Excerpt
From The Book of Hard Choices: How To Make The Right Decision
At Work And Keep Your Self-Respect
Ethical
behavior depends not on policies and guidelines and his-sounding polysyllabic
statements, but on individual integrity.
There are plenty of instances in which what is legal
may very well not be ethical; thus, an emphasis on what's legal can get many
managers in trouble: "If it's legal, it must be okay." This has often become
a very convenient hiding place for people who don't want to use their own
integrity to evaluate the ethics of what they're doing or have done, only
the legality.
The reasons for this are obvious enough. We are a
nation of laws, we bind virtually every agreement with a contract, we dictate
that behavior must be legal.
But ethicality is not about contracts, its about
covenants. Contracts are written with all sorts of provisions for reparation,
damage assessments, and other legal repercussions. On the other hand, covenants
are moral understandings and are "enforceable" only by the moral intention
of the participants, by their commitment to do what they say they are going
to do.
While ethics is an institutional term, the living
of an ethical work and management life nonetheless depends absolutely on
the moral compasses of the people who must make ethic real by the way they
chose to behave.
© 2006 by James A. Autry and Peter Roy All
rights reserved. |
