A question I am often asked by everyone from law students to board members is some version of this: can you really do well by doing good, and can you explain how ethical behaviour in business actually pays? My answer, built over decades as a General Counsel and Company Secretary in some of the world’s largest companies, is an unequivocal yes, but it requires more than good intentions. It requires the ability to make the case.

Before you can argue for values inside a business, you must first choose the right business, and it is remarkable how often people treat that choice as a secondary consideration rather than the foundational one it actually is. The organisation you work for is not merely a context for your career but a daily expression of your judgement, and if its values are fundamentally incompatible with yours, no amount of individual integrity will bridge that gap; you will spend your energy negotiating the distance rather than doing the work. Knowing where your own red lines lie, and being honest about them before you accept an offer, is not idealism. It is professionalism.

The idea that the General Counsel is the conscience of the company is one I hear often, and one that deserves scrutiny. A GC can activate conscience, surface uncomfortable truths, and connect a board’s decisions to their longer-term consequences, but a GC cannot manufacture conscience where none exists. What we can do, and what is frequently our most important contribution, is to make the case that ethical failure and commercial failure are not separate risks arriving on separate timelines; they are the same risk, arriving at different speeds. The collapse of Arthur Andersen was not incidental to its proximity to Enron but was the direct consequence of becoming, in the public mind, an organisation that had chosen complicity over integrity, and even in industries where the product is something tangible rather than a professional reputation, the erosion of trust follows the same pattern, more slowly perhaps, but just as surely.

The framework I return to most often is the three circles of sustainability, a Venn diagram of three overlapping rings whose intersection defines the only space in which a business can genuinely thrive over time. The first ring is profit: without financial viability, nothing else is sustainable, and good intentions do not outlast insolvency. The second is the environment: this is not an abstract concern, but a practical one. Maintaining the environment in which you operate is not merely an ethical preference but a commercial imperative if you wish to be in business for the long term. At the extreme, an industry that exhausts its own supply base has no future, however admirable its intentions, and for any industry damaging the environment leads to regulatory constraints, increased costs and reputational damage, which can reduce sales and make it harder to do business. The third circle is people, encompassing employees, suppliers, customers and communities, and an organisation that treats its people as a cost to be minimised rather than a resource to be invested in will find, eventually, that it has made itself fragile in ways that do not appear on a balance sheet until the moment they catastrophically do.

The relationship between staff wellbeing and operational resilience is one that businesses persistently underestimate, because disengagement does not present itself as a systemic risk until it becomes one. When people do not care about outcomes, they stop maintaining the small, invisible things that hold systems together, and the consequences accumulate quietly until they surface with a force entirely disproportionate to what any single point of failure would seem to warrant. The human element is integral to the technical or financial element. In the same way, looking after your customers, consumers, and the communities in which you operate means you will have their support, which underpins not just your future success but your future survival.

There is a related failure I think of as the failure of translation, where an organisation may have values adopted by the board and inscribed in its code of conduct and its communications, but the people responsible for operational decisions cannot see how those values connect to business outcomes and so treat them as aspirational decoration rather than operational guidance. The job of the GC, and of anyone in a leadership role with ethical responsibilities, is not simply to assert that something is right but to demonstrate that doing the right thing is also, in most circumstances, the intelligent thing, and that these two arguments, held together, are far more difficult to dismiss than either one advanced in isolation. Safety investment illustrates this clearly: the ethical argument for maintaining safe working conditions is self-evident, but the business case, when properly constructed, is equally compelling, since the cost of negligence, both legal and reputational, vastly exceeds the cost of prevention.

Working across cultures adds a further dimension of complexity that is worth addressing honestly, because values, properly understood, operate at two distinct levels. There are the core principles, which should be non-negotiable, and there is the expression of those principles and translation into daily action, which must be sensitive to the legal, cultural and social environment in which you are operating. The principle that every person deserves dignity and inclusion is one I hold to be universal, but the means by which you engage your audience to put that into practice will differ considerably across jurisdictions and indeed parts of a business. It must always be engaging and relevant to your audience, drawing on examples from their experience. Imposing a single mode of expression globally, without regard for local conditions, can be counterproductive and can draw attention to differences in ways that expose people to harm rather than protecting them. The task is to hold the principle firmly while always being thoughtful about method and listening to your colleagues who work in the relevant team, area and region.

One final point on the GC’s role, and perhaps the most important for you as an individual: there is a version of the conscience function that slides, under pressure, into something more troubling, which is the willingness to absorb blame that properly belongs elsewhere. The GC’s job is to help an organisation navigate difficulty and find the legal and ethical path through a problem, not to serve as a liability shield for those who have made bad decisions. An organisation that treats its legal counsel that way does not deserve good legal counsel, and a lawyer who accepts that role has confused loyalty with complicity and has forgotten that the business is the client, not the individuals in it.

Values and commercial value are not competing priorities to be traded off against one another in some perpetual negotiation between ethics and economics. They are, when the argument is properly made and properly understood, two expressions of the same underlying logic, and learning to make that argument, clearly, consistently and with genuine conviction, is one of the most important things any of us in this profession can do.

Disclaimer: This post features insights from a guest author. Elevate occasionally invites select industry voices to share their perspectives on topics of interest to our audience. The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Elevate.