Center for Sales Innovation keeps the spotlight on ethics

Ethics are essential in every profession. But they have a big impact on sales, where sustained success depends on building trust and credibility with customers above all, and also with managers, co-workers and business partners.

As experts say, sales is not about “pulling a fast one” on the buyer — it’s about cultivating steady customers and generating repeat business based on referrals, which flow from ethical behavior.

So, if you’re in sales, how good are you at recognizing and confronting an ethical situation? And, if you have studied sales ethics at St. Catherine’s, how prepared are you to deal with ethics in the workplace?

That’s what Lynn Schleeter, director of the Center for Sales Innovation, and Vickie Allen, assistant professor of business administration, set out to discover through a recent survey of students and alumnae.

The objective was to assess what students had learned about ethical decision-making from courses they had completed at St. Catherine, then apply findings to the sales curriculum — with an eye toward improving students’ readiness to deal with ethical issues in the workforce.

“As a college student, you may see issues as black and white,” Schleeter says. “But in the real world, there’s a lot of gray. Our curriculum is designed to help students understand what’s coming for them.”

Behind the questions
The 12-question survey was sent to a mix of 450 current students and alumnae this past spring. Around 200 individuals responded. “An excellent response rate,” Allen notes.

Student respondents included sophomores, juniors and seniors enrolled in undergraduate business administration courses in St. Catherine’s day and Weekend College programs.

The survey is one of several projects funded by a $25,000 grant from the James S. Kemper Foundation to develop strategies and curricula focusing on ethics in sales.

Besides the baseline questions about age, gender, student or alumnae status and other demographic information, students were asked to describe their primary value system; their support system; and who they would talk to, professionally or personally, about an ethical dilemma they might face.

In addition to verifying completion of courses with ethics content at St. Kate’s, respondents also were asked three key questions:

If you have work experience (including internships), have you ever faced an ethical issue on the job?
Whether or not you have work experience, do you feel prepared to make an important ethical decision on the job?
Do you believe St. Kate’s business courses have enhanced your decision-making process on ethics?

“We were pleased to find that 85 percent of respondents said they felt prepared,” Schleeter said. Slightly more than 50 percent of respondents also said discussion of ethics in business courses at St. Catherine had given them tools and resources to identify and deal with ethical issues in the workplace.

One resource is the “Ethics and Integrity in Selling” undergraduate course taught by Allen and developed shortly after the Center for Sales Innovation opened a decade ago. It’s the only sales-focused, college-level ethics course offered in the country.

Other tools include about 25 “real-world” case studies that were integrated into business administration department curriculum about four years ago. The case studies have been incorporated into nearly all business administration courses, so ethics issues are being discussed consistently across classrooms, Schleeter said.

The case studies address a wide variety of situations, some of them that seem minor, but in fact can have major ramifications.

“We want to help students understand that even what they might not think of as critical, the company would say they crossed the line,” Schleeter said.

The idea of classroom discussions, she noted, is to get students to “think things through — even in something seemingly small, like reporting extra mileage on an expense report. Through the identification of stakeholders, we help students recognize that the company is losing in that case."

“Students need to constantly think about all the individuals affected by a situation,” Schleeter added. “We’re building their awareness, versus 'This is just happening to me.'”

Regarding perception, 93 percent of the survey respondents reported encountering ethical issues in their lives — a definite improvement over the 70 percent reported four years ago. Taking them at their word, this finding indicates that messages from the case studies are getting through, Schleeter said.

Nevertheless, there’s always room for improvement. As a result, Allen has enhanced this fall’s undergraduate business administration curriculum.

All this is part of the continuing effort by the Center for Sales Innovation to live up to its name and stay up to date. “We want to bring relevant, current situations to the classroom that students have to analytically work through and problem-solve,” Allen said. “These are real-life examples, gathered from alumni.”

Ethics have always been crucial in sales and an area of focus at the center. But decision-making about ethics is even more important in today’s marketplace, Allen maintains.

“As demands on sales people continue to grow and pressure gets more intense, we really need to talk about how to manage that pressure while still maintaining a value system,” she said. “We need to look at how people and organizations are dealing with that pressure as our economy gets more competitive.”

Mary Vitcenda is a St. Paul freelance writer-editor and communications consultant.

By Mary Vitcenda
Nov. 4, 2008

Contact Julie Michener, (651) 690-6521

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