Author: Pavlos, Jacky and Roger

Within the MoralDNA™ Profile we question participants about their moral values and our data reveals how different occupations assess their Courage, both at work and within the home.

“It is curious that physical courage should be common in the world and moral courage so rare”. Mark Twain

Courage refers to doing consistently what we feel is right despite personal risk. It can often mean facing the fear of the unknown, conflicts of interests and the counter-intuitiveness that tough decision making often brings. A lack of courage in our lives may result in us holding back from standing up for our beliefs: we may give up too easily or we may become fearful. Our psychological safety and risk-avoiding culture sometimes may prevent us from acting in a way which we feel is right. On the other hand, too much courage may push us stubbornly towards a distorted perception of the facts and lead us to make a wrong decision.

Ethical leaders like Ghandi and Mandela are regularly cited as showing moral courage, as are whistelblowers who, at professional and sometimes personal risk, uncover what they see as unethical practices. These individual acts have most recently been led by whistleblower Edward Snowden who felt the need to speak out about what he sees as the NSA’s ungovernable global appetite for eavesdropping because, as he states: “I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things” 1

So, how do our occupational groupings compare as displaying the most courage?

Law Enforcement tops the list. Other high scoring occupations include Banks, Telecoms, Politics and Oil & Gas. At the lower end, Arts and Crafts don’t appear to want to ‘rock the boat’, closely followed by Advertising and PR, then the Unemployed, News/Media, Retail, Education and Legal.

So what does it all mean? There are occupations where truth is fundamental, such as information about a toxic loan, a technical fault or a gas leak. If truth isn’t shared then usually a bigger disaster will be the result. In occupations where expectations for moral behaviour are high it is also worth noting how problematic it can be for people to be morally courageous, as it largely depends on the influence exerted over them in their daily professional activities. For the many creative professions at the bottom of our Courage list, it appears they find it highly challenging to face conflict on the one hand and come up with creative ideas and new solutions on the other.

Our moral courage is strongly linked to our integrity – the way in which we wish to live our lives, which shapes the kind of society we want to live in. When faced with a situation that we feel is wrong, our moral courage drives the action we are prepared to take to address it.

How courageous are you? What is stopping you from “doing the right thing”? Join over 80,000 people from over 200 countries around the world and find out more about your values and how you make decisions.

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1 ‘Edward Snowden: more conscientious objector than common thief’ The Guardian Editorial, Monday 10 June, 2013

Also by Professor Roger Steare

‘ethicability® How to decide what’s right and find the courage to do it’

The ethicability® framework integrates high-level principles, detailed rules and empathic stakeholder outcomes to help you decide what’s right – and then do it. And you’ll find the courage to act by showing clients, shareholders and regulators alike that you’ve made the right decisions fairly, with integrity and in good faith.

www.ethicability.org

Courage: Is It Time to Stand Up and Be Counted? was last modified: June 20th, 2017 by MoralDNA

At first it may appear a little surprising that ‘hope’ is included on the list of moral values tested within the MoralDNA™ Profile. After all, can someone’s judgment on how full or how empty their metaphorical glass is, impact upon their wider moral outlook and occupation?

The answer is, yes it can and does.

Hope is the moral value that enables us to believe in the good of humanity, even when we ourselves have been hurt. Hope enables us to be generous, kind and giving to others; through hope we believe that things will get better because of our or someone else’s efforts.

In our MoralDNA™ Profile, one of the factors we measure is Hope and the pattern that emerges by occupation is fascinating.

Topping the list of occupations with the most optimism is Religion, as it is arguable that part of their work is to support people during difficult times – offering them hope and consolation. The occupations that followed, also scoring highly on Hope include: Investment, Sales, Human Resources, Travel and Leisure, Marketing, Business Consultants, and Real Estate. All these occupations look to the future. Also high on hope were more down to earth occupations, including Automobiles & Parts, Telecoms and Oil & Gas.

