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He tells me, "I encourage leaders to think about this stuff when you're not in a crisis, because when the crisis inevitably comes … it's come for all of us within the last few years … you're better prepared to be able to deal with whatever difficult decision is in front of you." This involves thinking about where our morality comes from, understanding the ethical context in which we make decisions, and learning what exactly the expectations of our roles are in the eyes of all of our stakeholders. The answer, he tells me, is to evaluate why we make the decisions that we do in relation to the three sides of the triangle we talk about. I finished our chat by asking Pilner what would be the one piece of advice he would give to leaders on the subject of making difficult decisions. "The sign that they potentially made a pretty good set of choices is that roughly 80 percent of their employees returned after the furlough period – that’s a pretty amazing sign about the values that the company espouses, but also the way they live their values, that they understood their ethical context and they were able to reconcile that with their role responsibilities.”
#Difficult decisions how to
In making decisions on how to look after its workforce of more than 20,000 during the pandemic, its leadership underwent a complex process of understanding and evaluating the implications of all of the choices which had to be made. On the other hand, Pliner points to Ralph Lauren as a company that has done a good job of navigating difficult decisions. When the state introduced legislation recently banning the discussion of homosexual relationships in schools, the corporation’s refusal to condemn it – despite CEO Bob Chapek’s assurances that he personally disagreed with it – has led to it coming under fire from all parties – it’s customers, workers, and the state lawmakers. To illustrate this, he points to the example of Disney and Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Many leaders over the years have made the mistake of simply ignoring such problems, but this is likely to simply cause further difficulties because, as Pilner examines in his book, there are many situations where inaction or delay has the effect of becoming a choice in itself. And the bigger a business is, the more potential there is for it to run itself aground. But nevertheless, it does offer a structured approach to tackling decisions that might seem hopeless or where there is no good solution – or even a least bad one.Ĭompanies face these issues all of the time and can find themselves in very sticky situations if they don’t have a methodology for making such decisions. Pliner acknowledges that there are times where, following this framework, different leaders may come to different decisions, given the same set of circumstances. “As a leader, what’s my responsibility? Make sure my business can be productive, make sure my people are healthy and able to deliver on their responsibilities, and that they and their families and communities are taken care of … ultimately it's clear that in order to deliver that, I either have to give people a choice about whether or not to come into the space, or if they are going to come into the space, to create a set of measures that align to that ethical expectation of public health.” “When any two sides of the triangle come into conflict, look to the third side – in this case, your role, your responsibilities,” he says. Helpfully, this way of modeling decisions also gives us a straightforward method of finding a solution, he proposes simply look to the third side of the triangle. Pliner suggests that these “difficult decisions” arise when any two sides of a triangle – personal morality, ethical context, and the responsibility of our roles – come into conflict.
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Similarly, requiring staff to be vaccinated before returning to workplaces puts issues of bodily autonomy – what employees do with their own bodies – and public health in opposition. Two principles that both seem "right" – such as the need to keep a business running, so people's jobs are viable and the need to keep people out of harm's way – might be in direct opposition to each other. What makes these decisions tricky is that there is not a clearly correct course of action that can be determined by examining data.