OPINIONISTA: Ethical leadership means first do no harm, in business and in life

On 1 May 2019, when most South Africans were at home enjoying Workers’ Day, Edward Kieswetter was at his desk. The brand new South African Revenue Services commissioner was writing a four-part letter.

Kieswetter told them where he stood on matters that were important to him, matters of substance so that they could trust him. It was a textbook case of ethical leadership. As he explained to a breakfast panel I hosted recently, “People don’t expect us to be perfect, but they do expect us to be authentic and to die fulfilling our promises – or not make them in the first place.”

Rabbi David Lapin, the global business leadership strategist who helped draft South Africa’s first Code of Ethics for the first King Report, believes ethical leadership resides in the injunction of doing no harm, something that appears so simple until you try to offset the very different needs of the four stakeholders that make up any business: the shareholders, the employees, the customers and the communities.

Ethics though has to be underpinned by dignity, something that Lapin defines as the ability to look at another person in a way that they feel you are seeing as they should and could be and not as they are. In our South African context, this has a particular resonance and import. We have to see one another as individuals with the potential to change the world for good.

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