What’s the ethical climate of your newsroom?
Let me put it this way: when leaders talk about ethics, does your staff hear more about what you won’t stand for, or what you stand for?
Leadership, as usual, plays a critical role in determining whether yours is a culture of compliance or integrity.
Those terms are used by specialists in business ethics. They’ve become part of my vocabulary because of a grad course I’m taking in organizational ethics. It has been fascinating to view ethical standards and practices outside my normal newsroom turf and to review research on what works and what hurts. It turns out that in newsrooms — and in any workplace — leaders set the tone with their talk, their actions, and the systems they put in place. Some leaders push compliance, others integrity.
Which of these cultures sounds more like yours?
- Compliance:
We have rules and procedures here, and we expect people to follow them. We’ve committed many rules to writing. We make the consequences of improper behavior clear and we follow through with sanctions. Our lawyers play a large role in helping us keep on the straight and narrow. Our leaders expect employees to know and respect the standards and practices. When they talk with us about conduct, it is to remind us of the importance of those rules in preserving the future of our organization. We don’t want to get sued, or lose our license, or end up in trouble with H.R., so we focus on complying with the rules.
- Integrity:
We have values here, and we talk about them a lot. We have a code of ethics and written policies and procedures, but they are framed in terms of what we believe in around here. We encourage people to ask questions, and suggest changes if they feel things aren’t as good as they could be. We take misconduct seriously and sanction accordingly. We consult with our lawyers, but we all recognize that something can be legal but not necessarily ethical, and we want to emphasize the ethical. Our leaders set the tone with their words and actions. They expect us to respect each other, and make decisions with our values at the fore.
A compliance approach focuses on keeping out of trouble, and at the same time, can produce a pretty chilly climate. Harvard Business School professor Lynn Sharp Paine wrote in the Harvard Business Review: “Management may talk of mutual trust when unveiling a compliance plan, but employees often receive the message as a warning from on high. Indeed, the more skeptical among them may view compliance programs as nothing more than liability insurance for senior management.”
An integrity culture warms up the workplace and produces additional benefits. According to Paine, ethics isn’t just a set of rules, but becomes a force for good decision-making at all levels. She notes that integrity approaches tap into “powerful human impulses for moral thought and action.”
Paine was writing about employees in general, but I suspect she’s slam-dunk accurate about journalists. Since we include ethical components in all of our Poynter seminars, I see evidence of those powerful human impulses time and again. I believe most journalists view ethical decision-making as the heart of their vocation. They want to discuss, dissect, and debate case studies. Yet not all of them feel they can do so comfortably in their own newsrooms.
- Some feel that their organizations haven’t yet reached the compliance stage, that they too often make snap decisions based on competitive pressures or the gut feelings of the manager on duty.
- Some long for codes of conduct to provide them some guidance, but are told the company lawyers discourage written guidelines as a defense against lawsuits. (If we don’t have codes, we can’t be accused in court of violating our own standards.)
- Some feel their bosses may say the right things about values and integrity but make all the judgment calls themselves, and don’t involve staff in the process.
An integrity strategy that truly involves employees in ethics discussions provides benefits to the organization: employee commitment to the organization, a sense that personal integrity is valued at work, and a willingness to bring even bad news to bosses when necessary. That’s what a 1999 study reported in Business Ethics Quarterly determined. While the study was not conducted in a newsroom, the results resonate with our Poynter experience in teaching ethics in journalism organizations.
Think about it. Your newsroom is filled with people who are faced with ethical decisions every day. How have you prepared them? Do they:
- Dread such moments?
- Rely on rules alone?
- Check with the lawyers, and assume if it is legal, it is ethical?
- Wait silently while you make the judgment call?
- Never ask questions, just march in step?
If so, you have a chilly climate of compliance.
Or, do they:
- Already know what your organization stands for?
- Know to check guidelines and consider their applicability?
- Check with lawyers, and include ethics in the discussion?
- Talk about values all the time, not just in crisis mode?
- Ask good questions, seek your input, and then make the kind of ethical decisions that make you — and them — proud?
And one final question, do they think of YOU, their leader, as a walking, talking example of all those behaviors? If so, congratulations. The forecast is clear: you enjoy a climate of integrity.
[ How would you describe the ethical climate of your newsroom? Compliance or Integrity? ]