Simon Sinek explains "ethical fading": a social phenomenon where groups make unethical decisions while believing those decisions align with their own ethics. He gives extreme examples (e.g., pharmaceutical companies raising essential drug prices by hundreds or thousands of percent) and describes mechanisms (short-term pressure, rationalizations like "everyone's doing it," and a slippery-slope of small compromises). He argues the primary remedy is strong ethical leadership and culture that catches and shuts down unethical ideas early, plus trusting teams and reduced pressure to meet short-term targets.
Chapters
So ethical fading is a really amazing and fascinating social phenomenon. Basically what it is is when a group of people make unethical decisions believing that they are still consistent with their own ethical framework. In other words, they don't think they've done anything unethical. Right. Extreme examples of this would be things like a pharmaceutical company raising the price of an essential.
Drug 500%, 800%, 1,000%, 5,000%. And though it may not be illegal, it's highly, highly unethical. And yet they don't think they've done anything wrong.
That's an extreme example. But we see ethical fading happen all across companies all the time, where we do things that we know are good for us, where we might lie to our, our customers or our clients, for example, or we might lie to each other to get ourselves ahead. You know, this is all, these are all demonstrations of ethical fading.
The way in which ethical fading happens, as you said, one of the ways is just a ridiculous, unbalanced amount of pressure on, on short term, which forces us to think about ourselves or only think about that short term goal. And then we can rationalize. Well, everyone's doing it. It's what the company wants me to do. How else am I going to get ahead? I have to put food on the table. It's the system. It's, you know, like we can rationalize the behavior. Also the slippery slope. We do something a little bit, once it worked, we do it a little more, it works. We do it a little more, it works. And before you know it, you have full blown ethical fading. And so the way you combat ethical fading, and like I said, I gave you an extreme example of the pharmaceuticals. But we see low level ethical fading across a lot of companies, unfortunately. And the way you combat it is one good leadership where that kind of thing is not tolerated. So for example, it's totally normal for people to have unethical ideas, but the question is, when do they get caught? So in an unhealthy company, that unethical idea is implemented until social pressure or the law intervenes or there's a scandal. And then we say, oh, we're terribly sorry, we're a very good company. After you got caught in a properly ethical company, somebody may raise the idea in a meeting and everybody in the meeting will go, that's funny, but we would never do that here. That's not us. That's a little bit unethical. And it gets shut down immediately.
And again, that's good leadership because it's the leaders who are promoting people who are ethical, who are highlighting ethical behavior and acting in a way that sets the tone, and they're not putting undue pressure on people to break the rules in order to make the numbers. You know, a lot of leaders, unfortunately, when confronted with toxicity or unethical behavior, they'll shrug their shoulders and say, I know, but the numbers are so good, and they allow it to happen. And so one of the primary ways in which you beat ethical fading, quite frankly, is good leadership. But the others are just cause, you know, trusting teams. All of these things contribute to operating in a highly ethical way.
