Navigating the Ethical Landscape: Lessons from Corporate Insider, Alison Taylor

Jackie - 00:00:10:

Welcome to Season 10 of Diversity: Beyond the Checkbox, proudly presented by The Diversity Movement and part of the Living Corporate Network. I'm your host, Jackie Ferguson, author, business leader, and human rights advocate. In this podcast, we're diving deep into the stories of trailblazers, game changers, and glass ceiling breakers who share insights and professional success and personal development. Thank you for being part of this amazing community. Enjoy the show. You're listening to Diversity: Beyond the Checkbox. My guest today is Alison Taylor, Clinical Associate Professor at NYU Stern School of Business and Executive Director of Ethical Systems and the author of the book, Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World. And we need that. Alison, thank you for being here today.

Alison - 00:01:07:

Thank you so much for having me, Jackie. Such a pleasure to be here.

Jackie - 00:01:11:

I'm so excited about this conversation because it's always timely. It's always important, but especially in today's environment, it's something that we need to really think about. Let's start, Alison, if you'll tell us a little bit about your journey to becoming what you are today with NYU, the clinical associate professor of Stern School of Business and the executive director of Ethical Systems. Can you walk us through that journey a little bit?

Alison - 00:01:44:

Sure. So I love this first question because I really like to say up front, I'm now a professor at NYU, but I'm not an academic. I have not spent decades reading books and making studies. I've spent decades working in the corporate sector. So worked in corporate investigations, so helping ethics and compliance teams, questions of fraud, money laundering, corruption, how you operate in high-risk countries. I spent time thinking about leadership and culture and what it takes to be a good leader. And then I spent time in what's often called sustainability and ESG. So really the book is about that journey, about all our different and very confusing ideas about the role of business in society. And that's also why I teach. So I came to teaching late in life. I'm from a family of teachers and always thought it would be a terrible idea and I wanted to be out in the real world. And I've discovered that I really love it, but I'm very, very clear that the reason I'm interested in two, interesting two students is because of my professional experience and because I'm out there in the real world. So that is what's most important to me and how I like to contribute. I'm not interested in abstract ideas. I'm interested in helping real leaders run real organizations.

Jackie - 00:03:04:

Alison, that's amazing. Tell us a little bit about what you're hearing in the classroom from your students about what's happening in society and how they're processing that.

Alison - 00:03:15:

Oh, what a great question. So I think the first thing I hear is that young people want to be proud of where they work. They want to be work somewhere that is aligned with their values. They want to feel that they're having a positive and not a negative impact on society. They feel pretty frustrated about politics. So they're looking for their jobs very often, I think, to fulfill some of those ambitions and frustrations that maybe they would have turned to their personal life before. I hear a lot about anxiety and depression and concern about mental health. And then of direct relevance to this podcast, what I very often hear from students is, before I take a job somewhere, I go and look at the senior leadership team. And I look at whether that senior leadership team looks like me and my friends. And frankly, if it is a bunch of old white men, I don't want to work there. So maybe that's one of the most revealing and interesting things is we've got all this noise at the moment about the anti-DEI backlash and companies dialing back on these commitments. What I hear from my students is that there's nothing more important when they're deciding where to work.

Jackie - 00:04:27:

Alison, thank you for sharing that. You know, that's so important for leaders to recognize because so many leaders came into the workplace as Gen Xers, where you got in wherever you were hired and you didn't really research the company. They interviewed you. Now these, you know, prospective young employees are interviewing the company as much as they are being interviewed.

Alison - 00:04:54:

100%. And I'd certainly, I mean, I'm Gen X myself. So when I started work, I was like, yeah, you sit at your desk, people yell at you, you do all the work, maybe sometimes some point you get promoted, and then you get to yell at other people. That's a terrible view of leadership, and a terrible view of work. But that was honestly what I thought it was all about. And I don't hear that in the classroom anymore. And I think that's a good thing.

