One of my latest podcast conversations was with Robert Chesnut, the Chief Ethics Officer at Airbnb. He wrote a book called Intentional Integrity: How Smart Companies Can Lead an Ethical Revolution. An attorney by trade, Robert advises setting clear ethical boundaries for the security of your business, both for shareholders and stakeholders.
I was really excited to hear what inspired Robert to write this book about ethics, and after reading it, I found that there is so much more to the ethics conversation than I had originally anticipated. Let’s get straight to it.
Is Integrity a Part of Your Culture?
Robert began, “I’m a big fan of learning from other people’s mistakes. So I started thinking about what we could do at Airbnb to learn from other companies and intentionally drive integrity into the culture of our company.” Robert went on to say that, upon reflecting on typical company ethics practices, he was embarrassed when he realized that most aren’t intentional about them. “Oftentimes, companies will find a code of ethics, their law firm will send them a code of ethics, or they’ll download one off the internet from another company, and they’ll put their logo on it and email it out to the whole company. The employees then click a box to say they’ve read it, and that’s it,” Robert explained.
You might never hear about ethics beyond that quick read, or you might see employers tack up a compliance poster in a break room. You may even receive some third party video about sexual harassment. It struck Robert that, if we really cared about integrity, we’d move beyond compliance. He explained that “those are things that you have to do to technically comply with the law, but they’re not things that you do to really send a message to your employees. That integrity matters.”
The Stakeholders and Why They Matter
In his book, Robert talked about stepping into a leadership void and charting a proactive ethical course that is good for their full slate of stakeholders. I asked Robert to define terms for me.
“Traditionally,” Robert explained, “companies have had one stakeholder, and that stakeholder is the investor. In business, we always hear ‘do whatever’s right for the shareholder.’ So if it’s good for the shareholder, it’s good for the company. In other words, if it brings up the stock price today or this week or this quarter, let’s do it — even though it may not be the right decision for the long term. And that type of short term thinking has ruled the day.” Robert is sure that this thinking has led to a number of ethical issues. Therefore, his new approach recognizes that there’s more than just one stakeholder.
Employees are stakeholders. Your customers are stakeholders. And the community that you operate in is also a stakeholder. So what does it mean? It means that there is a group of people that you need to be thinking about when you’re making important decisions. Robert asked, “What’s the impact of that decision going to be on your stakeholders? It’s important to consider how you’re taking care of each of the stakeholders and balancing the interest. That’s what a modern 21st-century company needs to do.” He explained that if you’re only thinking about shareholders and you’re doing things that aren’t good for your employees, not good for your customers, and not good for the communities that you serve, ultimately, that’s going to be bad for your business.”
“Employees are stakeholders. Your customers are stakeholders. And the community that you operate in is also a stakeholder. So what does it mean? It means that there is a group of people that you need to be thinking about when you’re making important decisions.”
A Call To Think About It
Are these ethics decisions the same across every company? According to Rob, not at all. Every company is unique. And instead of thinking of his book as “Rob’s rules for every company,” Robert describes his book as more of a “call to think about it.” It’s a call to go on the journey to think about what you want your culture to be.
Different companies can take different approaches to problems and still be ethical. One example that I noted in Robert’s book was the varied ways that a company can deal with gifts from third party vendors. It’s not unusual to have business partners or vendors give you gifts at the holidays or offer to take you to a ball game or send you a bottle of wine. When it comes to these gifts, Walmart takes a strict approach. “I’ve been in meetings with folks from Walmart, where if you offer them a bottle of water, they pull a dollar out of their pocket. And why do they do that? It’s because Walmart, as a company, is so focused on providing the lowest prices every day for their customers. That’s what they’re about. And they believe that if their employees are accepting gifts, the cost of those gifts will ultimately be reflected in the cost of goods and then be passed on to customers. So Walmart believes strongly that gifts to employees are inconsistent with their core mission.”
“However, Airbnb is in the hospitality business. So when they deal with business partners and vendors, Airbnb employees are allowed to accept small gifts that are consistent with something that you would ordinarily give a business partner. And we set a dollar limit of $200. If it’s under $200, we think that’s consistent with hospitality, and that works for Airbnb.” However, a given company might have a rule on this that works for their particular culture. The important part is being specific about it, recognizing that it’s an issue, and then coming up with something that works for your business.
Of course, Robert added, any solid ethical proposition “needs to include some element of how you plan to treat each other inside the company — treating others with respect and dignity. A code of ethics is a shared work between leaders and employees where you attempt to define what it means to treat people well.”
Silence: The Enemy of Integrity
When I read Robert’s book, one quote that really stood out to me had to do with how silence creates ambiguity about what is right and what is wrong. It goes on to say, “That makes everyone in the organization a little uncertain, a little nervous, and regrettably, a minority of people will exploit that uncomfortable silence to rationalize selfish behavior.” I thought that this was such a great point. When you don’t talk about things, it does leave things open to interpretation. I asked Robert, “How do we avoid these interpretation issues when it comes to integrity?”
“What’s most interesting about this is, as human beings, we are all susceptible to interpreting rules in our own favor. It’s apparently normal human nature.” In order to avoid this issue, Robert said that you have to restate your code of ethics frequently, and you must communicate it clearly in a very human way. When it comes to communicating things like ethics, “you have to make your point multiple times and in multiple ways to make sure that people really understand it. Just saying it once or leaving it open to interpretation just doesn’t work.”
“You have to make your point multiple times and in multiple ways to make sure that people really understand it. Just saying it once or leaving it open to interpretation just doesn’t work.”
There’s More to Learn
There was so much more to my conversation with Robert that I’d love to share with you. If you would like to learn more, like some common ethical pitfalls to avoid, give the podcast a listen or pick up a copy of Robert’s book. If you want advice on how to chart a course where you can come up with the best ethical decisions for your particular company and your particular culture, then this book is a must-have.
Robert’s book, Intentional Integrity: How Smart Companies Can Lead an Ethical Revolution, is available at Amazon and will be available in all the independent bookstores as well. If you want information about the book or other ways to think about integrity, you can go to Robert’s website, www.intentionalintegrity.com. As always, thanks for reading, and I hope this podcast article gives you more tools to help you transform your workplace.