Management is a moral profession

Many factors drive senior individual contributors to pursue a management position, the most obvious ones being a bigger salary and more significant influence. However, one other aspect strikes me as crucial: the moral implications of the job.

As a manager, you often find yourself in the position of making decisions that will impact people’s lives—real people with real families and real bills to pay at the end of the month. Employing such influence while guided by a sense of justice over the search for self-benefit is a constant moral exercise.

A strong reason for it is that as a manager, you often can do the job without ever dwelling on that subject—and many do just that. In most companies, there’s a good chance you will never be directly accounted for the ethical aspects of your decisions simply because most of us still leave that kind of talk outside the office.

It’s not that managers are evil and interested in harming their team members. Even without reflecting on the morality of the job, I guess it’s fair to say they try to do what’s best for people most of the time. However, by not giving intentional thought to the ethical part of management, they risk weakening their role when faced with difficult decisions.

More importantly, they miss the multiple opportunities for personal growth that the manager position offers through reflecting on morality and striving to improve. This is not just a growth opportunity for you and me as professionals—as if there were such a clear separation between personal and professional lives—but for each of us as individuals.

For instance, should you say no to your manager when asked to fire a team member responsible for a major product crash? If you understand that part of your job is to foster an environment where engineers are not afraid of being fired because of on-call mistakes and support people’s growth during hard times, then you have a valuable compass indicating the path.

As Will Larson says in An Elegant Puzzle: “We have the opportunity to create an environment for those around us to be their best, in fair surroundings. For me, that’s both an opportunity and an obligation for managers.”

Hierarchies exist to help lower levels do a better job (as Donella Meadows beautifully explains in Thinking in Systems), not to give higher levels more control. A manager who understands and exerts that principle is a humble manager. She will feel heavier, as will the superficial manager. But while the latter’s weight comes from glamour, the former’s comes from understanding her ethical role and the impact of her decisions on people’s lives.