When Respect and Ethics Collide, What's a Well Intentioned Leader to Do?

In Five Minds for the Future, author Howard Gardner discusses the difference between respect and ethics. He states that respect is the process of understanding where other people are coming from and giving them the benefit of the doubt while ethics is fulfilling your roles (e.g., employee, parent, child, citizen, etc.) responsibly and from a place of integrity.

These two "minds" may sound synonymous or at the very least complementary; often times they are not. Respect calls for us to put ourselves in the position of another to understand why that person has taken a particular action. An ethical mind demands that we question choices and uses of power if we do not believe they are for the greater good.

How do leaders embody both minds simultaneously?

I returned to Gardner's book this week to support me in making some choices about how to proceed in a situation where I'm finding these two minds coming into conflict. And after some nice musing, I've concluded you can't and you shouldn't fuse the two. You have to layer one on top of the other.

First, you employ a nice dose of respect. You understand the context in which the person(s) made the choice. What information did they have at their disposal? What results did they seek to achieve? How did they draw on best practices or past experiences? Then you evaluate the short, and depending on how much time has transpired, long term impact of those choices. Finally, you take action based on what your head, heart, and gut tell you.

And this is where a lot of us emerging leaders feel uncomfortable. We know what we think and feel, yet we lack the experience at making an effective intervention. As a result, we come across as idealistic and self-righteous or mousy and paralyzed by fear.

And here is the really juicy opportunity to go back to Gardner. For us babes who want to save the world and find it hard to quell the desire not to go all Erin Brockovich, it's worth cycling back to respect to identify how to share our voices so that the intended listener can truly take in our feedback and hopefully take appropriate action from it. When we do this, we usually recognize the importance of approaching someone discretely, speaking from our perspective, providing a variety of evidence, and asking questions to learn more about where someone is coming from.

For developing leaders who suffer from the butterflies, Gardner can also be used. One of Gardner's other minds, the creating mind, gets developed by teasing out new ideas and proposing new practices and answers. To be a leader with Gardner's minds for the future (and I'd assert for the present- for the future is created moment-to-moment through each real time choice that we make), I call leaders who find themselves sniffing out injustice to speak out against it. Use the fear as a platform for developing creativity... for finding voice... for individually and collectively creating space for what is right to take shape.

To create this new neurological pathway takes discipline (which just so happens to be another one of Gardner's minds, fancy that). And, conveniently enough, all of this work is ultimately about synthesis, putting a range of ideas or practices together into a coherent framework for thinking and action, Gardner's final mind.