Your ethos should work for you — it should engage you and make you feel healthy, with a sense of pride and meaningful self-direction. It provides the groundwork for traits like integrity, authentic collaboration, and friendship — the stuff that makes society work and life worth living.

Trusting relationships begin with a flood of evaluations, some of which are ethical: does this new person’s decision-making align with my needs and values? In business, will their services resolve my problem? Is there enough common ground to profitably collaborate? Is it worth the effort? And, most importantly, do I trust them? This is why deals so often get closed over drinks or golf.

We then adapt as required, seeking to thrive in relation. When we get it right then a true confluence of interests can make magic, even when compromises arise. The quality of those initial, ethical assessments is a critical success factor, as with due diligence generally.

That said, an ethos can also be harmful and still make sense to its practitioner. They may get pleasure, for example, from dominating and controlling people.

Such behavior is often deceptive and self-interested, and breaks trust, like if you catch your boss lying to you about a promotion. When that happens, moral compromises escalate, cognitive dissonance arises, and you automatically seek a way out. Here are a few of the options:

Ick.

Most of us get a queasy feeling when we must lie for the company (at least at first). Do we suck it up and close the deal? Do we approach management with recommendations for change? What if they don’t care, or worse? Do we come clean with the prospective client? Or is lying so much a part of doing business generally that it has become normal and expected?

Depressing, right?

As a counterpoint to despair, this, site and its contributors offer a hopeful perspective: that most people are trying to do the right thing most of the time, and might benefit from discussions, tools, and resources in a collegial space — a workout space for learning, exploring, and building usable skills.

How it works:

As individuals and groups we live, operate, our ethos grows over time, based on subsumed decisions we have made about our line(s) of work, our professional style, and our sense of right and wrong. To a large degee, those earlier decisions and actions now determine the options that are currently available. And today’s decisions, in turn, influence future health, the value of brands, and the resilience of society.

On a personal level, good decisions over time lead to an effective ethos that simplifies life and reduces stress. Furthermore, ethical frameworks reduce decision fatigue, impulsiveness, conflict, and paralysis. They also increase future liberty, the way good credit accumulates to help buy a house or a car.

Naturally, working with others whose ethics align with yours is easier. Furthermore, group ethics determine organizational behavior. Whether those rules, policies, and statements are written or just “understood,” ongoing membership requires upholding the organization’s operating policies, including its ethics.

Furthermore, explicit statements of ethics can provide the foundation for organizational policy, leading to consistency, adoption and enforcement. But if those ethical principles are muddled, then chaos ensues, for example, in contradictory or unenforceable HR policies. Once we codify and adopt policies, whether ethical or not, they “set it and forget it.”

Personal morals help to determine ethos. Often arising in religious or community settings, these beliefs guide individual behavior. For example, do you prefer working at big companies for big money, non-profits that pay almost nothing, or startups with all their frenetic energy? Which companies have similar values to yours? Where can you align and work collaboratively with others?

To succeed, ethics and policy must also operate within broader social constraints. For instance, political corruption is unethical in most moral systems. Peaceful societies cannot be built or sustained based on its leaders lying cheating and stealing, no matter how self-justified they may feel. The moral value of civilation usually outweighs the ethics of corrupt actors.

In this context, team effectiveness arises from ethics, morals, lawfulness, and communication.  Sustainable coporate values focus primarily on human stakeholders. Thus, alignment, value, and resilience increase upon a declararion of principles.

Acknlowedging that ethical frameworks can be put to ill uses — a destructive person or corporation still has a “way of operating” — it’s still hard to keep customers if your motives are corrupt. Even though it’s illegal to steal, immoral to swindle, against policy to x, unjust to y, executing these activities must still follow an ethic, even if it’s misguided, harmful, and ultimately doomed to failure, like in the movie Goodfellas.

Successful systems of ethics respect the law, accommodate competing moral frameworks, and advance collaboration.

When a crisis arises, our initial response is habitual – we do what we usually do. If that approach fails (and we can remain calm), we start formal decision-making – gathering and analyzing what we know, striving to learn more, and seeking alternative solutions before making a decision.

Informed deliberation then leads to better outcomes. Such well-made decisions not only solve current problems but also set precedents that we can repeat effortlessly.

These principles apply to individuals, organizations, cultures, and governments. For instance, production lines incorporate industrial design decisions, and managers then learn how to accommodate inevitable design shortcomings. Government procedures, once established, can either facilitate or hinder its citizens. Thus, the quality of life depends on thousands, if not millions, of accumulated decisions over time.

Here you will find tools, discussions, and resources to help you articulate your subsumed ethics and, if you are so inclined, challenge yourself to build on them.