Ethical Leadership in the Age of AI: A Lesson From Ed Clark

By Cori Harding, Founder, Compass Performance Group

There are moments in a career that don’t just teach you something. They change you.

I’ve had the privilege of working under many great leaders over a thirty-two-year career in financial services. But one stands apart. Not because of a strategy he executed or a quarter he won, but because of who he was when it cost him something to be that person.

This is a story about Ed Clark. And about what it means to lead from a place of genuine moral conviction.

I am writing it now because I believe we are in a moment that needs exactly that kind of leadership, and I see too little evidence that organizations are rising to meet it. Ethical leadership in the age of AI is not a new concept dressed in new language. It is the oldest leadership question, made urgent again.

Ed Clark: Leading Before It Was Safe To

In 1994, while serving as President and CEO of Canada Trust, Ed Clark introduced same-sex benefits, believed to be a first among major North American financial institutions.

To understand what that decision meant, it helps to remember what 1994 actually looked like. Same-sex marriage was eleven years away. Federal protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation did not yet exist in Canada; it would not arrive until 1996. That same year, a man in Alberta was fired because of his sexual orientation and the provincial human rights commission refused to investigate, because the law did not yet require them to. The cultural and legal environment offered no cover, no precedent, and no roadmap.

For a financial institution to act in that climate was not a progressive gesture. It was a genuine act of institutional courage. The reputational risk was real. The customer backlash risk was real. Clark made the decision anyway. Not because the business case was clear, but because his moral case was.

When TD acquired Canada Trust in 2000 and Clark became CEO of the combined institution, that commitment came with him. Under his leadership, TD built internal employee networks, sponsored Pride festivals across North America, and took public stands at a time when most corporations were doing neither.

“You have to start and say this is just the right thing to do,” he told CBC News following his keynote at the WorldPride Human Rights Conference in Toronto. “This is about human rights, this is about being a good corporate citizen, this is about being a good person citizen.” 

I remember hearing his words and feeling something come alive in me.

For someone like me, who believes that how you impact people is the truest measure of leadership, this hit deeply. Here was the most senior person in the organization standing in public, before it was safe or popular, and saying: people matter. Not as a policy. Not as a program. As a conviction.

I can only imagine what that moment meant for LGBT colleagues and customers who had spent years navigating organizations that did not see them. The knowledge that the person at the top of the institution had looked at the world as it was and chose to build something better.

That kind of leadership creates loyalty that goes all the way down...the kind that doesn’t show up in an engagement survey...the kind that stays with you for decades. I know this because I felt it and I carried it with me through decades of leadership decisions of my own...an internal reference point for what it looks like when someone in authority chooses principle over convenience.

Clark’s commitment to doing right by people was not confined to a single decision. The Rotman School of Management described his entire tenure as defined by a track record of doing the right thing. American Banker noted that early in his CEO tenure he walked away from a highly profitable but overly complex product line because it was, in his words, simply not the right thing to do, a decision that drew criticism at the time and proved prescient when the financial crisis arrived years later.

The Hidden Value of Public Courage

There is a clear business case for inclusive leadership. The research is unambiguous on that. Clark made it plainly: “The only way to make people their best is to allow them to be their true selves. If you let prejudices get inside the organization, then you inhibit people being everything that they can be. So, it’s actually core to our whole business strategy.” 

But underneath that business case lives something much bigger.

When a leader takes a public stand rooted in moral conviction, employees feel seen, valued, and proud. They feel the organization they are giving their working lives to is run by people with a genuine internal compass, one that guides decisions before the business case is written. Today we might call that psychological safety. At the time, I experienced it more simply: as trust.

When trust goes that deep, employees orient toward what is best for the organization. They surface the uncomfortable truth instead of just the polished version. They flag risk before it becomes a crisis. They choose the long-term answer over the short-term win. They feel represented by the organization, not just employed by it. 

They become its ambassadors, its defenders, and its recruiters.

They begin to act not only as employees, but as stewards of something they believe is worth protecting.

Recognition programs and reward initiatives have their place. But they do not reach that depth. Only a human-based foundation does. The kind built on the sincere conviction that doing right by people is not a tactic. It is the moral code of the entire organization.