Who then is languishing at the less optimistic end of the scale? Chemicals is at the bottom of the list followed by those in Politics and Central Government. Following on from our revealing test data in Trust, Care, and Honesty, these low scores on Hope are concerning for those whose aim it is to lead us. Hard on the heels of Politics we find Creative, Legal, Non-Government Organisations and New Media. Also at the lower end are Armed Services personnel and the Retired

Having a more positive outlook on life can help us better cope with difficulties and help us reach our goals. People without hope give up. Positive Psychology, a recent branch of psychology, highlights just how much hope matters; how “being drawn by the future rather than driven by the past” helps create fulfilled, creative and happier human beings – something every individual, community and occupation would surely benefit from.

How hopeful are you in the decisions you make? Join over 80,000 people from over 200 countries around the world and find out more about your values and how you make decisions.

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Hope: Who Has It? Who Needs It? was last modified: May 14th, 2013 by MoralDNA

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
Ernest Hemingway

What makes someone trustworthy? We trust people every day: the teacher, the policeman, the nurse; a host of acquaintances and complete strangers as we go about our lives and work. But who considers themselves most trustworthy?

If we believe that trust is earned before it is given, then a lot of our daily lives would become impossible. We wouldn’t get on a bus before seeing the driver execute a number of manoeuvres to show us his or her skill and therefore trustworthiness. So it’s fair to say that within reason, we trust first and ask questions later.

MoralDNA™ is a psychometric profile that has measured 10 moral values including Trust in a sample of over 80,000 people in 200 countries around the world and we have some surprising results from different occupations concerning their perceived trustworthiness.

Our data analysis reveals that those working in banks, real estate, utilities, insurance, engineering and industrial goods and services describe themselves as people that regard themselves as most trustworthy. High too on the list are the retired, oil and gas workers, accountants and those in consulting and business services. Whilst this list may surprise many, most of these occupations have to be trusted, because without them our society just wouldn’t function.

On the list of those who see themselves as less trustworthy we find those working in news media, arts and crafts, religion, charities and not-for-profits. Creative professionals also doubt themselves, together with politicians. So isn’t it interesting that those responsible for reporting and legislating on others’ behaviour consider themselves less trustworthy?

The gap between the most and least trustworthy is considerable. In our broad sample, news media thought themselves more trustworthy than only 35% of the sample, while bankers considered themselves more trustworthy than 58% of the sample.

To trust is to take a risk and make a judgement call. It also confers a responsibility on those we trust. When trust breaks down, chaos, fear and anger follow this breach in our basic human value system. To betray someone’s trust goes a lot deeper than we often like to admit. Major banks fail through the lack of it, media empires shudder, fortunes are lost and lives ruined.

Truly trusting others and being considered trustworthy in return is a cornerstone of personal integrity, not only in our workplaces but in our personal lives as well.

How trustworthy do you consider yourself to be? What stops you from “doing the right thing”? Join over 80,000 people from over 200 countries around the world and find out more about your values and how you make decisions.

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“Who should you trust? was last modified: April 26th, 2013 by MoralDNA

What happens when good people go to work? From the shop floor to the boardroom, the factory, office block, studio, café and classroom, through the MoralDNA™ Profile we’re discovering more about who bring brings the milk of human kindness to work in their packed lunch and who leaves their humanity, along with their coat, at the door.

Our Ethic of Care helps us distinguish “good” from “bad” actions. If other people are going to be inconvenienced or hurt by a decision we make, usually this decision is characterised as “the wrong thing to do”. Care calls into question our empathy – how good we are at putting ourselves in another’s shoes and acting accordingly.

History is littered with atrocities performed by people on others. In all these cases there was a mental process of dehumanizing those suffering by the perpetrators. From the mundane to the tragic; from not being bothered to get someone’s name right to mis-selling products, corporate negligence and acts of terrorism – all these factor within the Ethic of Care.

