What Is the Business Value of Inclusive Ethics?

UCLA Anderson is strategically investing in becoming the world’s premier destination for education that drives transformative leadership. With this broad benefit in mind, Anderson has launched the Inclusive Ethics Initiative to serve our global ecosystem of stakeholders, including current and prospective students.

Organizations are increasingly frustrated with the use of polarizing workplace tactics to suppress differences and extract short-sighted “wins” on ethical issues. Figuring out how to fruitfully engage a diverse workforce in driving everyday ethical behavior is essential for any firm or professional looking to reliably reap benefits from diversity.

What is the Inclusive Ethics Initiative?

You can think of inclusive ethics as an approach to judgment, decision making and behavior that embraces diversity among stakeholders. It anticipates that members of a community may have a variety of fluid and evolving preferences, such that optimal decisions may be those that are continually informed by — and perhaps co-created with — stakeholders, rather than dictated top-down by distant, elite and exclusive authorities.

What will IEI do at UCLA Anderson?

Broadly, there are three major impacts of IEI for Anderson:

• First, it will advance behavioral research regarding the nature of inclusive ethics and the conditions that determine when and how they may be effectively practiced. This research will explore the extent to which considerations of equity, diversity and inclusion may implicitly, and even inextricably, determine what practices stakeholders will experience as ethical — whether in leadership, client service, decision making or product development. A key question will be the extent to which ethical practices need to be aligned with EDI to be robustly compelling, especially as the workforce becomes more diverse.

• Second, it will develop innovative methods and tools for teaching inclusively ethical practices. The IEI places a major priority on facilitating the practice of inclusively ethical behavior, not just producing knowledge about it. Our initial learning program will be called Leading Ethically for All People (LEAP) and will use interactive learning experiences to familiarize people with a set of basic skills (for example, proactive, humble listening) that behavioral science suggests may be vital to practicing inclusive ethics. Our pedagogical innovation workstream will focus on developing new ways to not only introduce inclusive ethics concepts, but to further help people engage in the skilled practice of inclusively ethical behaviors. For instance, we’ll use behavioral insights to design structured and engaging improv-based LEAP learning exercises that help participants observe patterns — within their own real-time social interactions — in their ethical instincts amid diversity.

• Third, it is a way to engage the public in identifying and learning from real-world “wins” and “woes” in the practice of inclusive ethics. Real-life experience is an invaluable source of inspiration for the kind of research and teaching that Anderson values most: research and teaching that improve real-life experiences! With IEI research and teaching innovation, we want to create knowledge and foster skills that people find powerfully resonant, relevant and beneficial in everyday life. We plan to host roundtables, conferences and other events designed to engage thought leaders and the general public in sharing their successes and failures in the practice of inclusive ethics, as well as their related observations, questions and insights.

What about the IEI is of interest to a prospective student or would induce someone to apply to Anderson?

Anderson’s pathbreaking IEI defines ethical leadership for the modern world. Prospective applicants to business school know that ethics, equity, diversity and inclusion powerfully determine organizational success — in terms of how much access they have to talent, how readily and effectively they can adapt to changing market conditions, how engaged and loyal their employees will be, and much more. The IEI makes Anderson the first and foremost institution to put a structure in place that recognizes how ethics and EDI are deeply interconnected as determinants of successful, sustainable decision making and leadership practice. Any prospective student who wants to be ready for successful management and leadership within the increasingly diverse modern workforce will have a lot to gain by studying here.

Once an MBA graduates, how will having engaged with the IEI benefit the graduate in job or career?

The main ways students and alumni will interact with IEI is through our new learning experiences and public engagement activities. When they take on their jobs, they’ll have had opportunities in LEAP and other IEI activities to discover the extent to which the instinctive or habitual ethical practices they exhibit are inclusive. They’ll also have learned to use evidence-based insights and to adjust or revise those instincts and habits as they see fit.

How is the IEI aligned with Anderson’s strategic plan?

Being inclusive and ethical are among the skills that define the transformative leadership goals at the core of Anderson’s strategic plan. In many schools and organizations, inclusion and ethics are not supported with skill development. They are buzz words, treated as a nebulous set of ideal practices. In reality, however, we know that inclusion and ethics are more complex and challenging than that. People struggle even to define what the terms mean, let alone exhibit behaviors that reliably and concretely make them felt in everyday experiences. With focused research, teaching innovation and public engagement, Anderson’s IEI gives people a destination for inquiry and insight, as well as structured opportunities to cultivate inclusively ethical practices — in themselves and in the world around all of us.

UCLA Anderson’s Inclusive Ethics Initiative is led by Associate Dean of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and Adjunct Associate Professor Heather Maiirhe Caruso, and by Professor of Management and Organizations and Behavioral Decision Making Eugene Caruso, who teaches Ethics, Values and Tradeoffs in Anderson’s MBA programs.