What I Learned from Reading Thousands of Student Ethics Papers

Students tell me about bad leadership and its consequences for organizational culture and employee motivation

Each year, I teach several sections of the required NYU Stern course on “professional responsibility”. The course requires students to write a paper exploring a real life ethical dilemma they have participated in, or directly observed. At this point, I’ve graded thousands of such papers, each of which is confidential and meant for my eyes only. Most are about bad leadership (there sure is a lot of it about) and the wider consequences for organizational culture and employee motivation. Some are jaw dropping and headline-worthy, providing fascinating front row detail of famous corporate scandals. Still, I see the same themes crop up over and over again.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

Posters on the wall encouraging whistleblowing. See something, say something, right? But, retaliation for actually speaking up is real, and pervasive. It is also usually subtle, with the individual in question getting sidelined or demoted, rather than experiencing direct bullying.

I also read interesting papers on whistleblowing processes being abused and manipulated to help an ambitious individual get ahead. There’s a huge difference between firms that investigate thoroughly and independently, and those who make knee-jerk decisions depending on who has the most power.

When speaking up efforts are successful, it is usually because a senior leader was willing to listen, intervene, and exert influence to hold peers accountable. If that person doesn’t exist, you are often better off getting out of there as soon as possible.

Moving up in the hierarchy seems to reduce self awareness, though I am not clear if this is a function of the type of people that get promoted, or the effect of power itself. It is a surprisingly rare person that can gain enormous authority and maintain empathy and understanding for the wider workforce. If you can, you will be far more inspirational than you might imagine.

If you don’t have power, the best thing you can do is to back up a peer who raises concerns. As the Asch experiment shows, two voices are more than twice as powerful as one.

Bad leaders focus on plausible deniability. Just expense this dinner! Just sign this compliance form! Just approve the accounts—we’ll figure it out later! Don’t do it, people. Never be the patsy or the scapegoat. Don’t sign the thing. If you face this kind of pressure, stall for time while you figure out what to do.

If you treat your team well and appreciate loyalty, they will be happy to overlook other questionable stuff (eg drunkenness, minor conflicts of interest).

Social reality is a social construction. But, character matters. A lot.

Deeply sociopathic, toxic leaders are much less common than those who are well-meaning, but willfully blind to inconvenient facts, and who use commercial pressure to pressure their teams and avoid accountability.

My students are much less willing than older generations to call the whistleblowing line and hope for the best. They are far more likely to coordinate with their peers on Slack and in real life, and to build a collective case against a manipulative and unfair leader. This is often very effective, and seems set to continue and expand.

Sexual harassment is still common. Drunken texts are still a thing, too. I get the impression that HR teams have got better at dealing with harassment and ensuring accountability. I sometimes read papers from young men who intervene to help and defend their colleagues, even when they are not directly involved or affected, and it’s lovely to see. I also read a surprising number of papers about female perpetrators.

Startups tend to suffer from hubris, favoritism, and prioritizing speed over quality. Highly motivated, close-knit teams gradually fall apart because founders are reluctant to put ethical systems in place. Women are hired into strategic roles, and then implicitly pressured to take on the (perceived) office housework of managing people and team dynamics, in the absence of HR and compliance teams.

Multinationals suffer from ethical drift, and yawning gaps between aspirational values and actual employee behavior. Your boss and team is far more important than the leadership of the company itself. In general, your boss is the most important factor in early career success, far more than the role or remit.

Consultants, advisors and accountants suffer from huge tensions over incentives. Partners are rewarded on sales and profitability, junior team members on utilization. The result is senior people pressuring junior people to under book their time so the project profit margin looks better. Many young employees put up with this out of fear.

These firms often act as if the client is always right, which often drives ethical drift. But, consultancies also frequently prioritize their own survival over providing value to the client. If you are ever a client, it is a good idea to be skeptical and demanding.

Professional services firms also have the most visibility on generational shifts, as they hire in cohorts. These firms all seem highly serious about recruiting and retaining women and minorities, and are still relatively open to working from home. Not all, but I see progress here.

Human Resources leaders are either brilliant and empathetic, or clueless and biddable. This seems quite binary.

Students want diversity and inclusion, but DEI programs are often ineffective. I’ll never forget the student who turned up for his first day at a financial services firm, only to be greeted sneeringly as the “diversity intern”. I’ve also read a lot of papers about students being pressured to act as the inclusive hiring lead in their spare time, to the detriment of focusing on their core role. Employee Resource Groups can increase inclusion, but often create office housework and increase internal tensions.

Lots of women and minorities would rather work on Wall Street, where at least you know where you are, than in a more overtly inclusive firm, where there tends to be a lot more hypocrisy and mixed messaging.

I’ve read about people seeing colleagues on Facebook in MAGA hats and feeling unsafe. I’ve also read about leaders pressuring their underlings to donate to social justice causes, generating resentment.

Financial services and healthcare firms tend to have watertight compliance, which can be very effective. Gray area ethical dilemmas are harder, and the biggest source of moral injury. I see the most moral injury in healthcare, by far. Also the most professionalism and dedication.

Mimetic isomorphism (where firms in the same sector copy each other) is a thing. This is especially true in Big Tech.

If anything, NGOs seem to have worse leadership than for-profit firms. Arrogance and poor succession planning seem to be the norm. There’s often a huge gap between the organization’s societal aspirations and how it treats its people. Hard work and low pay dominate, well into middle management. There’s also often a thick layer of people at the top who aren’t going anywhere, blocking advancement (and oxygen) for everyone else.

Boards seem ethically ineffective in general, but non-profit boards especially so.

People will work harder and for less money in a mission-driven firm. This often leads to exploitation, which might be deliberate or unconscious on the part of the leadership team.

Sales teams tend to sell stuff without checking whether operations teams can deliver. This causes immense stress for those tasked with preparing the service or shipping the product. If the sales team has all the soft power, this gets messy very fast.

Kicking down and kissing up is still a remarkably successful career strategy, though hiding the evidence is harder than it used to be.

Nothing influences the trajectory of a student’s career more than an ethical near miss. Students who exhibited poor judgment or failed to speak up often have their view of ethical leadership transformed, for the better.

A company that can really describe and drive societal value is one that can recruit the most brilliant and dedicated employees out there. There is no clear relationship between this and (performative) sustainability programs.

Thinking about the longer term and bigger picture is rare enough to be a superpower.