Valuable Investments: Ethical Values in Business

Lauren is in her late forties, and is the president and CEO of an Internet startup company. Lauren argues that strong values and business success are intimately related, though she acknowledges that this understanding may not be the norm in the business world. During a previous job with a different company, Lauren made the choice to move a company meeting from Colorado to California “at a time when Colorado had passed legislation that was very anti-gay and lesbian,” even though they had already put deposits down on hotels in Colorado. She upset at least one other employee with her support of the gay and lesbian population, and this employee quit the company as a result. The company certainly lost money because of Lauren’s decision, and she may well have lost customers as well.

Lauren is the President and CEO of an Internet start-up company that provides web-based hiring systems, workforce data management, and other services to help corporate clients build competitive workforces. She is in her late forties, and has over a decade of experience in the software and Internet industry. 

Lauren’s most basic values come from her parents: her mother encouraged her to contribute to the community, and her father believed strongly in integrity. Lauren grew up in an upper-middle-class New Jersey suburb. Concerned that her daughters were becoming “spoiled rich kids” in a “lily white” neighborhood, Lauren’s mother enrolled her and her sister at a camp in inner-city Newark. At the camp, Lauren and her sister became friends with people who were from backgrounds very different from their own. This experience taught her to value diversity, and she considers that summer a turning point in her childhood. 

Lauren grew up in a “people-intense environment.“ She shared a home with her parents, five siblings, and her grandmother. Her grandmother often took on the role of mother when her own mother was working, taught her how to cook, and was very vocal in her beliefs and opinions. Lauren claims she often hears her grandmother’s advice still ringing in her ears. She describes it as a very social house: friends were always visiting, sometimes a friend in trouble would come and live with them, and her family regularly took in foster children. 

Religion has played an important role in Lauren’s life. Her parents made sure that she had a strong church upbringing, and she is doing the same, in turn, for her own children. In times of difficulty, the church has given her strength, and she finds that going to church clears her mind and gives her a sense of greater purpose.

She describes herself as goal driven, even in her youth. When asked what personal qualities may have contributed to her success, she cites openness, honesty, and directness. Although she is always willing to go to bat for her employees and her customers, she finds it more difficult to stand up for herself. She was raised to believe that “good things will happen if you do good things.” Calling attention to herself if those good things don’t happen quickly enough is difficult for her. 

When asked if she finds that her beliefs conflict with the dominant values in business, she says no. However, Lauren emphasizes that much depends on how individuals define their terms. What “integrity” means to one person may be very different from what it means to another, for example. Lauren believes that her understanding—that values directly impact business results— is not the norm in the business world. She argues that strong values and business success are intimately related. 

She measures her success by checking in with clients on a regular basis. Just as the company surveys clients, she surveys her employees. In other words, she seeks feedback regularly. Lauren believes that values have a direct impact on a business’s results, and she has a deep sense of loyalty to her employees. These principles keep her going when she faces difficult choices. She tells a story about a difficult choice she made when she was in a previous position: 

“I made a very unpopular decision once that I would never change in retrospect at all. It wasn’t unpopular with everybody, but it was with a certain … it was around the issue of diversity. It was that we were going to have a company meeting for the group that worked in my organization. [The meeting was planned for] Colorado, and it was at a time when Colorado had passed legislation that was very anti-gay and lesbian. And somebody told me that in one of the chat rooms, one of the intranet, internal company chat rooms that was for the gay and lesbian alliance, that there was scuttlebutt going on in there about how could we as a company support Colorado in such a visible way by having this huge meeting there and flying everybody in and spending all of our money there. So I was completely oblivious to it, I didn’t know anything about the chat room, I didn’t know anything about the legislation. And anyway, net result was I changed the location of the meeting. And it cost us. I mean we’d put deposits down on hotels and stuff and we moved the meeting out to California. And it was an unpopular, it wasn’t an unpopular decision with the people that I worked for, I was actually very, very supported by the CEO on this, which was a really nice thing because I didn’t know if I would be or not. But there were elements of the employee population that truly believed that any gay or lesbian lifestyle was evil. And there was a guy that quit the company over it and he was a really good employee but had very, very strong fundamentalist Christian beliefs and said, ‘I don’t want to work in a company that supports the equality of gays and lesbians and says that this is a normal lifestyle.’ So those were, that was a decision that I had to put money behind, and had to take a stand on; it was a little risky at the time.”

Although backed in her decision by many at this company, Lauren clearly upset at least one individual by her support of the gay and lesbian population. Retention of customers is a key element in this business. It costs a great deal to win a customer: they must be up on the latest technologies and must provide an excellent service. 

These things are only possible with employee retention, and Lauren believes that they are a direct result of the values outlined above. She may well have lost customers as a result of this action. The company certainly lost money because of her decision. If the company loses money, the employees themselves may lose out as a result. 

What do you think of Lauren’s decision? She mentions that measures success by “checking in with employees” regularly. How do you measure success in your work, and does this help to guide your decision-making?