Summary: Ethical leadership means making life-affirming choices in morally ambiguous situations, from everyday unkindness to systemic discrimination.This practical framework helps navigate these moments through five practices: developing awareness of what’s happening, examining your attitude, considering relational impacts, connecting to inner values, and committing to learning. Ethical leadership requires slowing down, reflecting honestly, and taking personal responsibility.
There are many theories and models of ethical leadership. This article offers a practical framework that connects ethical thinking with ethical action in everyday workplace decisions, helping leaders approach dilemmas with responsibility, courage, and a commitment to learning.
At its core, ethical leadership is about making life-affirming choices, even – and especially – when the professional environment makes this difficult.
So how do we navigate morally ambiguous situations and make sound ethical decisions under pressure? And how can we lead more ethically when we encounter our own moments of truth – the ones that test who we are and what truly matters to us?
How to respond well to ethical dilemmas
Navigating ethical dilemmas with integrity, courage, and consistency is one of the most difficult – and often most avoided – aspects of leadership. Yet it is also among the most meaningful, precisely because it is life-affirming.
There will always be moments – from everyday unkindness to microaggressions, bullying, and systemic discrimination – where leaders can make a positive difference. These situations test a leader’s integrity, moral courage, and willingness to take personal responsibility. Ethical dilemmas rarely have quick or easy solutions.
Responding well requires slowing down: taking time to reflect, gather information, deliberate, and check in with one’s values, beliefs, and intuition about what feels right. Often, it also means having an honest conversation with a trusted peer, coach, or mentor.
The origins of natural morality
Our natural sense of morality finds its roots in what the American psychologist Dacher Keltner calls the ‘survival of the kindest’. By kindness, Keltner does not mean being endlessly nice or self-sacrificing. He is referring to traits such as cooperation, empathy, care, fairness, social bonding, and emotional attunement.
For thousands of years, it was those who were best at getting along – the kindest and most collaborative – who were most likely to survive and pass on their genes. This may be the real secret of our success as a species: the instinct to work together, protect the vulnerable, recognise the dignity of others, and keep widening our moral circle.
Ethical leadership requires moral integrity
Moral integrity begins with being in tune with our fundamental values and beliefs – the inner compass that guides how we think, communicate, and behave. It also requires personal responsibility to reflect on the consequences of our actions, learn from them, and, when necessary, make amends.
So how do some leaders resist workplace pressures and stay aligned with their ethical values?
These leaders remain true to their moral compass. Often, this clarity emerges through experience: past regret, the appreciation of others, or a growing awareness of the harm their actions may have caused. Over time, these moments help leaders identify the values they are unwilling to compromise on, in professional life or elsewhere.
The well-known Japanese poet, Ryōkan (1758-1831), puts this very well:
If you point your cart north, when you want to go south, how will you arrive?
At the same time, no leader operates in isolation. Ethical agency is shaped by the complexity of each situation and by the fact that we are social beings. Most of us prefer to fit in rather than stand out – to feel liked, connected, and safe. Ethical leadership often means working against this instinct.
For some leaders, however, their ethical values provide enough motivation to act. To make life-affirming choices even when professional pressures push in the opposite direction.
Common ethical dilemmas in the workplace
Based on my experience working with leaders, particularly through my ethics-in-leadership programme, the following are common workplace dilemmas:
Situation: A high-performing employee consistently violates company values through harassment, bullying, or undermining best practice.
Dilemma: Do you hold them accountable and risk losing results, or tolerate behaviour that harms people and culture?
Ethical tension: Results vs integrity and psychological safety
Situation: A team member shares sensitive personal information about their mental health, family situation, or medical condition.
Dilemma: Do you respect their privacy, or share information to protect performance, safety, or the organisation?
Ethical tension: Confidentiality vs duty of care
Situation: You must choose between two candidates – one slightly more qualified, the other likely to improve team diversity.
Dilemma: Do you prioritise short-term merit or consider systemic inequities and long-term inclusion?
Ethical tension: Equality vs equity
Situation: Senior leadership demands unrealistic deadlines that require sustained overtime.
Dilemma: Do you comply and push your team, or push back and risk missing targets?
Ethical tension: Productivity vs employee wellbeing
Situation: You know that honest feedback may negatively affect a staff member’s morale or career.
Dilemma: Do you speak openly or soften the message to avoid discomfort and potential conflict?
Ethical tension: Compassion vs integrity and accountability
Situation: You observe unethical behaviour by a senior leader.
Dilemma: Do you stay silent to protect their and / or your role or do you challenge authority?
Ethical tension: Power dynamics vs moral responsibility
These are just a few examples of the many ethical dilemmas leaders contend with at work.
