Ethics and your talent pipeline

By Edward Haigh

Greenwashing is a term with which we've all become a bit more familiar over the last few years. It describes the act of creating an impression of sustainability and environmental sensitivity when the reality is somewhat different. And it's happening everywhere.

In some cases it's simply about an attempt to manipulate someone's perception of an organisation. In others it's a statement of ambition: it's what an organisation wants to be one day; what it's striving for. Take BP's green and yellow flower logo, for example, and decide which of those two camps you think that falls into. Because it has to fall into one or the other, doesn’t it? Perhaps it's both.

Sometimes, of course, it's just plain fraud. It's the supermarket potato from the other side of the world, dipped in soil and sold to you at the farmer's market as a local, organic potato, for twice the price. The point is that it's about impressions, which are as much as people outside an organisation (including its customers) normally ever have.

Turns out something's changing.

We’re hearing from a number of consulting firms, most recently in the Middle East, that they’re struggling to attract the best quality graduates because those graduates have ethical concerns about joining a consulting firm. Now, there’s nothing to suggest that their concerns are specifically about the environmental credentials of consulting firms – indeed it’s arguably more likely that they’re connected in some way to the part consulting firms have played in various financial scandals and crises of recent years – but there’s a point here that stands nevertheless: organisations, including consulting firms, can no longer get away with simply projecting an impression of behaving ethically. They actually have to be what they claim to be. Because the people who judge them in future will be on the inside as well as the outside, and there’s no hiding place there.

This thing works both ways, of course. Some negative impressions about consulting firms may be just as ill-informed as the positive ones: it’s quite conceivable that young people are kicking out against ‘big business’ generally, and failing to discriminate between those companies at whom their ire is justifiably directed and those at whom it isn’t. No matter – it’s still a problem consulting firms need to deal with.

The trouble is that while both of these are things over which consulting firms have some control, there are others over which they have none. Like their clients’ reputations. All they can do is choose not to work with some clients. In the past, provided you avoided offering advice to dictatorial regimes (yes, I know) you were probably alright. But what about now? Tobacco companies probably wouldn’t be advisable but what about oil companies, or even banks? “Thanks for your offer of a three-year global transformation project at Big Bank Inc, Mr Smith, but until you sort out your senior-executive compensation culture we’ll have to politely decline.”

Of course the idea that you can be tarnished by association with your client’s reputation won’t be new to consulting firms, but the question of what you do about it might be given added significance if the answer has the potential to dry up your talent pipeline.

In future you might need to be green (and a whole lot else besides) to the core.