By Linda Fisher Thornton I have been thinking about how lightly some leaders take the subject of ethics. Some ignore ethical issues altogether or think ethical issues are unimportant compared to money concerns. It’s a risky choice to take ethics lightly. Why? There are no “ethics transplants” for people who have made bad ethical decisions. We are responsible for our choices. If an ethics transplant did exist and we could easily start over, imagine how long the waiting list would be for that procedure! Since there is no quick fix for failed ethics, we need to protect our ethical reputations carefully, and choose to stay on an ethical path. In our global society, where almost anything can be obtained for a price, you can’t buy ethics.
Category: Ethical Thinking
5 Ways To Bolster Your Organization’s Ethical Immune System
By Linda Fisher Thornton I was thinking about organizational culture recently, and noticed an interesting parallel. Eating healthy foods, exercising and getting enough sleep all boost our individual immune systems. What actions can we take to boost our ethical immune systems? And how could doing that help us create more ethical organizations? Building a healthy ethical culture where people take steps to protect ethics and reputation takes intentional effort. It requires regular attention, similar to the way we must eat healthy foods and exercise daily to maintain our individual health.
Leaders: Is Respect Enough?
By Linda Fisher Thornton Respectful behavior makes it possible for people to work together successfully. But when we ask the teams we lead to be respectful, I wonder if we're aiming too low. Shouldn't we be asking for more?
Trust is a Relationship (Not a Commodity)
By Linda Fisher Thornton Waiting For Trust to Be Earned I sometimes hear leaders say that they think "trust is earned" and that we should not trust others until they have earned our trust through their behavior and choices. I see several big problems with this way of thinking about trust.
Prepare Now For The Future of Leadership
By Linda Fisher Thornton Leading with positive values and demonstrating care are becoming expected ways of doing business. Leading now is not as much about leaders as it is about bringing out the best in those they lead and serve.
9 Questions for Ethical Leaders in The New Year
By Linda Fisher Thornton As we head into the New Year, use these questions to plan how you will transform your leadership, your workplace and your world.
Ethical Leadership 2015: Graphics That Tell the Story
By Linda Fisher Thornton The graphics at the links below tell the story of the future of responsible leadership. They describe the kind of leadership that is respectful, caring and ethically aware. This is the positive leadership that engages employees in meaningful work and helps builds an ethical culture. My hope is that you will share this story with your leadership team and plan now for the future, using the questions that follow.
5 Powerful Trends in Ethical Consumerism
By Linda Fisher Thornton If you think your customers are separate from your business, you are behind the times. Customers are becoming part of the fabric of organizations in ways that meet their very specific needs. This week I describe 5 powerful trends that are changing the rules of business, and require a heightened ethical awareness.
Want To Thrive in Leadership Future? Tether Yourself To Values
By Linda Fisher Thornton It would be "easy [...] for organizations and leaders to become frozen by the magnitude of the changes under way" (McKinsey & Co., Management Intuition For the Next 50 Years). Success in future leadership requires being nimble and adaptive, flexing with constant change, and being ready for anything. How should we stay grounded as we avoid crises and manage our way through a maze of increasing expectations?
Global Sentiment About Taking Responsibility
By Linda Fisher Thornton A clearer picture of global ethics is coming into view. In this clearer picture, we know what's important and see how far our responsibilities extend into the global community. We understand that business leadership includes responsibility for much more than just making a profit and obeying the law. Ethical leaders have begun to realize how connected our global community is. Customers for our products may live in 50 or more countries. Product parts may be made in multiple countries, each with different laws and regulations.
What is Integrity? Beyond “I’ll Know It When I See It”
By Linda Fisher Thornton During the recent 2014 NeuroLeadership Summit, Jamil Zaki (an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford) talked about an interesting experiment the Stanford Neuroscience Lab did. The team took a large number of Fortune 100 statements of company values and generated a word cloud from them to see which word would appear most often. Which word was it? Integrity was the most frequently used word. This experiment reveals a general agreement that integrity is important, but what exactly does it mean? People may understand it in very different ways.
3 Factors That Numb Ethics Efforts (And 3 That Energize Them)
By Linda Fisher Thornton To build a strong ethical culture, leaders should take a positive, preventive approach to ethics. That would include communicating clear ethical values and expectations and quickly stopping any unethical behavior. But those things are not enough by themselves. There are cultural factors that either enable our prevention efforts or disable them.
Trust-Building Requires Trust-Giving
By Linda Fisher Thornton Good leaders Intentionally build trust. They build it through everyday words and actions. They build it by demonstrating that they can be trusted. They also build it when they extend trust to others. Many leaders wait for people to prove themselves before they trust them, but trust is reciprocal. Leaders set the tone for trust-building by how open they are to trusting others first. Are you reaching out? Or are you waiting for your employees to have a "perfect" record before trusting them?
7 Definitions of “Good” (Why We Disagree About Ethics)
By Linda Fisher Thornton Why is it so difficult to agree on the right thing to do? One of the reasons we may not agree is that each of us may be using a different definition of what is "good." Here are 7 different interpretations of what is ethically good, based on the framework in 7 Lenses: Learning the Principles and Practices of Ethical Leadership (2013). Which ones are you using in your leadership?
“Hearing” All Stakeholders (Even When They’re Not in the Room)?
By Linda Fisher Thornton A quiet group of stakeholders is being considered in leadership conversations. They can't weigh in on major decisions, but they have a lot at stake in the decisions that get made. They are silent stakeholders, and the decisions we make in our meetings every day affects them directly.
Leading in Context 