Work poses special challenges and constraints, whether we’re faced with lying, deceiving, stealing, or harming. We all have bosses, to whom we feel we should defer. We are compelled to focus on numbers, which divert attention from people. We rely on teams to succeed, which put us at the mercy of peer pressure and groupthink. But our actions still depend on the ethics of the same person inside.

We often do not feel free to exercise our personal ethics. In fact, our professions or organizations may call on us to follow ethical rules that diverge from our own. We may even feel pressure to violate our personal code and rationalize our behavior by citing “the way things work” in business or government or politics or civic organizations.

That’s why one of life’s weightiest decisions is what to do for a living. What trade or profession do we enter? What organization do we work in? If we are to end each day without compromising, we want to join an organization that is compatible with our principles.

The Right Profession

• Are we comfortable with the temptations we would face in this job?
• How do the people in the profession behave when faced with temptation?
• Do enough degrees of separation stand between us and objectionable actions?
• Do we want to be like the people at the top of this profession?

Given that leaders set the tone, are they ethical role models? For an illustration of the thinking needed, let’s look in detail at just the first question: are we comfortable with the temptations in the profession? Before we choose to be a lawyer, for example, we can ask whether we are ready for one of the more onerous aspects of the profession: keeping secrets. The legal profession requires an extreme level of secrecy. Spouses, whose lives are very much affected by what the attorneys do, are not privy to their work.

Keeping some secrets may also be ethically uncomfortable. Imagine an in-house attorney reporting to a CEO, who, against the attorney’s advice, engages in legally risky behavior. In so doing, the CEO’s actions may violate the personal ethics of the attorney and put not only the CEO, but the company and the attorney, in legal jeopardy. What does the dissenting attorney do?

The situation puts the attorney in a bind. While he or she may take great personal offense at the CEOs actions, and may even be at great personal risk, the attorney is duty-bound to be a zealous advocate for and achieve the best results under the law for the client. An attorney is a fiduciary. This means the attorney is duty-bound to act in the client’s best interest even if it is not in the attorney’s best interest. This positive ethic goes far beyond the negative ethic of doctors to simply “do no harm.” In most jurisdictions, blowing the whistle on bad behavior is out of the question. An attorney could not turn in the CEO even if the actions contemplated involved death or injury to another.

Other professions pose similarly tough ethical temptations. Consider a physician whose male patient tests positive for the AIDS virus. The physician can urge the patient to tell his wife but cannot say anything himself, even if the wife is one of his patients. Suppose the physician sees the wife at the local country club. What does he say? We can debate what is right or wrong, but we can also choose to anticipate such ethical binds and, if uncomfortable, forgo joining this particular profession.

The Right Affiliation

In the same way that trades and professions pose ethical challenges, so does every organization, and even every industry. To be ethically content in our work life, we need to vet an organization before we join. If we do not, sooner or later, we will wish we did.

While we can’t really know the ethics until we join, we can watch for tip-offs to the ethical standards of a company. One red flag is the questionable behavior of people. As in a profession, the tone at the top shapes the culture we will work in day in and day out. Are the top executives or managers role models? Will spending time with them bring out the best in us? If we are not comfortable with the choices made by our boss or our boss’s boss, we may find it fruitful to ask more questions about the organization.

Another red flag is the organization’s ethical code, especially if it puts emphasis on obeying the law. The law is a minimum standard, not necessarily a desirable one. (In fact, obeying the law may be a prudential practice rather than an ethical one.) Companies focused solely on legal compliance, as opposed to answering to an independent ethical benchmark, are more likely to compromise ethics for profit. This is especially true when they are following laws that free peoples consider unethical, like the censorship laws in China.

A third potential red flag is conflicts in everyday business practices. A company may strictly enforce a prohibition on the release of any confidential information (but what if your customer is about to buy an obsolete product, and you would prefer to be honest?); or prohibit speaking ill of competitors (but what if the competitor produces a dangerous product?); or allow gifts of certain specified amounts (but what if the company allows gifts of amounts that cross our line for bribery?). We have to decide for ourselves whether these issues conflict with our ethics, and if so, we must avoid these organizations.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press. Excerpted from Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in World and Life. Copyright © 2008 Ronald A. Howard and Clinton D. Korver; All Rights Reserved.