Young Entrepreneur Business Ethics - Part 1

Business ethics is one of those interesting topics - do you really need to be "ethical" to succeed? There are examples of both business owners who are extremely ethical and fail, as well as business owners who are unethical and succeed. There might not be a perfect correlation between being ethical and being successful, but I believe that it does matter. Not only can being ethical positively impact your bottom line, but more importantly it can set good examples for others to be ethical as well.

I know what you are thinking: is business ethics really a problem? Yes. It is a huge problem. Even if one looks past the Enron's of the world, it's hard to ignore the lying, cheating, and backstabbing that people are willing to commit to "get ahead". I was lucky enough to have several college internships and co-op's in addition to the one year I spent out in industry, so in reality even though I am only 23, I have a solid four years of business experience in various industries. In those four years I saw numerous examples of things that I considered to be unethical.

Last year I was given the responsibility of conducting interviews for some young engineers for our company, as well as recruiting and interviewing for our co-op program. After screening resumes and doing around 10 interviews I was shocked to see how many people blatantly lied on their resumes and in interviews, and how easy it was to tell that they were lying. Could that many people really lie? Well, a study from ResumeDoctor.com shows out of 1,000 resumes, almost 43% had at least one inaccuracy. So yes, a lot of people lie.

I can't comprehend why someone would lie to an employer during on a resume or during an interview. You are also screening and interviewing them to see if you are going to fit well in their organization. If you don't show your true colors, you are doing a disservice to them and to yourself. What if you lie about liking something or being good at something, and then you start the job and that is precisely what they have you doing? You are miserable and your boss is stuck with a sub-par employee. Exactly who wins in that scenario? If you are honest and truly show who you are, you can be assured that when you are hired you are being hired because of who you are, not a perception of who you are.

Since those interviews, I've paid attention anytime a friend mentions working on their resume or talks about going to an interview and I can't believe how many of them lie! They pretend to have skill-sets that they don't just to impress employers or they pretend to be excited about a field that bores them. Last week, one of them called me to discuss an interview that they had upcoming with a company that they didn't really know if they wanted to work for. They said "I'm going to have to lie in the interview." That drove me nuts - the way I saw it he had two options - respectfully decline the interview or be honest. You can still be honest and not insult the potential employer. Saying "I've never really considered a career like this but I'd be interested to learn more to see if I might be a good fit" is fine. Saying "this is what I've dreamed about doing my entire life" when it's not, is not fine. That is lying.

When I was in college we were forced to take three business ethics courses. RPI was the first school in the country to have this "extensive" ethics training as a requirement. I was less than thrilled - at the time I thought it was the school trying to teach us our values and I didn't want any part of it. And that is essentially what it was - the school trying to impose things on us that our parents should have twenty years ago. Why would they do this? Because these problems are real. I suspect that a liar and a cheater isn't going to change after 21 years of being a liar and a cheater, but there are certainly many people that want to be ethical but get caught in a bad situation, make one wrong decision, and then ruin their careers. Those are the people that they are going to connect with and hopefully influence them to do the right things, no matter how hard and no matter what the penalty.

It might not always be the easiest thing to do, but I challenge you to set an example for other people. I challenge you to show them that you can succeed in business AND be ethical...that those two things can go hand in hand. What you do does matter, and others will follow your lead.

Next post I'll talk more about what I think young entrepreneurs can do to be more proactive with our skills.