My personal reflections on Decision Dilemmas at the Work Place

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Today I will share my personal reflections and experiences with 'Dilemmas in Decision Making' i.e. when personal ethical and moral considerations clash with organizational guidelines while making important decisions at the work place. What triggered me to write this piece was a recent article in the Economist magazine. A little historic context. On October 12, 2002, two bomb blasts took place in Kuta, Indonesia within a minute of one another. The first one was inside the Paddy's Pub and the other at the opposite Sari Club (the latter being a car bomb detonated by a suicide bomber). In total, the two blasts killed more than 200 people and more than half of the victims were from Australia and Britain.  After several years of investigation by the authorities, three of the Indonesian suspects were convicted for these crimes. And almost six years later  - between November 8 and 9, 2008 these three Indonesians were executed by the firing squad. The then Australian Prime Minister John Howard indicated publicly that 'he will not oppose the death penalty when it involves terrorists'. “Some people say that I should be thumping the table and saying, ‘Don’t execute,” John Howard, the then prime minister, said at the time. “I’m not going to do that because I do respect the judicial processes of Indonesia.”

Fast forward a few years. Now we are in 2006. Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, the co-ringleaders of the infamous 'Bali Nine' (the group arrested for trying to smuggle 8.3Kg of heroin from Indonesia to Australia) were convicted and were potentially facing execution by the Indonesian firing squad. The same John Howard, the Australian PM was quoted "The police are there to protect us from the ravages of drugs and I just hope that every young Australian who might in their wildest imagination think that they can get away with this will take a lesson from this" ..... "I feel desperately sorry for the parents of these people. I do. All of us as parents will feel that way, but the warnings have been there for decades".... "We are against the death penalty..... We will make, in an appropriate way, at the appropriate time, representations."

When I read this story for the first time, the question that immediately popped into my mind was "How could the leader of a Western nation have two different standards on exactly the same subject. Support the death penalty when foreign nationals were involved BUT oppose the same when his own countrymen were involved".

I tell the story above to exemplify one of the biggest challenges we face at our work places. Decision Dilemmas. Dilemmas brought forth to the surface due to a clash between Personal, Moral and Ethical considerations on one hand and Corporate, financial and regulatory considerations on the other. For example - should one let go of thousands of employees to save the company from bankruptcy (or sometime just to shore up the share price) ?. Should I recall a drug from the market when data suggests the product could pose a safety risk to a minority with heart ailments while providing increased life expectancy to millions ? 

 

Frameworks are always good tools to help us with decision making. In order to put some structure to some of the decisions I have made in my career, I decided to do some digging around for a suitable framework on ethical decision making. One of the pieces of literature that caught my eye was a piece titled "Thinking Ethically: A Framework for Moral Decision Making" Developed by Manuel Velasquez, Claire Andre, Thomas Shanks, S.J., and Michael J. Meyer.  According to the authors, Ethical Problem Solving  requires the decision maker to answer some critical questions when trying to resolve a moral issue:                                

1. What benefits and what harms will each course of action produce, and which alternative will lead to the best overall consequences?                                        
2. What moral rights do the affected parties have, and which course of action best respects those rights?                              
3. Which course of action treats everyone the same, except where there is a morally justifiable reason not to, and does not show favoritism or discrimination?                              
4. Which course of action advances the common good?   

Let me share the real life story of Benjamin (the name and identity of the actual person has been masked to protect the privacy of the individual, but some of the readers may recognize who I am talking about). Benjamin - 24, had recently joined the company (I was Marketing Director of the company at that time) as a marketing intern out of the business school at the University of Amsterdam. In a short time, he had become one of the popular characters around the Dutch office. After a three month project in Shopper and Customer marketing, Benjamin decided that his career path was in Brand Marketing and decided to apply for a permanent position as Assistant Brand Manager. While he was being interviewed for a role in my marketing team, his previous boss (from Shopper and Customer Marketing) decided to leave the company. This meant Benjamin had no line manager during the time he was being interviewed for his permanent position.  During this period, Benjamin was hospitalized and after multiple tests, he was diagnosed with having  an advanced stage of cancer. Benjamin (and of course, his family/friends) and the entire organization  received this horrendous piece of news with sorrow and shock.

 

When this case was presented to me, I was faced with one of the most difficult decision dilemmas of my career. Why? Benjamin did not have the personal or family financial resources to cover for his entire medical treatment and moreover he could get some of that cover  for his treatment only if he was a permanent employee with our company. However the company had not officially provided Benjamin an official appointment letter and hence had the opportunity to protect itself from providing for significant amount of medical costs (albeit via the medical insurance provider). Personally I didn't have to  manage Benjamin's situation since I was officially not his line manager.

 

With the benefit of hindsight, I believe the company and I used the framework above. And importantly, we tried to answer question No:1 above - of all the alternatives, which one would provide the best overall set of benefits over the downsides. Thinking back, we believe the alternate scenarios were:

a. Do not hire Benjamin as full time employee: Pros - Company is protected from any costs, we are legally in the right. Cons - Benjamin struggles to cover for his medical costs and not supporting Benjamin leads to poor morale among existing employees who would view our company as a 'heartless monster'.

 

b. Hire Benjamin as full time employee: Pros: Benjamin gets the much needed medical insurance at company cost and employees are happy. Cons - Company exposed to potentially unlimited medical expenses not covered by insurance plus no assurance that Benjamin would come back to work despite all these costs and time - meaning unused employee costs on payroll. 

 

In balance we took a hybrid decision. i.e. extend Benjamin's temporary contract for about six months to ensure that he got the medical cover for a longer period while minimizing the financial exposure of the company plus the flexibility  for the companyto review the decision six months down the line.

 

Other examples of Decision Dilemmas during my career were:

- Asking a female expatriate employee that recently got married (and had got her partner to give up his fantastic job in his home country and move in with her at her foreign location) to leave the company due to poor performance (action taken: changed the decision to spend even extra hours on coaching and performance feedback till family was better settled) .

 

- exiting large numbers of long time employees from the company to meet annual profit commitments (action taken: proceeded to exit the agreed number of employees based on fair and legally binding methods).

 

In summary, I would like to conclude by taking a position on the two situations described under the Indonesian capital punishment scenario. In general, I am against the idea of capital punishment. I am also of the opinion that no human being has the right to take away the life of another whatever maybe the case and importantly there is large body of evidence out there that capital punishment doesn't necessarily lead to dramatic reduction in crime. Therefore, in my opinion Prime Minister John Howard should have taken a similar stand of condemning capital punishment in both cases and more importantly using the power of his highest office and his ability to influence the Indonesian Government to move both decisions from capital punishment to something like life time imprisonment. Easily said than done, but ethically right for everyone involved.

 

I look forward to receiving your feedback on this topic. Thank you for taking time to read my little blog.