By Linda Fisher Thornton Monday I received the wonderful news that I was in the Trust Across America-Trust Around the World 2015 Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trust. I consider this a great honor because trust is critical to successful business. Trust improves communication, culture, performance, engagement and results. Today I'm sharing some inspiring quotes from recent trust reports about why "it's all about the trust" - why trust has such broad importance and impact in work relationships and organizations:
Tag: ethics
12 Gifts of Leadership (Will You Give Them This Year?)
By Linda Fisher Thornton How do we lead when we want to bring out the best in people? These 12 Gifts of Leadership are on the wish lists of employees around the world. They aren't expensive. They don't require dealing with the hustle…
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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.
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.
Focusing on Profits? Watch Out For the “Blinder” Effect
By Linda Fisher Thornton We need profits to exchange goods and services, pay bills and grow our businesses. So what's the problem with it? The problem is that profitability cannot become our defining business goal, and it cannot replace values as the central beacon of our decision-making.
5 Ways to Talk About Ethics (Without Being “Blah Blah Boring”)
By Linda Fisher Thornton We owe it to our employees to make ethics real. People learning ethics are often given "blah blah boring" material (and then expected to remember and apply it). I believe that this is not just a mistake, it's a crime! Why? Because ethics is anything but boring. Ethics is really interesting stuff when you dive into its complexities. Today I'm sharing 5 ways to talk about ethics without being "blah blah boring." Feel free to use these as conversation starters with your team, and let me know if they make your conversations more meaningful.
Full Accountability For Ethics: The New Normal
By Linda Fisher Thornton I recently blogged about trends in ethical leadership, sharing 10 forces that are fueling a movement toward higher expectations for values-based leadership. Today I want to explore how those trends help explain what we are seeing in ethics cases in the news. Recent headlines have described more severe sanctions than people have seen in the past, in response to ethics problems in sports, politics, business and beyond. Some people may have wondered, "Why are people now being convicted for doing the same things that others before them have done?"
Leading For Ethics Future? (Or Ethics Past?)
By Linda Fisher Thornton We are expected to make ethical decisions in a rapidly changing global society, where there is increasing awareness of what "ethical" means. The question of where ethics is headed has been the focus of my research over the last four years. I have learned that to be considered ethical, we must consider more constituents, honor more dimensions of ethics, and lead ethically through higher levels of complexity. How do we prepare for that? We reach higher and think longer-term.
5 Reasons Ethical Culture Doesn’t Just Happen
By Linda Fisher Thornton Don't assume that an ethical culture will just happen in your workplace. Even if you are a good leader, ethical culture is a delicate thing, requiring intentional positive leadership and daily tending. It requires more than good leadership, more than trust building, and more than good hiring. Why does building an ethical culture require so much more than good leadership? Ethical culture is a system of systems, and just putting in good leadership, trust-building and good hiring doesn't make it healthy.
Getting Past Murky Uncertainty
By Linda Fisher Thornton
Workplace issues are complex and opinions vary about the right thing to do in challenging situations. This complexity and uncertainty combine to create a "murky uncertainty" that may keep people from giving us their best, most ethical performance.
250th Blog Post: Beyond the Comfort Zone
By Linda Fisher Thornton
In the 200th Leading in Context Blog Post, I wrote about Learning at the Speed of Life. To celebrate the 250th post, I want to reflect on what it's been like to work every day in the stretch beyond the comfort zone.
Ethics is Contagious
By Linda Fisher Thornton
I must admit that I can't take the credit for coming up with the catchy title of this post. A group of attendees at a recent keynote I delivered came up with it as a way to describe what they had learned. And it makes perfect sense.
Ethics is catching, and leaders set the tone for the ethics of the organization. What would happen if everyone in the organization followed our lead? Would the organization be more or less ethical? What kind of ethics are people catching as they work in our organization?
Well-Being is Trending
By Linda Fisher Thornton
Have you noticed that well-being is trending? It's not enough to provide fair pay and good work conditions any more. People want to participate in something meaningful and work in high-trust cultures where they can flourish. They seek out companies that care about their well-being.
It’s Not About Us
By Linda Fisher Thornton
You may have noticed that people's expectations of us as leaders have increased exponentially. Consumers are choosing companies that care about their well-being. Employees are choosing companies that do meaningful work and give back to the community. To survive in this new land where ethics is key to success, we must confront the situation with a clear realization that it is not all about us. As leaders, we are not the center of the universe.
Leading in Context 