Ethical Dilemmas in Church Leadership | An Interview with Brad Agle

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Brad Agle, the author of The Business Ethics Field Guide, is a professor of Ethics and Leadership in the Marriott School of Business Management at BYU and has also taught at the University of Pittsburgh. In this podcast, he discusses how ethical dilemmas can come up in the church setting and how to better approach them.

Highlights

05:31 GRAY AREAS Ethical gray areas come when values conflict. He teaches practical tools for prioritizing. 06:46 His well-received book, The Business Ethics Field Guide, started with collecting thousands of written accounts of ethical dilemmas faced by executive MBA students in North America, São Paulo, and Prague. 07:23 Thirteen types of fundamental ethical dilemmas 09:12 REPAIR As a church member, knowing how to repent provides a really good formula to help you repair when you or someone in your organization has done wrong: recognize what you did wrong, ask for forgiveness, provide restitution if you can, and resolve never to do it again. People don’t often do all these steps in repairing harm done to others. 10:54 SHOWING MERCY Church members who have served in bishoprics or stake presidencies have particularly been trained well in the appropriateness of showing mercy from experiences serving in a Church Membership Council (formerly known as a Disciplinary Council). In these councils, showing mercy is balanced with ensuring the good name of the Church and innocent victims are protected. 13:00 CONFLICT OF INTEREST In the church, we’re not well trained for situations when we are in two different roles, such as business positions and church leadership. 14:25 MAKE A PROMISE AND THE WORLD CHANGES We church members teach each other that we keep our promises: we keep covenants and keep our word (e.g. a bishop gets an emergency call which conflicts with a commitment to a family member). Church leaders must teach boundaries for marriages and family and how to make tough decisions: sometimes you need to say no. 17:29 Imperfect leaders make mistakes 18:11 INTERVENTION DILEMMA (or Counseling Together) How do we balance sustaining leaders with the command to council together in decision making? When do we sustain revelation and when do we push back by speaking up for something we think is wrong? 19:24 SCENARIOS An Intervention Dilemma (or Standing up to Power): As a bishop who lived close to the site of a new stake center, Brad was delegated by a beloved stake presidency to coordinate with Church Facilities, the general contractor, and the local architect. The first plan from Church Facilities had the kitchen close to the bishop’s office and chapel instead of the cultural center. He proposed the change to the stake presidency but was denied. A bishop serving in the one other building built according to this new plan agreed that a change was needed from personal experience, so Brad asked again and was denied again. The switch would cost about $1,500 for a multi-million dollar building that you want to get right. On the third time requesting a change to the stake presidency, he came with the change request from the whole ward council, and they finally granted the change: he wore them down like the petitioner to the unjust judge. Meanwhile, the granted change actually ended up saving $500. 24:47 QUESTIONS for the 13 DILEMMAS in The Business Ethics Field Guide The book provides examples of and pitfalls for each of the thirteen dilemmas. It also includes actions for prevention as well as questions. Some questions for an intervention dilemma include these: (1) Are you the right person to intervene? Intervention is necessary because of a violation of ethics, or harm may be done to people: i. e. we want to spend sacred funds wisely, we don’t want to create situations where someone is going to feel bad because they spilled juice all the way down the hall and cost the church lots of money due to the strange placement of the kitchen. All decisions have some level of ethicality to them with varying levels of moral intensity. Paint color may have low moral intensity while the chance of someone receiving the death penalty has high moral intensity (29:52). (2) Can you recruit help? (3) Do the urgency and potential impact require you to act now? For example, he once stayed outside the bishop’s office when a new bishop was meeting with his Relief Society president and there was no one else in the building. (4) Does your intervention plan require you to act unethically? (5) Will your intervention create a permanent solution or just a temporary fix? (6) What are your own motives? Are they pure? (7) Is the problem a result of one person’s behavior, or is it a systematic failure? (8) Does the solution require just one active intervention, or does it require sustained, regular effort? (9) How can you create the least harm for everyone involved? Many have found it very helpful to go through the questions systematically. 