Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Ethics Class


I'm teaching a workshop on ethical decision making in Phoenix on April 4.

The topic sounds easy until you encounter those Right versus Right situations where one virtue must prevail over another. Some of the nicest people are capable of doing some very unethical things and so checking out our rationalizations - and aren't we creative when it comes to those? - can be the equivalent of getting a flu shot.

An odd aspect of ethics training, however, is it can be exhausting. A strange silence falls as people churn over the times when their behavior was questionable or perhaps, in retrospect, just flat-out unethical.

I'm hardly immune from this so it's not as if the participants are getting training from a saint.

When management is the topic, we often talk about the importance of the basics. The subject of ethics is about as basic as it gets. At your next staff meeting, ask people about the situations in which honesty is optional. Listen carefully to the responses.

I guarantee that they'll be interesting.

3 comments:

Bob said...

Another interesting discussion is at what point do you have to worry about or consider ethics? Before or after the fact? Such as, when did we deem this particular behaviour as unethical?

Politicians seem to have very 'bendy' ethics, does this set a good example for everybody else?

Dan in Philly said...

Why don't you write a play about executives confronted by equal but opposite ethical inperatives which forces them to choose between two equally unethcial outcomes? I would read such a play.

Michael Wade said...

Bob,

Preferably before acting but evaluating the past has its benefits.

Dan,

Good plot! I'll think about that.

Michael