Andi runs a ten-person sales team at a large telecoms company, selling equipment into financial institutions. Last year the team brought in £91m of orders. This year, head office wants 10% growth to £100m, and Andi’s own pay depends on hitting it.
She can set targets for her ten salespeople however she likes, within limits. And she’s being encouraged, gently but unmistakably, to do what everyone around her does: over-target. Set individual quotas that sum to £110m instead of £100m, on the theory that stretch produces effort. If everyone is chasing 10% more than they need to, the thinking goes, the team is more likely to land the number that matters.
The maths works in Andi’s favour. It works against the ten people in her room. Some of them will now, almost by design, miss their number, earn less commission, feel worse about themselves, walk into next year’s performance review with a story to tell that isn’t the one they wanted.
Andi feels uneasy about this. She doesn’t have a framework for the unease. She has never been taught one. Nobody has.
I’ve spent forty years in and around complex B2B sales as a salesperson, a manager, a trainer, a consultant, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen this exact dilemma named out loud, let alone handed a proper toolkit. It’s just “how targeting works.” So, a few years ago, while doing the philosophy degree I’d always wanted to finish, I decided to see whether it could be named properly. What follows is where that took me, and it now sits underneath the doctoral research I’m doing on ethical decision-making in sales management, so this is very much a live thread, not a closed file.
Why sales managers are in a strange spot
Most writing on sales ethics treats sales as a subset of marketing, which is a bit like treating a general as a subset of the diplomatic corps. It misses what’s distinctive. Bush, Oakley and Cicala’s research on the “sales subculture” gets closer: sales professionals are boundary-spanners, operating in a role that’s psychologically and organisationally separated from the rest of the business, dealing constantly with people outside it: customers, partners, competitors, in situations thick with uncertainty. For a sales manager, that boundary-spanning is even more pronounced: they’re holding relationships up the chain, across the team, and out into the whole commercial ecosystem, often simultaneously, often under time pressure, often with real money riding on the next five minutes.
Layer onto that the fact, not flattering, but reasonably well evidenced, that reward structures heavy on commission and bonus correlate with a higher tolerance for ethically dubious behaviour in sales populations specifically. Put a boundary-spanning role, a compressed decision window, and a compensation-driven incentive structure in the same room, and you get exactly the kind of situation Andi is in, a decision that matters, made fast, with no obvious rulebook.
The obvious move is to borrow ethics from somewhere more established. Two candidates present themselves, and both turn out to be dead ends worth walking down anyway, because the reasons they fail tell you what you actually need.
Why “just be a professional” doesn’t work
The traditional professions like law and medicine have well-worn ethical machinery: professional bodies, codes of conduct, years of training, and crucially, a foundational commitment to some human good beyond the transaction. A doctor’s professional identity is bound up with health; a lawyer’s, however imperfectly, with justice. Sales managers routinely call themselves professionals, but the structure isn’t there underneath the word. There’s no licensing body, no universal code, no agreed answer to “what human good does this role exist to serve” because for most people, honestly, the answer would have to be “revenue,” and revenue isn’t a human good in the way health or justice are. I don’t say this to be unkind about the profession I’ve spent my life in; I say it because pretending otherwise means borrowing a framework that doesn’t fit and then being surprised when it doesn’t hold weight in the moment of decision.
Why the military fits better than you’d expect
The second candidate is stranger and, I think, more useful: military ethics. It sounds like an odd place to look for guidance on setting sales quotas, but the structural similarities are closer than they first appear. Both roles chase clearly defined, transparent objectives; a target, a mission. Both are frequently described in adversarial terms by their own practitioners (sales managers talk about “the competition” the way officers talk about opposing forces, and The Art of War remains, bafflingly or not, a staple of new-manager reading lists). Both are intensely boundary-spanning: an officer must weigh their own troops, civilians, allies, government, and the mission itself, often in the same five minutes.
Where the military differs, and differs usefully, is that it takes the ethical training seriously in a way business never has. The US Army’s leadership doctrine talks explicitly about developing “leaders of character.” The British Army’s leadership code is built openly around named values. And in the Australian officer training documented in ‘Key Concepts in Military Ethics’, there’s a practical three-step process for making hard calls in the field, sometimes called Ethical Triangulation.
It works like this. First, ask the question as a matter of rules and rights, independent of outcome (what philosophers call deontological). Does this involve deliberately killing non-combatants? Does it involve torture? If a clear rule settles it, you’re done. Second, if the rules don’t resolve it, weigh the consequences: whose lives, whose risk, what mission value, balanced against each other. As one former Navy SEAL commander put it, describing what actually occupies a commander’s mind in an active theatre: the value of the mission, the risk to your own people, the risk to non-combatants, weighed continuously, with real cost to getting it wrong. Third, if consequences still don’t produce a clean answer, and in anything genuinely complex, they usually don’t, because you can’t compute what you can’t fully know, you fall back on character. What would the best of your officers do here?
