Why the loudest voice on ethics might be worth watching for all the wrong reasons (and what to do about it)
On a recent call, we all logged in, cameras on. As we started asking (fairly benign) questions about lending standards, one person switched off their camera (only five of us on the call) just as their mic was unmuted. Interesting.
What followed was a tirade about why her fund shouldn’t be held to development finance standards, replete with invective and ad hominem attacks. Delivered from behind a blank screen. This situation was strange, as the fund was lending into huge infrastructure projects (long-term) in some of the most corrupt markets on earth. The fund’s website, brochures, and backers were full of ethics this, sustainability that, and integrity, blah blah.
But that small act of turning off a camera to have a toddler tantrum told us (we were acting for a potential LP) what we needed to know about the values posturing: it was total BS.
Voluminous virtue
The host of the Fund Shack podcast (more on that soon), Ross Butler, said something to me recently that triggered the memory above, and it stuck with me.
“Virtue is least often found where it’s advertised.”
I gave a hopefully passable response to that comment live. But on the train back from the recording studio, numerous examples came to mind, including:
-
Sadly, multiple examples of chief ethics and/or compliance officers squeezing out colleagues who dared to speak out. The issues raised ranged from harassment, corruption, conflicts of interest, and management abuse.
-
One such former chief ethics officer stole confidential client deliverables we had developed and tweaked them just enough to avoid outright theft before passing them off as her own work at various stages (conferences, podcasts, etc.). The irony that most of her keynotes were on ethics is what made me remember Ross’s virtue quote.
-
The HR director who flew halfway around the world for an offsite jolly on a tropical island, before giving us ‘heathens in the provinces’ a toe-curling talk on “appropriate workplace behaviour.” Later that evening she appropriated the iPhone of a fearful local colleague, played some tracks, mocking his taste in music, before depositing herself on his lap (very much uninvited; he was married, devoutly religious, etc.).
-
The charity that tried to extort free advice for a junket around Bhutan, where they (generously) did four hours of work, in between a week of luxury resort stays and private jets. They later refused to pay and produced no research or any other obvious work as part of their animal-saving mission. That one stung, as I used to raise money for them as a kid.
-
The rating engines that extort businesses not to ‘deprioritise’ favourable reviews, make up others, while duping consumers with this pay-to-play charade.
-
The investigative journalist fighting against corruption, who was bunged an envelope to uncover personal details of a business leader refusing to pay bribes. The personal details were then used for a campaign of harassment and intimidation (bullets in the mail with pictures of his kids, etc.).
-
The hit piece a family-friendly famous celebrity wanted done (didn’t do it) to “destroy the lives” of a small group of people who’d criticised their most recent flop on Facebook.
And on…
Were there signs?
The reason for the list above is that it came in maybe 3-5 minutes of thinking. There are so many more… That’s terrifying!
I should caveat that no one should expect people working in ethics, charity, or journalism to live a life of penury and penance. But a basic level of “I do as I say” would be nice.
I’m more interested in the lessons. Deception detection can be tricky without training, but what due diligence habits can we take from these instances to avoid deceptive virtue-advertisers?
The first thing that came to mind was slips of the tongue. For example, when I hear (or if I catch myself saying), “To be honest”, we should query why a statement needs that prefix. Then there’s “No offence”, which is generally followed by the opposite. But this could be attributed to gestural, cultural, or other slips. We need something more.
The tests
-
Frequency: The more someone insists on their own standards, unprompted, the more worth checking that claim is. As my Dad used to love saying, “Those that can, do. Those that can’t, won’t, or don’t, talk about it.” Or, as Shakespeare put it in Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
-
Visibility: This links to the camera-off rant but also extends to what people do when they don’t think they’re being watched. Very useful if you’re also doing your social media diligence.
-
The poacher or gamekeeper test: I was at a fintech conference a few years back, where a self-confessed psychopath who held various dubious records (the longest hotel scam being one) proclaimed that he now worked in “fraud prevention.” I couldn’t resist approaching him during a break to float a hypothetical (if poaching were again more lucrative than gamekeeping, might he go back?). You can guess the response.
-
Money where mouths are: “Mission-driven, values, purpose, etc.” are all very nice until you examine the resources (financial, human capital, attention) they are afforded. This is why we can now measure charities based on the proportion of donations that reach frontline objectives.
-
Show us: When met with loud virtue proclaiming, ask for examples and watch for word-salad, silence, deflection, or indignation.
We know that most wrongdoing isn’t driven by opportunity; it’s a mix of pressure and rationalisation. In the case of the virtue-advertisers, my sense is that questions to understand how they rationalise the world offer the most promise for ‘early virtue bollocks diagnosis’.
Next time someone tells you, unprompted, how ethical they are, don’t ask whether it’s true. Ask why they felt the need to say it at all.