Ethical Accountability by Linda Hatcher
"We need to stress that personal integrity is as important as executive skill in business dealings. Setting an example from the top has a ripple effect throughout a business school or a corporation. After nearly three decades in business, 10 years as chief executive of a Big Eight accounting firm, I have learned that the standards set at the top filter throughout a company” Quoting Professor Thomas Dunfee of the Wharton School: “A company that fails to take steps to produce a climate conducive to positive work-related ethical attitudes may create a vacuum in which employees so predisposed may foster a frontier-style, everyone for themselves mentality.”
— Russell E. Palmer
The passage above illustrates the theme of the March edition of the free Leader Guide Magazine: “ethical accountability.” The day of reckoning has arrived in a dark tangle of an economic crisis that will leave no American, no business, no leader, unscathed. We have to look at how we got here, and what it will take, individually, and collectively, to find genuine changes in the way we conduct our business and ourselves.
The first article in the magazine is entitled “Ethical Accountability: Nowhere Left to Hide,” (CLICK HERE), we look at the macro view of why ethical accountability is so essential and what the lack thereof has created.
In “Practical Accountability: Individual and Organizational Solutions to National Mass Crisis,” (CLICK HERE), proven-practical steps are detailed on how leaders can establish ethical accountability in any organization. “The foundational issues of proper ethics and sensible accountability have to intersect with everyday procedures that leaders use as their operating references.” (2) Cited in that article is the recently advanced idea of the creation of a Hippocratic Oath for Managers. Write Khurana and Nohria in Harvard Business Review, “It is time to make management a true profession.”
Finally, Fred A. Manske Jr., the former CEO of Purolator Courier, Ltd., presents another very practical article on what you can do to help ride out the severe “economic storm” that is now affecting nearly everyone world wide. CLICK HERE for his article entitled “Steps You Can Take to Help Ride out the Economic Storm.”
INSPIRING LEADERSHIP QUOTE:
"Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
REFERENCES:
1) Royle, Todd, and Hall, Angela, International Journal of Management and Marketing Research.
