A crisis is no time to find your team's moral compass

There is a particular tone in a room when the red lines begin to blur. I have heard it.

I heard it when the company I was working for was taken over by WorldCom. At first nothing dramatic happened. The language did not change overnight. No one stood up and announced that standards were being lowered.

Instead, the pressure increased. Targets were stretched. Reporting became more aggressive. Processes were pushed to their boundaries, then just beyond their boundaries.  We went from white to light grey, from light grey to dark grey, and eventually, for some, to black.

Not in a single leap. In quiet increments. That is how moral drift works.

Some of us left. Many stayed. Each individual made their own calculation about what was acceptable, what was survivable, what was necessary.

But here is the point that matters for leaders. The organisation had never been explicit about its red lines. So when the pressure came, people relied on their personal compass, and personal compasses vary.

Moral drift does not feel dramatic at the time

When companies fail ethically, observers often ask how they did not see it coming. The answer is simple. It rarely feels like a dramatic break.

It feels incremental. One quarter of aggressive revenue recognition. One exception to a compliance process. One commercially necessary adjustment.

Each decision can be rationalised in isolation. Collectively, they define culture.

WorldCom did not collapse because of one decision. It collapsed because boundaries were repeatedly stretched and there was no shared agreement on where the line truly was.

And we do not have to look far to see similar patterns today.

The 737 Max crisis at Boeing was not the result of a single rogue engineer. Investigations pointed to sustained pressure around production timelines and competitive positioning. Safety concerns were raised internally. The question is not whether mistakes happen in complex systems, they do. The question is whether safety red lines are absolute or negotiable. In aviation, negotiable is catastrophic.

At Wirecard, sustained questions about accounting practices were met with defensive responses while the growth narrative dominated. Eventually €1.9 billion simply did not exist. Again, not one dramatic leap into misconduct, but prolonged boundary erosion under commercial pressure.

These are different sectors. Different pressures. The common thread is boundary testing.

High performance without shared ethics is fragile

In my current work with senior leadership teams, I see a recurring risk. Teams invest heavily in strategy alignment, operating models and performance metrics. Very few invest serious time in defining their non negotiables.

Not values in a brochure. Red lines in behaviour.

Would we walk away from a contract that delivers 20 percent of revenue if it conflicts with our standards? Would we publicly acknowledge a serious AI failure if transparency damages market confidence? Would we remove a senior executive whose numbers are exceptional but whose behaviour corrodes trust?

These are not theoretical questions. They are board level realities, and they cannot be answered properly in the middle of a crisis.

AI is accelerating the ethical pressure

AI now influences hiring, credit decisions, customer interactions and operational control. The commercial upside is significant. So is the temptation to move faster than governance.

Across the technology sector we can see tension between innovation speed and societal responsibility. Content moderation debates at X, data governance challenges at Meta, and safety discussions across AI firms all illustrate the same underlying issue. Where are the red lines, and who defines them?

Technology does not create ethical weakness. It amplifies it.

If your executive team has not explicitly agreed its boundaries around data use, bias, transparency and human oversight, those decisions will be made under pressure, in fragments, and often inconsistently.

That is reputational risk of the highest order.

Character is decided in advance

The most resilient organisations I have worked with share one common feature. When pressure rises, debate narrows. Not because they lack intelligence, but because they have pre agreed boundaries. They know what they will not do.

That clarity reduces internal friction. It accelerates decision making. It protects trust.

And trust, when everything else is unstable, is the only real stabiliser.

At this stage in my life and career, I am less interested in fashionable leadership language. I am interested in durability.

I have seen what happens when commercial pressure steadily erodes standards. I have seen good people rationalise small compromises that compound into systemic failure.

A crisis is not the time to discover that your leadership team do not share a moral compass.

If you do not define your red lines in calm conditions, they will be defined for you in chaos. And by then, it is usually too late.