Jackie - 00:05:18:

Absolutely. And then what leaders have to process today, Alison, is that's not the paradigm. It's shifted. And what the expectation is, is there's a more connection, more transparency, more alignment with values, as you mentioned. And that's so important. So important. Alison, in your book, Higher Ground, you discuss strategies for navigating ethical challenges in business. What inspired you to write the book? And what are some of the key takeaways that you hope that leaders will gain from it?

Alison - 00:05:52:

Sure. So I decided to write the book because I felt that it's never been so difficult to run a business. And I feel like on questions of what it means to be a good or ethical business, we've just got really confused. There's a lot of jargon. There's a lot of weird terminology. We seem to be arguing about this topic all the time. We seem to be really polarized, and then when I try to look at useful answers to these questions, if you're an executive or if you're a young MBA thinking about your career and thinking about your own leadership, I found that there was a lot of work that was very jargon heavy, is in one particular field is about how to run a good compliance program or how to be a sustainable business or how to have a good culture. But there wasn't anyone trying to bring all these ideas together and say, what does it take to be a good business in the 2020s? And even weirder, I found we don't even have the terms, the words, the way to describe this. I mean, I thought it was amazing. I did all these interviews for my book. And I interviewed all these ethics experts and they'd come on the line and say, I try and avoid using that word at all costs. So I feel like as a society, we've become super confused and there is no need for this confusion. So I tried foolishly to try and clear it up.

Jackie - 00:07:12:

I appreciate that, Alison. It's so important to align, right? Back to the first question about the values alignment for employees. They want to make sure that they're working for ethical companies. And what does that mean? Right? Because a lot of organizational leaders don't talk about that. So why do you think there's such a pushback? Hesitance about talking about ethics in the workplace?

Alison - 00:07:43:

Well, I mean, I think there are good questions, right, about the degree to which we can expect our personal values and corporate values to align. Corporations need to make a profit. They've got a certain role in society. It's not necessarily true that if we're frustrated about politics, we should turn to corporations to solve our problems. So there's lots of questions about the role of corporations, how we govern them, what they're for, what their purpose is. And then, I mean, maybe a more interesting way to think about this is we've had this habit for many decades of talking about corporations as if they're somehow separate from society. So this is just a profit-maximizing black box. There's nothing we can do about this. And so that's kind of never been true. But all our metaphors and the way we think about corporations are super, super odd. So we talk even about kind of internal problems and external problems. But in a more transparent world, our cultures are on full view as ever before. We talk about what corporations should be doing about questions like diversity and inclusion. But we need to acknowledge that if racism and sexism is a problem in society, it's going to be a problem inside our corporations. We can't treat corporations as separate from these kind of wider societal problems. At the same time, we can't necessarily solve all those problems out there in society inside corporations. So I think there's a real question about how far corporate leaders should go to solve an intractable problem like sexism or racism.

Jackie - 00:09:22:

Absolutely. Alison, in today's polarized world, how can leaders effectively promote and sustain a culture of ethics and integrity within their organizations?

Alison - 00:09:36:

Yeah, so I think there's an element, right, of training people and teaching people to use their voices and have disagreements in a more respectful way. If I was running a company today, I would say, if you want to be senior in this company, I need you to have a track record of working successfully with someone that you personally dislike and has very, very different values from you. I think we all need to get a lot more comfortable with respectful disagreement. It feels like on social media out there, everyone's just kind of yelling at each other and we will never reach agreement. And I think that's not necessary and it's not true. So we need to have better and more honest conversations. I also think we need to reimagine our organizations and really put people at the center and put treating human beings with dignity and respect at the center. So I very often get this reaction when I talk about corporate ethics and people will be kind of like, well, how can we think about this when nobody even agrees? And then I kind of say, well, let's take a couple of recent examples, Jackie. Like there's been a recent settlement where Hertz, the car company, was caught having its customers arrested and accusing them of stealing cars that in fact just lost in car lots somewhere. Or we could think about a recent story about Amazon warehouse workers being forced to work next to a dead body all day. And in both those examples, I would say, like, it's not really that partisan. It's not really, you know, it's not really this kind of divisive, difficult values disagreement here. I don't think anybody, no matter what their politics, no matter what their values, thinks that a corporation should be behaving that way. So I think we've also kind of got confused. We've said, oh, all of this is political and all of this is controversial and all of this is too difficult to get right. And maybe, it's not that difficult to say corporations should treat human beings with the respect and dignity that they deserve. That might sound simple. It might sound simplistic. But I actually think we could get a long way if we just had that principle in mind.

