Make Your Startup Ethical

Most startups, especially the ones not connected to social impact, see ethics as an afterthought, something that is either a given or that will be defined as the company grows. But ethical principles and values should be one of the first things to be defined when creating a new company. As the company vision serves to guide the productive behaviours of your workers, ethics serves as a moral compass to those behaviours, guaranteeing that your team functions as a well-aligned whole.

Recently I have had the opportunity of witnessing an NGO, of all places, suffering from this problem: competent team, good project but… no moral compass. The result was an amalgamation of behaviours and beliefs that resulted in very poor ethical behaviour and constant internal friction that was only solved by exercising hard power. The strongest or most influential at any given moment defined the ethical guidelines to be used in that situation.

Therefore my advice is that as soon as you start defining your vision, define in parallel your ethical guidelines. And then stick to them, make them inviolable, advertise them to the World. They will define your project’s identity as much as what you are delivering to the market.