Since 2012, participants in the worldwide MoralDNA™ Profile have been telling us how they think they behave in their personal lives, as opposed to how they behave at work. In almost all cases people report a reduced Ethic of Care at work, either because they are told to behave in a certain way or because they have to put the interests of their employer over the needs of the customer. The only professions that reported a slight increase in the Ethic of Care at work were those that deal directly with caring for people: Homemaker, Religion and Healthcare.

So, what of the workers who display the greatest difference between the levels of care shown in their personal lives and those at work? From our research these include:

Advertising and PR
Banking
Investment
Law
Telecommunications

An advertising professional’s job is to make you believe you don’t simply want something you need it and, on balance, can’t concern him or herself too much as to whether you are making the right choice given your particular circumstances.

Banking and investment has certainly figured highly in the ‘I’m alright Jack pull up the ladder’ school of behaviour in recent years, memorably illustrated in Goldman Sach’s executive Greg Smith’s open letter of resignation where he noted: “Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as ‘muppets’ …” He also added that in sales meetings his colleagues were more concerned about how to make money out of people, than how to help them [1].

Lawyers certainly would appear to need to disassociate themselves from people in order to apply the rule of law, especially when required to defend a client who is guilty but has the right to representation.

Finally, why telecommunications workers seem to care so little about people is something that has us puzzled and we welcome your thoughts on what it is in their industry that is literally disconnecting them from the people around them.

The bottom of the list of those professions with the lowest Ethic of Care in their working lives is dominated by professions in which people are not the main ‘commodity’ and include: chemicals, oil and gas, technology, construction, automobiles, engineering, telecommunications, and industry. Two glaring exceptions to this rule are politics and the armed services.

As more and more people take the MoralDNA® Profile we continue to drill down in greater detail into how people live out their values at home and at work, how they make decisions and how this influences others.

Do you care more at home than at work? What stops you from “doing the right thing”? Join over 80,000 people from over 200 countries around the world and find out more about your values and how you make decisions.

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[1] ‘Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs’ by GREG SMITH Published: New York Times , March 14, 2012

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

When it Comes to Work, Who Cares? was last modified: April 17th, 2013 by MoralDNA

“Cretans, always liars”, so reckoned Epimenides of Crete in around the 6th century BC. Have the fibbing Cretans changed their habits or are we, as a society, still playing fast and loose with the truth today? In a recent survey by People Management, one third of their poll* of HR professionals believed that they were being told more lies than two or three years ago. Drawing on research from our worldwide MoralDNA™ Profile we’ve unearthed some interesting data about how people in different occupations view their capacity for honesty.

Our psychometric test asks the individual to respond truthfully about themselves and their values – including Honesty – measuring how important each value is to them and how they rank them against each of the other values and against the rankings of other people.

It’s interesting to discover that the police, utility, oil and gas workers, industrial goods and services, and bankers, all declared that in their opinion they rarely tell lies. High too on the scale were the retired and our data shows us that as people age they feel less inhibited by telling the truth.

At the other end of the scale we find those who think of themselves as less honest and these include: advertisers, PR, media, charity and not-for-profit workers. Perhaps not surprisingly politicians also appear to be quite comfortable telling lies.

Even though we find measurable differences between these groupings of occupations, the gap between them is not large; advertisers and PR employees were on average more honest than 33% of our sample, while the police were more honest than 57% of the sample. It is also interesting to see the groupings of occupations. At the “honest” end were professionals that deal with services delivered by multiple-layered organisations, such as law enforcement, utilities and banks, engineering and the military. At the other end our less than honest workers are employed in communication – in PR, media, politics, broadcasting and arts and crafts only a little way below marketing.

If people feel that they are not being honest within their daily working lives where does that leave them and their role in the wider society? Closer inspection may show us just how this lack of truthfulness affects their lives and those that they influence.

Our research continues to offer valuable and insightful data and now offers even greater depth, showing us the differences in people’s values at home and at work.

How honest do you think you are? Join over 80,000 people from over 200 countries around the world and find out more about your values and how you make decisions.

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*People Management Survey (sample 820 HR professionals polled) Read the full article

All in an Honest Day’s Work was last modified: April 4th, 2013 by MoralDNA