Jackie - 00:11:47:

Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, such good thoughts there, Alison, and really good advice as to how we need to think about that in the workplace and how it applies and breaking it down to the base level of agreement, which no one should disagree with that, is so important and then begin to build from there. That's fantastic. DEI initiatives are crucial for fostering an inclusive workplace, yet they're facing headwinds. How should leaders approach the implementation of these initiatives to minimize resistance and maximize effectiveness?

Alison - 00:12:27:

Oh, I love this question. So the point of a diverse organization, right, is that you and me have different life experiences and different perspectives. Will make better decisions if we may bring everybody's life experiences and perspectives and upbringing and culture and perceptions and view of the world and work experience to the table. If we can get all of that on the table, if people can feel safe to express what they really think, organizations will make better decisions and we will have better outcomes. That is the point of diversity. The point of diversity is not to treat this like Noah's Ark and say, if we've got a certain amount of this type of person in the C-suite, all our problems will be solved. It is just as important to have a range of political opinions than it is to have a certain type of social identity group at the table. It is not necessarily true if you just put a single woman in the boardroom that you're suddenly going to have better decisions if that woman is not listened to. If she doesn't have the credibility, if she doesn't have the allies, she is not going to be able to make a difference on her own. And so I think we need to understand that the whole goal, the whole imperative here is to have leadership teams that reflect wider society and to consider decisions from all angles because no leader, no matter how personally impressive, ought to be making judgment calls in isolation. That's the point. I find it completely amazing that we seem to have managed to reframe this about a conversation of who does and doesn't deserve power, who does and doesn't deserve to be promoted, who does and doesn't deserve to have authority. We ought to be fair and we ought to be meritocratic and we ought to, in good faith, provide every employee the ability to be a leader and have their opinion heard and have their viewpoint at the table because that is how we move forward in this fraught world. I find it incredible the way that the conversation has been reframed and treated in this polarized way and treated as about being something it isn't about, because what I believe it is about is recognizing every human being has a different, distinct experience, is a complex person, cannot be reduced to you're a woman, you're black, you're white. People are more complicated than that. We need to see people's complexities and stop making assumptions that because you're this type of thing, you're going to have this opinion. And we need to just bring the full range of people's complexity to the table. That's what my students want. And that's what I think we should all want.

Jackie - 00:15:10:

I love that. That's so well said. Thank you for that, Alison. You know, I think you're right. We have a tendency in our society to reframe, right, and create division based on how we're using words and what the perception is of what that means instead of just understanding that, what it is, is a way to increase business, make better business because you're making sure that you're providing an environment for your employees to do their best work, to collaborate better, to innovate, to share their ideas, and that creates better business. And that's it, right? So I think that's-

Alison - 00:15:58:

Yeah, we've managed to make a very, you know, not simple to do this, not simple to get this right, but the imperative is simple. And so I've been very depressed to see the discourse and the way that the debate is now being treated. And as well, Jackie, you know, I hear very often these kind of stories in the classroom that really horrify me and feel like we've really lost the point. I'll give you an example. I had a student last summer who turned up to do an internship at a very prestigious financial services organization. He was an Asian man. And he turned up and on his first day, someone comes up to him and says, oh, are you the diversity intern? And it made him feel crushed. It made him feel that he had not been brought there because of his huge abilities, but was being treated in this tick box way. And it really depressed him and it really made him anxious. So that is a prime example of how we should not be treating these initiatives.

