Most leadership programmes say something about ethics, often as values, compliance or a code of conduct. Ethical leadership as a model asks a sharper question: not whether the leader is a good person, but whether the people they lead can see it, and take their cue from it.

What is ethical leadership?

Brown, Treviño and Harrison start from the idea that leaders should be a key source of ethical guidance for the people who work for them, and developed a way of measuring how far people see their own leader that way.

An earlier study of senior executives by Treviño, Hartman and Brown put it in two parts that are still the clearest way to teach it:

  • The moral person. What people see of the leader’s own conduct: how they behave, and how they make decisions.
  • The moral manager. What the leader does to shape others’ conduct: role modelling, how they use rewards and consequences, and how they talk about ethics and values.

Both have to be visible. The same study described the hypocritical leader, who talks about ethics but doesn’t act on it, and the ethically neutral leader, who may be a thoroughly ethical person but whose people don’t know it, because values have never been an explicit part of how they lead.

Why does trust matter to ethical leadership?

Because trust looks like the main route by which it works.

Trust is someone’s confidence in you with something they care about. In the original studies, ethical leadership was related to honesty, consideration, fair treatment and trust in the leader. A later meta-analysis by Ng and Feldman, covering 101 samples and nearly 30,000 people, found that followers’ trust in the leader explained the link between ethical leadership and both job attitudes and performance.

There is a practical finding too. Ethical leadership predicted people’s willingness to report problems to management. If you want people to bring problems to you early, how you behave ethically is part of that.

Is ethical leadership only for senior leaders?

No, and the evidence points the other way.

In a study of 195 departments, Mayer and colleagues found that supervisors’ ethical leadership was related to less deviance and more helpful behaviour in their groups. Top management’s ethical leadership mattered too, but its effect ran through the supervisors. What people experience from their own manager is where ethical leadership lands.

What do people get wrong about ethical leadership?

That being ethical is enough. The ethically neutral leader is ethical and invisible. People can’t take a cue from values they never see.

That it means compliance. Rules and codes sit with the organisation. Ethical leadership is about how one leader behaves and what they make normal in their team.

That it’s mainly about big dilemmas. Most of what people see is ordinary: whether you apply the same standard to a favourite, whether you explain a decision, whether you tell the truth when it’s awkward.

How does ethical leadership connect to purpose?

Through values. The ethically neutral leader’s problem is that their values have never been made explicit.

Trust Leader puts it this way: purpose is the anchor, the Trust Map is the application, and practice builds the evidence. In the Trust Leader Hub, three Purpose playlists take a leader through the questions behind their Manifesto, including “What are my values?” and “How will I act to support my values?”. The answers become their aim, their purpose and the values they want people to experience from them. The accidental manager: what do you stand for? explains how that works.

Which behaviours make ethical leadership visible?

These behaviours that strengthen trust line up most closely with it, in their exact wording.

The moral person

    1. Say what is true without using vague or confusing language.
    1. Say clearly when something cannot be delivered.
    1. Apply the same standards in tone, decisions and communication across people and situations.
    1. Consider how your actions may affect others before acting.

The moral manager

  • 18. Explain the reasoning behind decisions that impact others.
    1. Address issues directly with the person involved.
    1. Give updates on progress and raise issues early when there are risks or delays.

Behaviour 5 is the leader going first. If you want people to raise problems with you, they need to see you raise yours.

One part the behaviours don’t cover is the reward system itself: pay, promotion and formal consequences sit with the organisation. What a leader can do within it is be consistent and explain their reasoning.

Here is how it looks. A manager finds an expenses error made by a popular senior colleague. Handling it exactly as she would for a junior (7), taking it to the person first (16) and explaining her decision to him (18) is ethical leadership her team will notice, because they know how she treats everyone else.

How do you develop ethical leadership in your managers? turns this into a practice plan, and How do the 20 trust behaviours fit the leadership model you already teach? sets it alongside five other models.