospitable. Books like How Remarkable Women Lead (and their valuable research) remind us of the roadmaps that support talented people in coming into their own as leaders- roadmaps that can help us unlock our own growth personally and professionally and accelerate our leadership journey.

Gael O’Brien is a Business Ethics Magazine columnist. Gael is a thought leader on building leadership, trust, and reputation and writes The Week in Ethics.

A recent short video of a TED conference presentation by Kathryn Schulz talked about being wrong.

Kathryn Schultz

Schulz, who wrote Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, said at TED that we hate to be wrong; we do all we can to avoid thinking about our being wrong. We think that getting something wrong means there is something wrong with us: “so we insist we are right; it makes us feel smart, virtuous, and safe.”

The problem, she points out, is the internal sense of rightness we experience is not reliable. “Trusting too much in feeling you are on the right side of anything can be dangerous.” She illustrates her point by saying that is how we got a torpedoed economy and 200 million gallons of oil dumped into the Gulf of Mexico.

Her TED talk has other rich ideas about being human and stepping outside our “rightness,” but her concept of “error blindness” made me think of  a number of examples where being so wedded to one’s own sense of reality had backfired. Unfortunately for leaders, their backfires make headlines.

I was reminded of Renault’s espionage case; Alan Greenspan’s dogged devotion to a market theory; a county politician’s belief about what isn’t offensive; and how the Dodgers franchise has been jeopardized by divorcing owners’ sense of personal privilege.

Renault's Carlos Ghosn

Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn wrongly accused three employees in Renault’s electric car program of selling information to the Chinese based on what the French government called a mishandled internal investigation. The problem for Ghosn was compounded by his defending the spy claims in an interview on a national French television channel saying he had “certainties” about it.

Ghosn publicly apologized and, with those senior executives involved in the investigation, waived 2010 bonuses and 2011 stock option entitlements.  They endured a public reprimand by the French government, Renault’s largest stakeholder. A security agent was later arrested for fraud and the company is revamping its security operation.

For former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan it was about the certainty of his view on how markets behave. He was forced to admit to the House Oversight Committee that his world view, considered by critics to have led to the economic meltdown, turned out to be flawed.

Then there are the everyday convictions which demean others. Orange County (CA) Republican Party official Marilyn Davenport sent an email message to her mailing list with President Obama’s face superimposed over a chimpanzee saying “Now you know why — No birth certificate.” County Republican Party Chair Scott Baugh, one of the recipients, asked for her resignation; thus far she has refused.

At the press conference this week, she apologized to anyone she offended, saying she hadn’t realized how much it would offend people: “I offended the black people” and “I humbly receive your rebuke.” She apparently ruled out that those not African America could also be offended.

Frank and Jamie McCourt

The divorce war of Dodger owners Frank and Jamie McCourt is a cautionary tale of what happens when leaders make it about their right to lead rather than how they are leading.

While they have played out their tug of war over team ownership, media criticism has escalated the past 18 months over their Dodger stewardship, divorce filing revelations about lavish personal spending, and the franchise’s financial integrity. TMZ.com is reporting that the IRS has begun an investigation of the McCourts.

This week, Major League Baseball (MLB) Commissioner Bud Selig announced the MLB was seizing control of the Dodgers and would appoint a trustee to oversee its operations. Frank McCourt’s brief response said the Dodgers were in compliance with MLB guidelines. In other words, as bad and public as this drama and increased debt have become, McCourt isn’t budging from the rightness of his position.

So with these illustrations and more you can think of, what can we do about hating to be wrong?

The most basic is to accept it is part of being human and figure out how to mitigate our vulnerability through our receptivity to information that may be in conflict with our world view. The more we stay open to the possibility we could be wrong, the more likely we are to get beyond our own “rightness” and experience a larger reality.

It is really akin to developing an entrepreneurial spirit to constantly question, test, and have a world view that is organic, not fixed; connecting rather than isolating.

As to the minds that create racist responses or narcissistic entitlement, being “wrong” may feel especially frightening so the control they impose makes “error blindness” more pronounced, their internal sense of rightness more fallible, the potential consequences of being wrong more dire, and ethical leadership more implausible.

Gael O’Brien is a Business Ethics Magazine columnist. Gael is a thought leader on building leadership, trust, and reputation and writes The Week in Ethics, a weekly column where this article was first published.