35:50 The reception of The Business Ethics Field Guide has been way beyond his expectations. The book has received zero complaints while most books receive at least a few. Comments from students have been glowing. 37:55 ROLE PLAYS For simplicity’s sake, Kurt’s the bishop in all the scenarios and Brad’s the young women’s president who approaches the bishop asking about a different young woman each time. First Scenario: You know that one of the men in your ward is spending a lot of time out of state because his father is in serious legal trouble. This is highly confidential information. I come to you and say, “Marcie seems to be very sad these days. It seems like her father is out of town a lot. Are her parents doing okay?” Second Scenario: You know that a couple in your ward is about to file their divorce papers: No one else knows this. I come to you and say, “Jane seems down these days. I’ve heard that her parents are having difficulty and considering divorce. Is there any truth in this?” These are difficult, tricky situations. There have been times when someone in his ward council felt he shared too much of what was confidential, but if everything is confidential, then the bishop has to do everything–that’s not the system. We have to share the load. The church is trying to change the culture where the elders’ quorum and relief society presidents are supposed to do a lot of this. Third Scenario: You know that one of the brothers in your ward was just diagnosed with cancer. No one else knows this. I come to you and say, “Amanda seems kind of sad. My counselor saw her dad coming out of the oncology office at the hospital. Is he okay?” 44:04 DISSEMBLANCE DILEMMA There are times when you will need to dissemble to help keep confidences, or to make something look different than it actual is or to hide your true motives or intentions behind a false appearance. This is the antonym of resemble, which would be to make something appear as it actually is. Dissemble is to make it look like it’s different than it actually is: it becomes necessary sometimes in order to keep sacred confidences. You may need to make it look different from what someone is assuming. You must think about it ahead of time. If once you overshare information to reassure someone there’s no problem, the next time if you don’t share, the person will gather that their assumption is true. 47:09 Practice with impromptu dissemblance dilemmas to get people thinking about these situations ahead of the actual situation. Questions that may help include these: 1) Do you have authority to reveal the truth? 2) Why do you want to misrepresent the truth? Sometimes there are good reasons. 3) What is the cost of truth-telling? 4) Are you dissembling to protest others that need to be protected? 5) Are you at fault for a misunderstanding? Or do you have an obligation to clarify? 6) Is there a way to get what you need without dissembling? 50:17 It’s tricky, but there may be times where you must say, “I don’t know anything about that.” Any other answer you give may confirm what the other person suspects. 51:13 CONFLICT OF INTEREST Darlene Druyen was head of acquisitions for the US Air Force: she shopped using taxpayer dollars to spend billions on helicopters, tanks, and fighter jets. She was negotiating a $4 billion deal to buy helicopters from Boeing. She asked the chief financial officer at Boeing about a job for her son-in-law: that’s inappropriate but not illegal for someone with such a role of trust. She then asked for a job for her daughter. Later the daughter informed someone at Boeing that her mother was retiring the next year and would love a job with Boeing. That crossed a legal line: when a member of the justice department saw Darlene meeting Boeing’s chief financial officer at an airport about a post-retirement job, they both ended up spending multiple years in prison. 56:30 Solutions include avoiding conflict of interest at all costs when it’s forbidden, deferring to someone else, clearly recusing and disclosing, 59:15 When he served on a board for synchronous swimming (a small community), they had to educate everyone on conflict of interest in vetting judges for an Olympic team. Everyone had some conflict of interest. 1:01:41 After everyone has looked over an agenda, you should ask meeting attendees to verify whether or not they have no conflicts of interest. Also, hold an occasional conflict of interest training. 1:04:47 We can think of ethics as trying to be fair and just, trying to create the greatest amount of good for everyone, or trying to make sure everyone’s rights are upheld. Think of good, better, best. Ethics is about how we can become a better person or how to become more like Christ.