Avoiding ethical lapses and other ‘gateway drugs’

However, tacking on a few credits of ethics instruction to continuing education programs won’t get it done. There shouldn’t  be separate ethics courses. It’s too easy to inadvertently reinforce ethics as something in which to aspire in the classroom, but forgotten once the advisor or agent returns to the daily routine of mountains of files and never-ending meetings and phone calls.

By integrating ethical instruction into every facet of continuing education, it helps avoid what social psychologists Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrusel call our “moral blind spots,” which are biases that distract us from ethical consequences.

Moral blind spots can be illustrated with a simple experiment. Two tasks must be split between yourself and another person. One task is fun and pays a nominal amount of money; the other is tedious and pays nothing. Most experiment subjects decided to flip a coin to arrive at the division of labor. However, when the flip was performed in private, about 90 percent of subjects came back claiming that their coin landed in their favor and assigned them the fun task, rather than the 50 percent that one would expect from a coin toss. Additionally, when performed in plain view of the other person, many subjects claimed it was a practice flip if the outcome was not in their favor. In other words, they sought to temporarily adjust their sense of fairness to obtain a favorable outcome.[2]

Might similar blind spots occur in business situations involving advisors and agents?

We hope the question is rhetorical. It’s especially important because advisors and agents are, by the nature of their profession, client-focused. Yet as Kelly points out, it’s the client themselves that most often put their agents and advisors in difficult ethical positions. They’ll ask the advisor to sign off on an application because they might not feel like making the drive to the office for something so menial. Or they might ask the advisor to “bend the truth” a little. Not wishing to risk the client relationship, the advisor therefore agrees.

Ethics aren’t simply a business philosophy, operational code or moral high-horse on which to preen. Their integration into every fiber of the advisor and agent’s education and business also results in unmatched customer service, more business and a better overall quality of life for all involved.

For quick and enlightening exercise to determine just how ethical you are, as opposed to how ethical you think you are, answer a few of the questions in this article from Harvard Business Review.