Turning towards difficult issues
I recently worked with a senior leader who felt deeply uncomfortable about her COO’s inequitable treatment of two colleagues. While she had a strong sense of fairness, she was also aware of the internal politics and potential consequences of speaking up – for herself and her team. Together, we explored where she could make life-affirming choices that extended her moral courage while also protecting her livelihood.
Fear, doubt, and uncertainty are central to leadership. Often, the most ethical option does not feel clearly or immediately “right.” As Aidan McQuade notes in his 2022 book Ethical Leadership: Moral Decision-Making Under Pressure, there is sometimes “a moral half-rhyme” – where the most life-affirming choice is not easily apparent.
By speaking up, turning toward difficult issues, and engaging in honest conversations, leaders can create change – or at least open the space for more tolerant, open, kind, inclusive ways of working to emerge. Even when these actions go unnoticed, over time they shape cultures where people feel safe, dignified, and like they belong.
That said, some organisational cultures severely limit a leader’s influence. In such cases, it becomes essential to stay within one’s circle of control and ask: Where can I make life-affirming, non-harming choices that bring greater ease, freedom, safety and wellbeing? And where might action cause more harm – to myself or others?
Leading ethically comes from within
The traditional understanding of effective and good leadership focuses on the individual leader and their behaviour rather than on mindset, attitude, inner capabilities and capacities of a leader and the broader systems leaders operate within – economic, political, social, cultural and environmental.
It is important to remember here that our capabilites develop through our social interactions and are hence inherently relational.
A practical framework for leading ethically
Over the past five years, I have developed a practical framework to support leaders navigating ethical dilemmas.
Practice means consciously engaging with what is already happening, with the intention to interrupt unhelpful patterns and create new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.
Awareness: What do I notice?
Ethical sensitivity begins with noticing – waking up from autopilot to what is happening within and around you.
Ask yourself:
- What is happening here?
- How do I know this is an ethical dilemma?
- How am I responding?
Do I speak up, change a course of action, stay silent, avoid the experience through exclusion, withdrawal, distraction? Or do I slow down, gather information, reflect, deliberate, talk it through with a peer, seek conversations?
Ethical dilemmas are often accompanied by dissonance – a felt sense that something is off. When we act against our values, we may experience what I call healthy shame: a signal that our inner compass is working.
Healthy shame is different from toxic shame. It requires honesty, humility, and compassion.
Attitude: How am I meeting this moment?
Our attitude shapes everything i.e. how we attend to ourselves and others when faced with an ethical dilemma. When faced with an ethical dilemma, pause and ask:
- Am I open, curious, and kind – or closed, defensive, and judgmental?
When you feel closed, resentful, or judgemental, it’s a signal to take a few conscious breaths with self-compassion and ask: How do I want to be, how do I want to show up in this situation?
Relationality: How am I relating?
Ethical leadership requires looking beyond the individual perspective. We are relational beings – intrinsically interconnected and interdependent. We always impact each other with our thoughts, communication and behaviour.
Ask:
- What do I need and want?
- What does the other person need and want?
- What does the team need and want right now?
- What does the organisation, network, community need and want?
This shifts leadership from an ego-centric to a systemic, eco-centric approach.
Inner values: What matters most?
Intuitively, we know what is most important to us and yet fear, busyness, and uncertainty can cloud our inner compass and compromise or undermine what we hold most dear. In challenging moments, pause and ask:
- What are my deepest values and beliefs?
- What do I care most deeply about in this situation?
- What feels life-affirming here?
Notice the body’s signals – mind, heart, gut.
Learning: What am I learning?
Ethical leadership is inseparable from learning.
- What am I learning in this situation?
- What am I learning about myself?
- What might I need to unlearn?
- What could I do differently next time?
- Where does my focus need to be now?
Practice, practice, practice
Leading through ethical dilemmas is among the most challenging – and meaningful – aspects of leadership. It’s at the heart of effective and good leadership. As leaders, we may not always solve an ethical dilemma or make an ethical decision. Sometimes we may need to find a middle way or make a compromise in the midst of complex organisational life.
It’s important to be compassionate with ourselves and others. What matters most is our willingness to engage with ethical dilemmas: to notice, reflect, learn, and take responsibility.
Key takeaways
Where, in your context of leadership, can you begin to lead through ethical dilemmas?
- Start a conversation about ethics in leadership, what it is and its importance in your workplace. Notice where ethical sensitivity is missing, where it is already present.
- Share this framework with your team. Make time for collective enquiry and learning so that ethical dilemmas and decisions don’t stay unchecked.
- Remember that what you do matters. Thoughts, words, and actions have consequences, both positive and negative.
- Make more life-affirming choices. However small these choices are, when repeated over time, they can profoundly shape organisational wellbeing and success.
Karen Liebenguth is an accredited coach and mindfulness trainer. She offers executive coaching working with leaders, managers and teams in the workplace.