Clark was later recognized by Egale Canada Human Rights Trust for his leadership as an ally of Canada’s LGBT community. In accepting, he said: “Working to build a more diverse and inclusive environment where everyone is respected and has the opportunity to fulfill their potential is not only the right thing to do. It’s critical to achieving our mission.” 

Right thing first. Business case second. Get that order backwards and you’ll win the quarter. Get it right and you’ll build something worth leading.

What This Has to Do with AI Transformation

I am writing this now, not as nostalgia, but as a warning and an invitation, because I believe we are in a moment that demands exactly this kind of leadership, and I see too little evidence that organizations are rising to it.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the workforce at a pace that is genuinely unprecedented. Entire categories of work are being automated. Organizational structures are being redesigned. Headcount decisions are being made at scale, often driven by efficiency logic applied on a quarterly time horizon, to decisions whose consequences will play out over a decade. The temptation is to lead from the spreadsheet, to make the clean, defensible, dashboard-approved decisions...to treat people as variables in an optimization model rather than as the living architecture of the institution. 

That is exactly where moral leadership becomes most important and most rare.

The organizations that navigate this well will not be the ones that avoid tough decisions. They will be the ones whose leaders pause to ask three questions before they make them:

• What do we owe the people whose roles are changing?

• What institutional knowledge walks out the door when a role disappears, and what will replacing it actually cost?

• How do we use AI to strengthen human capacity, not simply reduce human cost?

These are not soft questions. They are business-critical questions with long tails, ones that determine whether an organization emerges from this transformation stronger, or simply leaner for a while, before the hidden costs begin to surface.

I want to be clear. I believe in what AI makes possible. Not just the efficiency gains, the deeper opportunity to redesign how organizations work, what leaders focus on, and what becomes possible when human energy is directed toward judgment, relationships, and things that actually require wisdom. My concern is not the technology, it is the leaders who deploy it without asking what it will cost the people inside their organizations, and what it will cost them in five years when the institutional knowledge, the culture, and the bench they quietly dismantled are nowhere to be found.

The ROI

Great leaders have always understood something that is easy to say and genuinely difficult to practice: 

Doing right by people and building a high-performing organization are not competing priorities. They are the same priority, viewed from different time horizons.

Ed Clark’s commitment to LGBT inclusion travelled with him across two institutions and twelve years as CEO of TD. Under his leadership, TD grew to become the second-largest bank in Canada, built a culture of customer service that was genuinely distinctive, and developed a generation of leaders who built cultures of their own that reflected what they learned from him. The culture produced results that lived far past his tenure because it was led by valuing people.

The culture he built, rooted in a belief that people do their best work when they are fully themselves, was not separate from the business results. It was inseparable from them.

That is the lesson I carry. Not that any one leader or any one organization has all the answers. Not that the past was simpler or better. But that there is an anchor available to every leader in every era... a willingness to ask, before the business case is made, is this the right thing to do?

In a time of genuine disruption, when the decisions being made today will shape organizations and careers and communities for the next decade, that anchor matters more than it has in a very long time.

Leaders who hold themselves to it will build organizations worth working for, worth defending, and worth the loyalty of the people inside them.

Leaders who don’t will eventually discover that the costs they could not see on the dashboard were real all along.

Cori Harding is the Founder and Principal of Compass Performance Group, a boutique advisory and leadership development practice focused on human-centric leadership and real business performance. She brings thirty-two years of financial services experience to her work with organizations navigating transformation, talent strategy, and culture.

Sources

1. CBC News. “Just the right thing to do: TD Bank chief says of embracing LGBT.” June 27, 2014.

2. Newswire Canada. “President & CEO of TD Bank Fina

ncial Group to be Honoured for Leadership as an Ally of Canada’s Lesbian, Gay, Bi and Trans Community.” September 14, 2010.

3. CBC News. “TD CEO Ed Clark: I’m paid too much so I give back.” 2014.

4. Rotman School of Management. “Thought Leader Interview: Ed Clark.” Fall 2017.

5. American Banker. “Lifetime Achievement Honoree: TD’s Ed Clark.” August 29, 2017.

6. LGBTQ Rights in Canada. Wikipedia. “Discrimination protections: Sexual orientation beginning provincially in 1977; federally since 1996.”

7. QueerEvents.ca. “Queer History: Rights & Freedoms.” Referencing Vriend v. Alberta, 1994.