Middle Way Management
Practice

What sort of person am I?

The question you ask yourself before the decision, in place of asking about rules or consequences.

A single question you put to yourself, deliberately, whenever you are confronted with a situation requiring an ethical or moral decision: “What sort of person am I?” It is the question virtue ethics asks in place of the usual openers about rules and outcomes, and it belongs before the decision rather than after it.

How it goes

  1. Take some time out of your busy day, before any particular decision is in front of you, and begin the process of defining yourself within a virtue ethics context. Then the next time you are confronted with an opportunity to exercise your morality, you will be crystal clear on what to do and why you are doing it.
  2. When a situation requiring an ethical or moral decision arrives, pause before you decide.
  3. Do not open with “What are the rules for proceeding?” or “What are the consequences of my actions?”
  4. Ask yourself instead, “What sort of person am I?”
  5. Ask it in every business relationship and interaction, not only with the people you manage: customers, suppliers, competitors, government regulators, and others.

A caution

He is candid about why the pause carries the weight here. His own workload has prevented him from making decisions on the basis of what sort of person he is; in the rush to make a decision, any decision, he compromised his ethics and inevitably regretted it. He also anticipates that defining yourself in advance will sound like defining the obvious, and answers from personal experience that it is not. What he never does is tell you what to do with the answer. Virtue ethics, as he puts it, is a way of being rather than a way of doing, and the character of the person precedes and informs the decision. In a later essay on shared vision he does say that in Middle Way Management “compassion tempered by accountability rules the day,” but he never presents it in the virtue ethics essay as a test to run your answer against.

In the rush to make a decision, any decision, I have compromised my ethics and inevitably regretted the decision. Now, I am able to pause and ask the question before making any ethical decision.

— Middle Way Management and Virtue Ethics