A CEO’s Guide to Stress-Testing Your Values
Stress-test your values now to ensure they’ll hold up if and when things go sideways.
By Caroline Barlerin
Is your organization ethical? What about your management team? Would you do the right thing in the face of a tough decision?
If you answered “yes” to all of these questions, have you ever been forced to actually stress-test those values?
It’s easy to confidently say in good times that you and your team have strong ethics. “If one of our products in the market were faulty, we’d recall it. No doubt.” But what if there’s uncertainty around its faultiness, and a recall would cost you millions? What if the company is already in serious trouble, and that loss could mean the end of the corporation, where all of your employees could lose their jobs?
“As a CEO, you need to know where your line is *before* something happens.”
The next question in this hypothetical might be, “Well, if we don’t recall it, and it proves to indeed be faulty, would consumers be injured?” Maybe potential injury vs. mere inconvenience for your consumers is where you draw the line.
This article isn’t about judging where you draw your line. But as a CEO, you need to know where your line is before something happens. A crisis can muddle your thinking as anxiety sets in. If you have a pre-existing framework with which to tackle an issue, decisions will be easier to make, and you can also have more faith in those decisions.
Here are some ways to stress-test your values now to ensure they’ll hold up if and when things go sideways:
1. Set Your Line: As simple as it may seem, this first step deserves some thought. You’re probably hard-lined against breaking the law, right? OK, that’s a start. Next, you have to decide where legality meets your aspirations for your company. To borrow from the earlier example, you might vow to never do anything to hurt your customers, or anything that could even possibly hurt them. Maybe you draw the line at anything you’d be embarrassed to see printed on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Discern your line, and be sure about it. Write it down.
2. Draft Important Questions: These questions will be the first true stress test of any decision you’ll consider. Look back at your aspirations for your company and where you know you’ll draw an ethical line, then make a list of interrogations to maintain those standards. The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics gives some examples I like:
Does this option meet our standards for excellence?
Is this option a worthwhile risk?
Am I acting like an owner when I take this option?
3. Draw Out Any Exceptions: So far, you have a good foundation for ethical decision-making, but let’s be honest: There are situations during times of stress when you’d be tempted to say, “This is an exception, because…” What are your buttons, your weaknesses? What might cause you to waver from your carefully set values? If you put those exceptions under a microscope and determine that they’re still valid, then more power to you. Either way, pressure-test them properly, before you’re stressed.
4. Assess Your Mission Statement: A study in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes showed that the wording in corporate mission statements can impact employee behavior. Companies with statements that prioritize urgent action (using words such as “dare,” “momentum,” and “act fast”) were found more likely to have worker EEOC complaints filed against them. Whether you subscribe to those results or not, you can’t deny that there is power in how a company defines itself. Use this power to promote careful decision-making and choosing to do what’s right. It could take you from being an ethical CEO to being an ethical CEO in an ethical organization.
What would you add to this list?
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