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Lori E. Solyom
An Essay in Ethics
lorisolyom@yahoo.com

To be an Ethical Leader
To be an ethical leader, I must be strong and persistent, yet not unyielding. I need be
stalwart and certain, but keep an open mind. Above all, integrity plus the heart of a servant will
be the underpinning of each decision and action.
As a young child, I was unaware that I would be influenced by those I did not know, that
their words and actions would impact my thoughts and behavior. I did comprehend that my
daddy was a man of honor and intelligence, an engineer who had served in the US Army Corps
of Engineers. In my earliest memories, I still observe my father going about the business of
finding efficient and laudable solutions to the myriad problems presented by his kinfolk, his
supervisors and his country. Without any doubt, he was my hero.
Though maturity and experience have presented me with a more realistic view of Carl
Allen Vansant as a fallible human being, he is in large part responsible for planting the seeds of
my current understanding of ethical leadership in action.
My dad worked with big, giant computers and punch cards at Operations Research
Incorporated, a large semi-military installation outside of Washington DC, from the time I was
four until I entered the fifth grade. I recall the excitement we all felt when he came home to
announce his promotion and transfer to do government contract work at the now defunct Vertex
Systems. Just as vividly, I remember the day a year and a half later that he told my younger
brother and I that we would be moving to Kansas City so he could go work for the engineering
consultant firm in which his brother was a partner. Choking back tears, I asked, Daddy, why do
we have to leave? With lips set in a tight, grim line, he uttered his response through clenched

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teeth, Because, honey, I couldnt in good conscience do the things they were asking me to do,
so I quit. Up to that moment, quitting any task or stopping shy of any goal was something I had
never known my father to do. Even in my immaturity, I recognized the seriousness of the lesson
my dad was teaching me about honesty, integrity and doing what is right.
Looking back over the years before my father quit his job (not only a conscientious
move, but eventually proven to be a wise one for the now retired hydro-power publisher and
international consultant), I realize that my recognition of my fathers uprightness was identifiable
by my 10-year-old mind only because of exposure to other, more public, ethical crises.
On March 16, 1968, Lt. William Calley carried out the orders he had been given to kill
everyone at My Lai. In 1970, Calley was court-martialed and imprisoned for his role in the
sanctioned massacre. As a news-savvy youngster and a compassionate child, my initial reaction
was that Lt. Calley was an evil man whose blood lust allowed him to commit the unspeakable act
of murdering innocent people. As the facts of the case came out, I felt differently. Through the
militarys practice of training methods that develop authorization, routinization, and
dehumanization (Kelman, and Hamilton 20), I realized that Lt. William Calley had done exactly
what the Army had trained him to do. What if Calley, like my father, had announced that he
couldnt in good conscience do the things they were asking me to do and quit?
More than two decades before My Lai, a Dutch woman named Miep Gies was among
those who risked their lives and well-being trying to hide and save their Jewish neighbors from
the horror of the Nazi holocaust. As an avid reader who had already plowed through every book
on Mrs. Sandersons first grade reading shelf, I eagerly received from her a book titled, The
Diary of Anne Frank. As I read of the impending doom encroaching upon the German-Jewish
teenager and her family, I lived for a time in the shoes of Miep and the others, wanting to believe
that in like circumstances, I would be just as heroic. In Mieps case, the quandary was not about

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what she could not bring herself to do, but rather, what she could not help but do. In her own
words, "I am not a hero. I stand at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch people who did
what I did or moremuch moreduring those dark and terrible times years ago..." (Gies, and
Gold 11)
So what is the essence of an ethical leader? Is it the ability exercised by my father, but
not by Lt. William Calley, to take a stand at a line you will not cross? Is it the resolve that does
what one knows to be right, regardless of potential consequences, as Miep Gies and her family
did? It is these and more. It is the possession of a foundational moral system that allows one to
evaluate, with open and impartial eyes, the information presented. It is the ability to value
others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the
others, and have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not
consider equality with God something to be used to His own advantage; rather, He made himself
nothing by taking the very nature of a servant. (Philippians 2:3-7) To be an ethical leader, I
must understand these things, and I must believe with all my heart that leadership is both a Godgiven privilege and a sobering responsibility.

Works Cited
Gies, Miep, and Alison Leslie Gold. Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who
Helped to Hide the Frank Family. 1st ed. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1987. 11.
Print.
Kelman, Herbert C., and V. Lee Hamilton. Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of
Authority and Responsibility. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. 20. Print.
"Philippians 2:3-7." The Holy Bible, New International Version. NIV. Grand Rapids, MI:
Biblica, Inc./Zondervan, 1973. Print.