The Ethical Moment Usually Arrives Before the Policy Does

Insights

Why integrity is really about judgement, voice, reputation and what happens when someone raises a concern

I have sat in many rooms where everyone agrees that integrity matters. Very few people argue against ethics. The interesting part begins later – when the situation is ambiguous, a relationship is at stake, a manager is under pressure, or somebody notices something that does not feel right and has to decide whether to say it.

It is also the moment when reputation is being built or weakened, often long before an issue becomes visible outside the organisation.

Ethics is easy when the answer is obvious

Codes of conduct, policies and reporting channels are essential. But they cannot make every decision for us. Most of the difficult situations I see are not “good versus bad”. They are competing responsibilities:

Loyalty ↔ Duty Loyalty to a colleague versus duty to the organisation	Speed ↔ Due process Acting quickly versus following the proper steps
Confidentiality ↔ Escalation Keeping a confidence versus the need to escalate	Compassion ↔ Fairness Compassion for an individual versus fairness to everyone else

People need to be able to recognise when they are in an ethical situation, slow the moment down, ask better questions, understand who may be affected, and know when they need advice or escalation. That capability protects more than compliance: it protects trust, relationships and the reputation an organisation has spent years building.

Reputation is built before the crisis

Organisations often think about reputation when something has already gone wrong. I think the more useful question is what protects reputation before the crisis. Usually, it is not a communications response. It is the everyday quality of judgement: whether concerns are heard early, whether conflicts of interest are surfaced, whether managers respond responsibly, whether people trust the reporting pathways, and whether leaders act consistently when the situation is uncomfortable.

For UN agencies, NGOs, multilaterals and global organisations, trust is part of the licence to operate.

Staff, donors, partners, communities and the public form judgements not only from what an organisation says it values, but from how it behaves when those values are tested. Ethics training should therefore help protect reputation at its source: the decisions and responses that happen before a problem becomes a headline.

What our work has taught us

Over the years, Shiftbalance has been brought into ethics, Ombudsman, mediation and respectful-workplace work in very different settings.

UNICEF VenezuelaUNOPSFAOWHO EuropeUN Ombudsman and Mediation ServicesUNDP

The contexts vary, but the recurring challenge is remarkably similar: people often know that something feels wrong before they know exactly what to do about it. That pattern is consistent with public-integrity guidance that treats open organisational culture, responsive management and clear reporting channels as core parts of integrity systems, not optional extras.

In 2026, for example, we delivered an ethics programme for UNICEF Venezuela:

10 cohorts

40 sessions

150 participants

We separated the staff experience from the manager experience because the responsibility is different on each side of the conversation.

Staff worked with • Conflicts of interest • Speaking up safely • Fraud and theft signals • Bystander dilemmas

Managers practised • Recognising conflicts in their teams • Receiving a concern from a direct report • Responding to fraud or theft signals • Protecting the person who spoke up

We have also delivered UNOPS’s “Ethics Start With Me” course internationally as part of the UNOPS Ethics team; trained and coached more than 150 FAO Respectful Workplace Advisors across continents; supported WHO Europe’s Ukraine Country Office through a two-year Ombudsman-linked programme; facilitated anti-racism dialogues for the UN Ombudsman and Mediation Services; and worked with UNDP on a Speak-Up Training of Trainers that equipped internal facilitators to lead courageous conversations.

What connects all of this?

The hardest part of “speak up” is what happens next

Organisations often tell employees to speak up. I understand why. But asking people to use their voice without examining the response they will receive can create more cynicism than trust.

?	What happens when a junior colleague challenges a senior person?

?	What happens when the concern is inconvenient?

?	What happens when the manager likes the person being questioned?

?	What happens when the issue is not dramatic enough to feel “reportable” but serious enough to feel wrong?

Repeated often enough, that becomes a cultural problem; mishandled badly enough, it can become a reputational one.

Managers carry a particular responsibility

A manager receiving a concern does not need to become an investigator. In fact, trying to investigate prematurely can make things worse. But they do need to know how to:

Listen	Avoid retaliation	Protect confidentiality appropriately
Document what matters	Explain next steps	Use the proper channels

That is why I believe manager ethics training should look different from general staff training.

Conflicts of interest are a good example

Most people imagine a conflict of interest as something obvious and dramatic. In reality, the more difficult cases are often ordinary: a friendship, a family connection, an outside role, a gift, a recruitment decision, a supplier someone already knows, or information that creates a divided loyalty.

The question is not always “Have I done something wrong?” It may be:

Actual

Potential

Perceived

That distinction between actual, potential and perceived conflict is where good discussion matters.

Integrity needs practice

We would never expect someone to become a strong manager after reading a leadership policy. Yet organisations sometimes expect ethical judgement to emerge from annual mandatory training alone.

Practice changes that. Give people dilemmas where there is no perfect answer. Let them notice how quickly they rationalise. Ask who has power, who carries risk, who is missing from the decision and what they would do if the same choice were made public tomorrow.

Five questions I would ask any organisation

1	Do people know the rules – and can they apply them to situations that are not explicitly covered?

2	Can staff raise a concern across hierarchy without assuming there will be a personal cost?

3	Do managers know what to do in the first ten minutes after someone brings them a concern?

4	Are conflicts of interest discussed early, or only once they have become problems?

5	What do people believe actually happens after someone speaks up?

The answers tell you much more about ethical culture than the existence of a code of conduct ever will.

A useful distinction: advice, reporting and investigation are not the same thing

One of the most practical things an organisation can do is make the pathway legible.

Advice Where can someone ask for confidential ethics advice before a decision?

Reporting Where should suspected misconduct be reported, who receives it, and what happens next?

Investigation Who is responsible for investigating?

When these functions blur together, people hesitate. When they are clear, staff and managers are more able to act without improvising processes that should already exist.

From compliance to capability

Compliance matters. Reporting channels matter. Investigations matter. But an ethical culture cannot be outsourced to the Ethics office, HR or an Ombudsman. It is built in thousands of small decisions made by people who may never describe what they are doing as “ethics”.

The aim is not to make every employee an ethics expert. It is to help people recognise the moment, think clearly, ask for help, speak when something needs to be said, and respond well when somebody else finds the courage to do so.

Reputation is the external reflection of those internal choices, accumulated over time.