Moral courage: The key to extinguishing deceptive seminars and designations

Moral courage is important because there are powerful forces defending the status quo. When you challenge bad actors, nasty things can happen, and advisors and their families can get hurt. So when confronting unethical conduct, you must have the courage of your beliefs and the wisdom to choose a response that doesn't wreak havoc on you and on those you love.

Rushworth M. Kidder, an ethics consultant and writer who died some years ago, illuminates such decisions in his book "Moral Courage." He said that having ethical values is not the same as living those values. One can be ethical, he wrote, but also lack the moral courage to move beyond ethical reasoning into principled action.

Rushworth goes on to share several key characteristics of moral courage:

• Know the core ethical values you're willing to fight for, even at great personal cost.
• Have a clear picture of the risks of fighting for those values.
• Be willing to endure both external and internal attacks, from status quo defenders and your own self-doubt.

So the next time you witness a colleague or competitor using seminars or designations to deceive prospects, will you stay silent or defend your values? I hope you take the latter course. To that end, here's a path you might consider following: 

1. Share your concerns with your FMO. Focus on behaviors, not personalities, and brace yourself for angry blowback. Also be prepared for the line, "How could you do this after everything we've done for you?"
2. Encourage the FMO to reform its practices. Enumerate the benefits of doing so for all concerned.
3. Think hard about the wisdom of filing a regulator complaint. It may embroil you in an investigation that makes it difficult to continue writing business. And it may even make it hard or impossible to find another job.
4. If the FMO refuses to change, remove yourself from the situation. This is difficult, but often the best action to take.

If more advisors adhered to this path, I believe we could extinguish the industry's smoldering problems with seminars and designations in relatively short order.