Jackie - 00:16:56:

Absolutely. Alison, let's get into, recent affirmative action legislation and that being repealed. What are your thoughts on the role of affirmative action in today's society?

Alison - 00:17:11:

I mean, I think we need to recognize that there are historic inequities that need to be corrected. I also think we need to recognize that we cannot reduce anybody to a single social identity category. Affirmative action is a very, very, very divisive topic. It might have unintended consequences. But I would feel much better about the affirmative action conversation if we were also having a conversation about legacy admissions and people that are being, admissions, I'm sorry, people that are being let into college on the basis just that their parents went there, which is a way to perpetuate privilege. So if we're going to have a conversation about the merits of affirmative action, let's also have a conversation about the merits of legacy admissions and the degree to which we are providing some categories of young people with, with unearned privilege that they should not necessarily have access to.

Jackie - 00:18:04:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Alison, how can businesses better integrate ethical considerations into their strategic decision-making processes?

Alison - 00:18:16:

Well, I mean, this is, I'm going to give you a very similar comment for what I think the imperative is about diversity. We need to treat ethical decision making as a collective issue. We need to give employees principles and we need to encourage employees to apply their own judgment, ask questions when they see something is wrong, to have a role in shaping the values and commitments of the organization, to have the psychological safety and the channels to speak up and query things, and to have an honest and respectful debate about what our values should be and what our role in society should be. So that's very different from the idea of ethics as we set a bunch of rules and we tell you you're going to get fired if you break those rules. And we encourage you to switch your cognitive processing off at the door and just pay attention to those rules. So I think we've treated ethics as a matter of rules, as a matter of the law, that is no longer fit for purpose in the 2020s. And again, what we need is to have everybody at the table so we can make better decisions.

Jackie - 00:19:24:

Absolutely. And then Alison, what role does transparency play in both trust within a company and between the company and its customers? This is one that leaders have a hard time with. How much do I share? When do I share? And did I share too much? What are they going to do with the information? But transparency is important. So tell us a little about your thoughts around transparency within a company as far as the organization to employees and the organization to customers.

Alison - 00:19:57:

Sure. So, I mean, the first thing to say up front is that transparency has really increased. You know, back in the 20th century, it used to be you could control what people saw and felt and learned about your company. The media was much more concentrated. Now, of course, anyone with a mobile phone can share whatever they like. We can think about all those employees filming videos of themselves being laid off and then putting them on TikTok. So, culture is on full display as never before. So transparency, you know, certainly can cause a lot of progress. But I think leaders feel ambivalent about it. I think they feel it's dangerous. And very often what we're calling transparency is really just another form of PR. And then certainly, you know, so I think there's a tendency to say we're being transparent and really kind of put out there, look at all the wonderful things we're doing. Look at our DEI initiatives. Look at the things we've invested in. Look at all the women we put in the C-suite. And it's harder to say, here's what we're struggling with. Here are the, you know, here are the problems with the fact that we can't retain those women we just put in the C-suite. Here are the problems with the pipeline. Here are the challenges we're having. Here are the areas that we disagree about. And so I think actually there's this kind of idea that if you actually tell the truth about the problems you're really discussing, that no one will trust you. But what I hear in the classroom is people are so exhausted with the PR, exhausted with the over-promising, exhausted with all the sort of, look at all the wonderful things we're doing, glossy reports full of happy looking children, that it's actually refreshing if a company leader says, I don't know, we're in uncharted territory. Let's experiment and explore this question. Let's get all the questions to the table. I actually think that the paradox is that what you're told about being transparent and what you're told is needed to build trust is very often the opposite of what I think young people really want to see, which is a lot more authenticity, which might include also saying, I don't know, or saying, we need to experiment and figure this out. I was having this conversation with someone last week, and we were both like, when was the last time we heard a corporate leader say, I don't know? And the answer is it's really, really rare. But the reality is business is changing so rapidly. The world is changing so rapidly. We can't be certain about anything that really, if a lot more leaders would start by saying, I don't know, but let's find out, I think we'd be in a better place.

