"Care about the compromises you make for if you push them to one side you are free to do worse in the future"

I have not really thought terribly deeply about the issues of corruption other than to know that it is invariably a slippery slope when you do something unethical.

Engaging with as many people as I do I find, myself included, that most people are good most of the time and thus it is not a mistake to extend trust to others as long as it's not blind trust.

When you are managing a group of people there is a tendency for three factors to conspire to cause more wrongdoing than is otherwise found in the individual people you meet.

By understanding these three factors you may be able to keep your environment largely free of corruption and wrongdoing.

So what are these critical factors and what makes them occur.

The first factor is simply that it is often easier in the short term to act without integrity. This means that there is a slight yet real gravitational pull that we must all work against in our daily dealings that pulls us towards to a quick fix and to the glib reply. This is especially true in times of stress. We will call this factor toxic gravity.

If you are completely swamped then it is very tempting to promise something tomorrow and not then deliver. The effects of which multiply easily and when enough people make enough poor excuses whole companies fail yet no single person is actually responsible for the failure. Or are they?

The second factor that comes into play is that mistakes stand out and are often punished while successes are often unsung. If you combine this with the pull of the unethical a culture of recrimination and blame forms and instead of cooperative teamwork you end up with highly positional communication and efforts to hide the truth and displace blame.

In such a situation the leaders of the company are singled out and appear to be responsible for the trouble. Except in rare circumstances it is usually no single person who is to blame for this but it is rather a context that has formed that is toxic. This context is decisive and those who operate inside the context have a strong tendency to behave as that context dictates. We will call the relevant driving factor toxic management.