This continues our series examining leadership traits you demonstrate for your business
You represent the moral and ethical compass for your company. You set the standard for moral and ethical behavior that you want your employees to follow. You set the standard your company will follow with vendors, suppliers, and clients. Small-businesses cannot hide improprieties that may pass in large or global firms. Fortunately, your staff and clients also closely observe good moral examples and high ethical standards.
Business Ethics and Morals
Changing Minds states “Morals have a greater social element to values and tend to have a very broad social acceptance. Morals are more about good and bad than other values.”
“You can have professional ethics, but you seldom hear about professional morals. Ethics tend to be codified into a formal system or set of rules which are explicitly adopted by a group of people.” Many businesses publish a code of ethics.
Test Your Morals and Ethics
Various tests or toolkits exist to measure the ethics of a decision or course of action:
- Utilitarian Test: choose the course of action that produces the greatest balance of benefits over harms for everyone affected
- Rights Test: deals with ethics based on human, legal, moral, or natural rights derived from by the community
- Duties Test: asks “To whom do I owe a duty and what duty do I owe?”
- Reversibility Test: considers if the decision would be ethical if the roles were reversed
- Universality Test: holds all decisions up to the test whether everyone would receive the same benefit or the same consequences
- Justice Test: assess your own sense of fairness by determining whether you would treat others the same in this situation or if you did not, your position in the outcome
- Disclosure Test: asks if you would make the same decision if you knew that your course of action would be broadcast on the evening news
- Virtue Test: attempts to make decisions based on the personal virtue or character of the person making the decision
Saturday we will analyze the leadership trait of required to act as a change agent
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