Jackie - 00:22:30:

Alison, all of those points are so impactful. And one of the things that I was thinking as you were sharing that is when a leader is transparent and vulnerable, it encourages their team to be transparent and vulnerable. And that sparks innovation. Because when you're testing out a new idea or trying a new process, you don't have it figured out. You don't know if it's going to work. You don't know if that's the right way to do it. But the ability to say, I'm not sure, I don't know, this didn't work. Is important in innovation, but what matters is they need to feel comfortable in doing that. And the leader being able to do that is what makes that employee feel comfortable. And again, that's how innovation sparks.

Alison - 00:23:21:

Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I couldn't agree more. And as you were talking, I thought about this story. So Hubert Joly, who took over the Best Buy in 2012. And, you know, 2012, not a good year to take over the Best Buy. They're getting killed by Amazon. Right? And so Hubert Joly takes over as CEO. And one of the first thing he does is goes to talk to people on the shop floor who are hearing from customers. And what he discovers is what people are doing is going to Best Buy to look at all the computers and do all the research and test everything out and then going home and buying the computer on Amazon. But what he also discovers is all of us now don't know how all our computer systems fit together. We want help aligning all our remote controls. We want help getting everything wired up. We want help getting this set up. So he discovers that there's this need for more support and more coaching and more help for customers that Amazon can't provide. And he revitalizes his business. But if he had not gone and talked to the people actually dealing with customers actually at the front line on the shop floor, if he'd sat there and been, I'm the CEO and I'll just cut costs and I'll figure this all out, he'd have killed Best Buy. But what he's actually done is transform that business model and has a much better culture and much more inclusion from listening. I'm not thinking he knew all the answers. So that is the kind of lesson that we need out there much, much, much more broadly.

Jackie - 00:24:49:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Alison, the term ethical leadership is one that's widely discussed. In your view, what are the core attributes of an ethical leader?

Alison - 00:25:02:

So I think part of it, right, is thinking about yourself as building coalitions. To be a leader, you have to have followers. You have to bring people along with you. You have to be able to express in an authentic way, we're all in this together. You have to be vulnerable and open yourself up to those ideas. This isn't about barking orders from the top anymore. We're in an intangible world where people disagree, where you need to have social skills. You need to provide influence. You need to be clear that you are subject to the same rules and conditions and expectations you're expecting your team to fulfill. So I think it's moved from this kind of, we design incentives and we set structures and we bark orders from the top and we sit back and let the money roll in to being, can you bring a group of people with diverse worldviews along with you? Can you provide inspiration? Can you provide voice? Can you provide an outlet? Can you listen? I mean, it's simple, but can you listen? So I think one of the things that we're experiencing today is this kind of change of the leadership paradigm from this era of certainty. I know how to get things done. I'm just going to direct you in a certain way to how do I get the whole collective to move with me?

Jackie - 00:26:24:

Absolutely. Alison, can you share examples of organizations that have successfully navigated ethical pitfalls and what practices contributed to that success?

Alison - 00:26:38:

Yeah, so there are a few examples I'll give you here. An example I really like is Chobani, the yogurt company. And so I like them. They're a private company, so they have life a little bit easier in some ways. But they've given employees an ownership stake. And they have managed to hire and retain refugees. They've hired refugees into Idaho and upstate New York, so really, really Republican parts of the country. And they've managed to make sure that those refugees become part of that local community and are accepted and valued in the Chobani workforce. So that, I think, all comes from having a culture where you treat human beings with dignity and respect. And you say, you are a part of this organization and you have a voice and we value you. So I think that's a really good example in our polarized world of how you can get things right. I also really like the example of Allstate Insurance, which runs this program called The Better Arguments Project. Where they treat or they teach employees to debate and discuss divisive ideas in a respectful way. And that is a set of skills we all need to get much better at. So I love that they've invested in that. And I love that they're paying attention to how we can have corporate America play a role in reducing our divisions rather than increasing them.

