By Kevin Duggan, ICMA-CM

Successful leaders are achievement focused. They set goals and measure progress. While not the only characteristics of successful leadership, goal setting and performance measurement are among the most important.

What ethical price are managers willing to pay, however, in order to accomplish their own and their organization's goals? Are you being thoughtful in regard to knowing the limits you are willing to go for both personal and organizational "success?"

I think it is safe to say that management colleagues want to both be able to achieve goals and be ethical. In fact, being ethical should be an overriding goal. But there are numerous examples of an intense focus on performance and achievement getting in the way of ethical conduct.

One of the most notorious recent examples is the case of Wells Fargo Bank. Last year, more than 5,000 Wells Fargo employees were fired for setting up more than two million accounts in clients' names without their permission, often transferring their funds from other accounts.

Much of this was occurring while Wells Fargo was ramping up ethics training. While employees were instructed not to open up unauthorized accounts, the company's performance expectations drove thousands of their staff to do so for increased income and out of fear of losing their jobs.

Volkswagen has prided itself on quality manufactured, high-performing automobiles across several brands. As is well known, VW experienced a significant self-inflicted wound by installing software in some of their models to cheat emission control tests. The desire was to avoid a loss of driving performance in order to meet emission requirements.

And there is the far too often willingness for college coaches and athletic directors to bend the rules or violate reasonable standards in regard to player eligibility and welfare to achieve on the field or court success. As in the other cases, the eventual consequences are often just the opposite of what they had intended.

Pitfalls to Avoid

Are managers equally at risk of failing our ethical test as we strive to achieve? These are a few potential examples of being at risk of "trying too hard" to achieve otherwise admirable goals:

• Going too far in a quest to present a balanced budget to a governing board by being overly optimistic regarding revenues and expenditures.
• Demanding unrealistic statistical performance from departments resulting in unintended pressure to distort performance statistics to meet required goals.
• Adjusting how a police department categorizes criminal activity in order to give the impression that the crime rate is better than is actually the case. And when do reasonable expectations for self-initiated traffic enforcement spiral into a quota system?
• The strong belief that a major new facility (e.g., convention center, sports venue, theater) will be a major community asset allowing administrators to inflate the upside financial potential while understating or not fully disclosing all the potential downside risks.
• In striving for the goal of labor peace, understating the short- and long-term impact of a proposed salary increase or new benefit.
• Creating an environment where corners are cut on inspections (e.g., fire, building, or code enforcement) so that the numerical goals are achieved while the quality of the inspections deteriorates.

A Critical Balance

It is critical that leaders personally stay focused on the potential of going too far to achieve a desired outcome. We need to remember that while "achieving" is important, how we achieve our goals is no less important.

Do we take the time to reflect on how far is too far to accomplish a desired goal? Do we fully assess the potential impacts to our reputations and our organization's reputation of being overly aggressive to reach a desired outcome?

Are we willing to accept that it is simply part of our business that desired outcomes (goals achieved, levels of performance, and so on) will not always be ideal?

Even if you understand the critical balance between achieving goals and maintaining a high ethical standard, could you be inadvertently communicating the opposite to staff? Do you have performance measurement or incentive structures that can push employees to stretch ethical boundaries?

Could you be preaching ethical conduct while creating pressures for the members of the organization to do otherwise? The leaders of many private and public organizations, including the examples noted earlier, have unfortunately done so.

Finally, do you know how to keep goal achievement in alignment with good ethical values? Does your organization?

Kevin Duggan, ICMA-CM, ICMA West Coast Regional Director, Mountain View, California, is the former city manager of Mountain View (kduggan@icma.org).