2nd Edition – May 08

Attracta Lagan

Welcome

WELCOME to our 2nd edition. The theme of this edition is ethics in the practice as the past few months have seen us all over the country helping organisations roll out their ethics training programs. It is our impression that ethics has reached a tipping point and many organisations are realising that the discussion of ethical challenges is a sign of positive progress and enhances employee engagement. Later in the year we will run the first of a series of public workshops to allow individuals to learn more about shaping the ethical context of their organisation. We'll post details on the website. Finally, we are delighted to announce that Michael Labrosse of the Leadership Commonwealth (U.S.) will be visiting Australia for a series of workshops on Ethical Leadership and Distributive Leadership. Michael has worked on assignments all over the world, most recently in Croatia. His organisation developed the Executive Leadership Profile for the Caux Roundtable. If you would like to receive details of Michael's workshops, please use the enquire form on our website.

We hope you enjoy Ethics in the Practice.

Values in Action

I'm having what she's having.

MANY organisational leaders today decide to develop a set of organisational values simply to keep up with the Joneses - everyone else has a set so we must have one too! When this approach is adopted typically politically correct values are chosen that bear little relationship to how things actually happen in their workplace.

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Has compliance become de facto ethics?

BEHIND every major Australian corporate scandal of late, can be found an organisational culture where unethical practices went unchecked. Yet, how cultures become the systemic source of unethical practices is perhaps the least explored area by compliance professionals.

So much compliance today essentially looks for ethics in the breech not the practice. Opportunities to hone ethical competence in the workplace is essential because when it comes to human behaviour, there is no standing still.

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Trends Watch

Executive Ethical Leadership

AMORAL leadership rather than unethical leadership was found to be more common among senior managers in an American study of executives and ethics professionals.

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Brian Moran

The Ethical difference between "Surfing" and "Astroturfing"

AS more and more people - especially but not exclusively Gen Ys - use social networks and virtual communities to conduct their social lives and gather information on life, the universe and spirituality, it seems that big business is determined to gatecrash these closed communities.

Many of these ultra-consumers have shut themselves off from conventional advertising and are refusing to participate in the consumer society and so big advertisers such as, allegedly, Big Tobacco and Warner Bros. have infiltrated networking sites such as YouTube and Myspace with supposedly innocent clips that seem to support a particular film or push a particular point of view. These "amateur" videos purport to come from fans of the particular products or feature and extol the virtues of the product. Enter "Astroturfing".

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Ethics Training

IN running close to 200 ethics training workshops in the last 12 months, Managing Values has observed the same top four dynamics that characterise workplaces as noted by the Washington-based Ethics Resource Centre's 2005 National Business Ethics Surveys. Find out what they are in this article.

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Save your marriage, save the planet

RESEARCHERS at Michigan State University have come up with a practical way that you can help save the planet - save your marriage. Between the years 2001 and 2005 in the United States divorced households used 42% more water, 53% more energy and 61% more land than those living as married couples. In 2005 alone, divorced households consumed a whopping 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water. Some of which would have been saved if the divorce rate was lower.

So the message is clear: don't hug a tree alone; do it with your life partner.

The Internet time sink

WALL Street Journal notes that huge chunks of company time are being consumed by employees tuning into YouTube or MySpace, wasting time and burdening company’s Internet bandwidth.

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Ethics Newsline reports...

MORE than three-quarters of MBA students surveyed by the Aspen Institute Business and Society Program say strong ethics and values are integral to company performance. but the Rocky Mountain News reports that only 43 percent of respondents said their MBA courses were sufficiently preparing them for values conflicts later in their careers.

Research Spotlight

Ethics and Morality Defined

THE most frequently asked question in Australian workplace ethics workshops is to define the difference between ethics and morality. Here’s our definition:

Ethics is the study of how people decide what is right and wrong. It recognises that there are different frameworks of morality giving rise to different ways of thinking about what might be appropriate values and standards. Ethics is also about considering possible actions and therefore consequences whereas morality is about behaving according to a predefined standard. Ethics is cross cultural and includes the debate between differing moralities while morality describes how judgements are made. We become engaged in the ethical debate when we begin to evaluate the moral standards we or others use and compare these to other decision making frameworks.

“Morality is the attitude we adopt towards people we don’t like”

Oscar Wilde