Jackie - 00:28:03:

Love that. Thank you for sharing that, Alison. What future trends do you foresee in the realm of business ethics and corporate responsibility?

Alison - 00:28:13:

Gosh, so I think we're only just getting going on the rise of employee voice and employee activism. The young people in my classrooms, many of whom have been protesting on campus over the past few weeks, want to have a voice in shaping the decisions that their organizations make. So I think that is going to be a huge issue. I think there are going to be ongoing pressures on corporations to tackle issues like inclusion and climate change and inequality. I think there are going to be more pressures on how corporations get involved in political questions and more calls for transparency and restraint on political spending. And then I think ultimately we're going to keep seeing culture as a real source of strategic advantage. So if you get this right, enormous benefits. If you get this wrong, nobody is going to want to work for you in 10 years. Sorry.

Jackie - 00:29:06:

That's right. And that's so important. I love that you said that, Alison, because you have to make sure that your business is sustainable. And if you can't recruit those incoming professionals that care about the place that they work, aligning with their values, that care about diversity within the entire organization. They care about the ability to collaborate and having a leader that they can respect. And mirror in some ways when we talked about transparency and vulnerability, then you're going to be missing out and you're not going to have the fresh ideas. You're not going to have those high performers that want to come work for you because they have their choice and they're going to choose to look for organizations that align for the greater good and for their own values.

Alison - 00:29:59:

100%. 100% agree.

Jackie - 00:30:01:

Love that. For our listeners who are emerging leaders, Alison, what advice would you give them on taking the high road in business and ensuring that they lead with integrity as they progress through their careers?

Alison - 00:30:16:

I mean, I think what I would say is get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Get comfortable with the fact that people are going to be looking at you about how you behave, how you make decisions, how you treat people, what you wear, where you go to lunch, whether you can tolerate disagreement, whether you're prepared to say you don't know. Everyone is going to be looking at you to figure out how to behave. So get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Get comfortable with ideas around inclusion and sustainability and vulnerability and all those areas. And understand that if you do that, you can drive enormous influence first in your team and then in entire organizations.

Jackie - 00:31:02:

Great advice. Alison, what's the message that you'd like to leave our listeners with today?

Alison - 00:31:09:

I would say focus on problems that you can actually solve and treat human beings with dignity and respect. And before trying promising to make the world better, focus on making your business and the people within it better and happier.

Jackie - 00:31:26:

Great advice, great advice. How can listeners learn more about you, Alison, and connect with you?

Alison - 00:31:34:

I'm very easy to find on LinkedIn. If you look up Alison Taylor NYU, one L in the Alison. And then my website is alisontaylor.co. Again, one L in the Alison. Not spelt the American way.

Jackie - 00:31:46:

Amazing. And then finally, Alison, what's next for you?

Alison - 00:31:52:

Oh, my gosh. That's a really good question. I'm about to do a seven week European book tour. I'm going to almost every city in Europe giving live talks and then I will be back and I'm going to take the summer to think about my next steps and what I what my next project is going to be before I get back in the classroom in August.

Jackie - 00:32:13:

So exciting. Alison, thank you so much for spending some time with us today. And I just love your approach is very direct and no nonsense, but it makes us think about how we're thinking day to day and gives us those abilities to shift how we're thinking about things. So thank you so much for being here.

Alison - 00:32:36:

Thank you so much for having me, Jackie, and for all that you did.

Jackie - 00:32:43:

Thanks for listening to this episode of Diversity: Beyond the Checkbox. If you loved this show, please take a moment to share it with a friend, leave a rating and review, and subscribe so you'll be reminded when new episodes are released. Become part of our community on Instagram, LinkedIn, X, YouTube, and TikTok, or subscribe to our newsletter at beyondthecheckbox.com. This show is part of the Living Corporate Network, sponsored by The Diversity Movement, and edited and produced by Earfluence. I'm Jackie Ferguson. Take care of yourself and each other.