What Are Tomorrow's Leaders Learning From Us Today? A Lesson in Ethical Leadership

September 2026 - Ken O'Malley - I recently completed a couple of ethics training courses to renew my Professional Engineering license, and they got me thinking about ethics and leadership—not just in engineering decision-making, but in everyday leadership situations.

That thinking led me back to a paper written by my former colleague Chris Powell, PE, CFSE, The Courage to Intervene: Developing Ethical Leadership in the Next Generation of Process Safety Professionals, prepared for the 2026 AIChE Global Congress on Process Safety.

Chris opens with a story that has stuck with me.

A safety-critical system had been commissioned and, from a procedural standpoint, the project was ready to move into startup. But a senior safety leader concluded that some of the work, performed under significant schedule pressure, had not been completed with the rigor it deserved.

There was no regulatory violation, and there was no clear technical failure. The leader simply wasn't comfortable that the work met the standard of his organization.

So, he required the most critical portions of the commissioning to be performed again under more controlled and thoughtful conditions.

That decision delayed startup; it cost real money. And the decision had to be justified to his leadership team without a clear and compelling safety case that made the choice obvious.

There is an important lesson in that story that extends well beyond process safety.

Our values are most tested when honoring them costs us something.

Today's leaders operate under tremendous pressure to perform. Grow revenue. Protect margins. Move fast to win market from competitors. Hit quarterly goals. Do more with less.

These are all legitimate responsibilities of leadership.

When Small Compromises Start to Look Reasonable

Problems creep in, though, when small compromises begin to look reasonable in service of those goals.

"We're technically compliant."

"It's good enough."

"We'll address it later."

"It's only this once."

Chris describes how individually defensible decisions like these can begin to normalize deviation. The extraordinary becomes acceptable, and eventually, it becomes normal.

There is another dimension that I think is easy to overlook: When a leader faces a difficult decision, there can be real value in letting the team see some of the forces at work behind the scenes.

Help them understand and appreciate the financial and schedule pressure, the reasons why the easier choice might have been attractive and technically defensible, and then why the harder path was chosen anyway.

This visibility is important. If the team only sees the outcomes and consequences of a difficult decision, they miss an important part of learning what it means to be a leader.  They need to see experienced leaders wrestle with competing responsibilities and ultimately decide where the line is.

Certainly, not every leadership discussion can be shared broadly. But some difficult decisions can become great teachable moments, and those opportunities should not be wasted.

The Takeaway

Chris closes his paper with an idea I think is worth reflecting on: the most enduring legacy of experienced leaders may not be their technical or commercial knowledge, or even their ability for strategic thinking, but rather the examples they set for others to follow.

I agree.

Someday, the people being developed today will face their own versions of these decisions—when doing what's right has a real and immediate cost and the justification is opaque.

What are tomorrow’s leaders learning from watching us today?

Credit: Chris Powell, PE, CFSE, The Courage to Intervene: Developing Ethical Leadership in the Next Generation of Process Safety Professionals, prepared for the 2026 AIChE Spring Meeting and 22nd Global Congress on Process Safety.