By Linda Fisher Thornton How well is your organization navigating the ethical pitfalls of the working world? If you're finding it to be a major challenge right now, you're not alone. Why is it so hard to navigate ethical minefields now? There is currently a "toxic soup" of factors at play...
Category: Ethical Leadership Development
Digital Deception: Unethical Sleight of Hand
Things are not always as they seem. Technology has advanced to the point that we can't be sure whether or not what we're seeing is real. There are many new ways that bad actors are usual digital sleight of hand to trick us. And the list is growing. It will take a healthy dose of skepticism, critical observation and research skills to find out if what we see is as it appears. Educate yourself and your teams about these methods of trickery and how to spot them:
Unethical Leadership: Beliefs of Convenience
By Linda Fisher Thornton Sometimes leaders believe things that aren't true because they haven't taken time to investigate the truth. In other cases, they may have trusted someone who has misled them. But there's an even more problematic reason some leaders may ignore the truth - claiming to believe the falsehood may benefit them in a tangible way.
Top 10 2020: Leading in Context Blog
By Linda Fisher Thornton Of the 52 individual posts published on the Leading in Context Blog in 2020, these 10 were the most popular. See if you notice a theme that connects these new topics that readers accessed most frequently.
Pandemic Leadership: 3 Questions To Ask in the New Year
By Linda Fisher Thornton Each year I raise questions that help leaders stay current as ethical expectations change. Here are three new questions to ponder as we head into a New Year. They are important questions about our ethical intentions, action and impact that will help guide our choices in the coming year.
Senior Leaders: Set Clear Expectations For Values
Senior leaders set the tone for the organization's ethics, but the senior leadership responsibility for values leadership includes much more than that. Today, I'll look at the senior leader responsibility for sharing clear expectations, and explore more important roles that go well beyond setting the bar for expected behavior.
10 Leadership Strategies For Thriving in 2021
By Linda Fisher Thornton Here we are at the end of the year already. So much of it has been a blur as we've scrambled to reinvent our work and daily habits to adapt to a persistent global pandemic.
Ethics is Actionable
Some people think about ethics as a theoretical concept that lives in procedures and regulations, but they're missing the point. Ethics is not just an esoteric concept. It's an actionable responsibility.
Clarify, Don’t Oversimplify
Many of us are on a quest to simplify our lives, reduce our clutter and improve our focus. This is a positive step that can improve our lives, but it doesn't work at all when applied to our decision making.
Ethics is Acting Beyond Self-Interest
By Linda Fisher Thornton Ethics is fundamentally about acting beyond our own self-interests. Can we be ethical without considering others and acting in ways that benefit them?
10 COVID-19 Trends: Our Inner Space
By Linda Fisher Thornton It seems that we're all getting more in touch with our "inner space" during the COVID-19 pandemic. The extensive time in isolation has given us the time and opportunity to face our truths - our beliefs, our impact and our choices.
Minimum Standard Leadership
By Linda Fisher Thornton I tell my students that if you go through life just reaching for the minimum standard, you end up with a minimum standard life. The good things in life, including success and happiness are more likely to happen when we reach higher than the baseline that is expected of us.
Good Leadership Serves, Respects and Uplifts
By Linda Fisher Thornton What is the ultimate goal of leadership? This question seems simple enough at first, and then begins to get tricky because it can’t be answered in one simple statement.
Leadership: Evaluating Ethical Awareness
By Linda Fisher Thornton Ethical awareness may have been considered private in the past, but it has become easier to observe in a society that is always socially connected. Since ethical reputation is a defining element in individual and organizational success, it is time that we consider ethical awareness as a key element of experience when selecting leaders for our businesses, community organizations, governments, and nations.
17 Leadership Paradoxes
COVID-19 has brought us many challenges including balancing economic and human factors, moving quickly but taking time to show compassion and so on. This Center for Creative Leadership video succinctly introduces 6 paradoxes in the essential leadership skills required in a post-COVID world.