Three lenses, applied in sequence, each catching what the last one missed. Rules first, because some things are simply off the table regardless of outcome. Consequences second, because most decisions aren’t covered by a rule and outcomes matter. Character third, because even consequences run out of road once a situation gets tangled enough, and Andi’s situation, with ten people’s careers and a shareholder’s expectations pulling in different directions, is exactly that tangled.
Two things you have to believe before triangulation works
Borrowing the method isn’t quite enough on its own as it needs two supporting beliefs to actually bite in a commercial setting, and this is where I think the real argument lies.
The first is what kind of business you think you’re running. If you hold a pure shareholder-value view, that the business exists to make its owners money, full stop (period), then a stakeholder-weighted framework like this has nowhere to attach. You’d need something closer to hard-coded compliance rules instead, which handle the worst abuses but give you nothing for the daily, tactical, “how do I set Dave’s number” calls. Triangulation only earns its keep if you actually believe it, not merely state it in the company values deck: that your team, your customers, your partners, and your shareholders all have a legitimate stake in the outcome, not merely an instrumental one that gets dropped the moment it stops serving the short-term numbers. Edward Freeman’s stakeholder theory versus Milton Friedman’s shareholder view isn’t an abstract debate for Andi; it’s the difference between a framework that can actually carry weight in her decision and one that can’t.
The second belief is subtler: that the relationship between a manager and their team, particularly around something like targets, is legitimately a little adversarial, and that this is fine. Philosopher Arthur Applebaum’s work on “Fair Play” describes exactly this kind of situation: a middle-level relationship between people with partly conflicting interests, where certain moves that would be unacceptable elsewhere become permissible, provided there’s informed consent, room for autonomy, and crucially, real transparency about how the game is played. Salespeople want lower targets; managers want stretch. That tension isn’t a failure of the relationship. It’s the relationship, tacitly agreed to the moment someone takes the job (and doubly so for talented salespeople, who can leave for a competitor with a phone call). Fair Play doesn’t make the adversarial edge go away. It puts boundaries around it: transparency, accountability, respected norms; so the edge doesn’t become exploitation.
Back to Andi
Run her dilemma through the three steps. Rules based (deontologically), ask whether she could defend the decision publicly, to her own team, without lying about it. That single test: “could I explain this without deceit if it came out?” already rules out the most aggressive versions of over-targeting; it’s a rule several experienced managers I’ve worked with use instinctively without ever naming it. Consequentially, map the stakeholders including her team, her own management, shareholders, supporting colleagues, customers, and you find something uncomfortable: a purely consequentialist reading actually argues for over-targeting, provided the pain is focused on whichever one or two people are least likely to leave. That’s the “spread it thin or dump it on the weakest link” logic that consequentialism, taken on its own, will hand you, and it’s precisely why nobody should stop there. It’s only when you bring in the third lens of character traits such as integrity, fairness, courage, trustworthiness, that the picture clarifies.
Andi’s actual call was to not over-target, at least not as a default, and comes from triangulating all three approaches, not from any one of them alone. And the framework earns its keep precisely in the harder variations: what do you do when a big deal slips from Q4 into Q1 and the temptation is to load the “already banked” salesperson with next year’s stretch? What do you do with two unfilled headcount slots and a choice between giving them a target they could hit, or an inflated one that punishes everyone else? What do you do when your own boss has already added their buffer on top of someone else’s buffer, three layers up the chain, until the number reaching your desk bears no relation to what the business can actually support? Run each through the same three questions, and you don’t always get a clean answer, but you get a defensible one, and you get it fast enough to actually use on a Tuesday afternoon, which a purely academic ethics seminar rarely offers a working manager.
Why this matters beyond one essay
I don’t think this is a complete theory, and I said so when I first wrote it up as an undergraduate dissertation, and I still think it now that it’s feeding into doctoral work. It’s built on one case and some plausible variations, not a large empirical study (which is coming). It assumes you can get an organisation to genuinely hold a stakeholder view rather than a “stakeholder-shaped shareholder view,” which is its own uphill argument. And “virtue ethics”, the theoretical academic framework doing the heaviest lifting at the point everything else runs out, is notoriously bad at giving crisp answers, which is exactly its strength and its weakness at once.
But I think the shape of it is right, and I think it’s right because it matches something the military worked out long before business ethics caught up: that in a boundary-spanning, ambiguous, high-stakes, time-pressured role, you cannot resolve every hard call with a single ethical lens. You need rules for what’s simply off the table, consequences for weighing the rest, and character for the residue that neither of the first two can touch. Sales management, for all its differences from a battlefield, shares exactly that structure. It might be the first place outside the military where that structure has been made explicit rather than assumed.
If you manage a sales team, the practical test is smaller than all of that: next time you’re setting a number that will land unevenly on your people, ask yourself honestly whether you could explain the decision to their faces without a single lie in it. If you can’t quite get there, that’s not a training problem. That’s the answer.
This post was originally a longer academic dissertation for my philosophy degree in 2024. Please contact me if you would like the longer version with academic references.