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The Importance of Purpose in Life
Sue Langley believes in life balance, not work-life balance. It’s all who you are.
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Modeling Ethical Behavior
To create an environment of ethical behavior, the entire organization must behave that way. Venkatesh Valluri explains why it’s important to model ethical behavior.
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The Ethics of Business Decisions
Most business decisions have ethical dimensions.
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Integrity Is a Character Issue
Character is who you are when nobody is looking. Integrity is the distance between your lips and your life—between what you believe and what you do.
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Ethics: Penalties to Potential
Ethics is more than avoiding fines, penalties, and sanctions. Ethics also involves care. Not hitting people in the workplace means we should care for them. Envision organizations where people feel valued.
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Uncover Personal Agendas Through Trust
Most senior executives don’t know the personal agendas of key stakeholders. You won’t learn those agendas by asking. To open up a personal agenda you must invest time in a long-term relationship. It works both ways; you must share your own personal agenda.
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Ethical Leaders Commit to Learning
Ethical competence is a moving target. We need to embark on a life-long personal learning journey. Linda Fisher Thornton tells of a baker who bakes gluten-free bread. He switched to rice flour, which is cheaper but has arsenic. He didn't know because he hadn’t kept up.
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Honoring Ethics and Profit
If we talk more about profits than ethics, employees will assume that profits are more important. Your core values should help employees choose when ethics and profits appear to conflict—when the right thing to do may lower the quarterly numbers.
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Leading for the Long Run
Ethical leaders maximize their positive impact and minimize their negative impact. They do good without doing harm. They think in terms of long term impact, not just short-term gain. The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children.
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What Is Ethical Leadership
The seven lenses of ethical responsibility are profits, laws, character, people, communities, the planet, and the greater good. All seven perspectives are important in order to live ethically in a global society.
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Leading from a Strong Moral Center
Profitability is not a strong guiding value when we make ethical decisions; profitability substitutes money for morality. Keep ethical expectations and values on the wall, on the meeting agenda, and on the radar. Describe what ethics looks like, especially in gray areas.
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Trust Through Transparency
The wife of a colleague who often worked late thought he was having an affair. The wife locked him out of the house until she saw his credit card statement. He refused. Vineet Nayar asked whether his purpose was to have the conversation or to get into the house.
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Business Partnerships: Trust and Trade-Offs
If you try to do business with people you don’t trust, the relationship will not last.
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Avoiding Destructive Comments
Marshall Goldsmith describes the importance of avoiding destructive comments.
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Ethics
Integrity is vital in business. Lord Kalms shows how the only rule your company should never break is upholding honesty and ethical behavior.
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Ethics: The Context of Our Character
People cheat to a level they are comfortable — the fudge factor. Knowing the fudge factor can reduce cheating in the workplace.
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Treat Other People's Money As If It Were Your Own
Acquiring, spending, and leveraging corporate dollars is a measure of success but can also lead to unnecessary risk-taking. Ray Anderson reminds leaders that outsiders' funds should be protected, respected, and invested like they were our own.
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Business Ethics Is About A Bunch Of Small Decisions
Like a stone thrown into a pond, the effects of our actions may reach farther than we realize. Heather Loisel recounts an example of a small action with extensive consequences, illustrating how business ethics involves many minute decisions that build on one another.
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How to Increase Trust
Building trust requires that you have a high ranking in each of the four elements of trust.
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Learning at the Speed of Trust: Self Trust
Self trust is about you and your credibility. The four cores of credibility are your integrity, your intent, your capabilities, and your results.
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The Ethics of Interdependence
Dr. Maciariello talks of the Japanese notion of interdependence. It is what people are responsible for and how they perform it in relation to all of the other staff and departments within the company regardless of their physical location.
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Trust Inc.
The businesses of the future are built around trust, not transactions and managerial bureaucracy.
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Should I Compromise? Weighing Healthy and Unhealthy Compromise
When judging when to compromise, recognize that you have a choice, count the costs, ask whether the gain is worthwhile, and weigh your options.
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Get More Results: Pick Up Accountability and Let Go of Responsibility
Move from being the go-to person to being a leader of go-to teams by becoming accountable for results.
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Knowing Your Values
For Steve McDermott, his most important value in business is fun.
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Making Business Ethics Part Of Your DNA
As a prime directive of her job, Phillipa Foster Back gets up close and personal with the concept of business ethics.
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How to Build Trust
At the start of a team meeting, ask everyone for their proudest moment that week and why. What is one new thing they’ve learned this week about themselves? What are two things that shaped you to be the leader you are today? How will that show up in this team?
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The Illusion of Scarcity Part 1: Scarcity vs. Abundance
Scarcity thinking is a disease that will ruin any group. Tim will help you get over the disease by the end of this series.
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The High Cost of Low Trust
Trust is the basis for positive relationships. In business low trust environments are filled with political games, interpersonal conflict, interdepartmental rivalries, and hidden agendas.
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The High Cost of Low Ethics
Unethical behavior affects 1) prestige; a lost reputation can alienate customers, shareholders, and prospective employees; 2) productivity, especially of highly skilled workers; and 3) profitability, through employee fraud, litigation, and high absenteeism.
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Authenticity: Representing Yourself as You Truly Are
Representing yourself as you truly are engenders trust quickly.
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Organizational Authenticity: The Alignment of Say, Do and Believe
Authenticity means that we actually believe what we say and do.
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How to Be a Trusting Person
There is no trust without risk. If you practice trusting others at your own risk, they will return the favor. Say, “At the risk of,” and fill in the blank with what you’re afraid of. For example, “At the risk of appearing a little ignorant here, I’m not sure I understand.”
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How to Increase Your Trustworthiness
Trust equals credibility, reliability, and intimacy, all divided by self-orientation. To increase your trustworthiness build on intimacy, the most important factor. For example, comment on other people’s feelings, e.g., “It looks like you’re a little upset. I’d be upset, too.”
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How to Build a Trust-Based Organization
Ask four groups to list five behaviors demonstrating the absence of the four virtues, one virtue per group: credibility, reliability, intimacy, and low self-orientation. Repeat with the four values: other-orientation, collaboration, long-term focus, and transparency.
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Virtues and Values
Virtues are credibility, reliability, intimacy, and low self-orientation, i.e., individual trustworthiness. Values encourage trust in the organization: focus on others, collaboration, focus on relationships, and transparency. Work on one virtue and value each day.
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Frameworks for Decision Making
Develop decision frameworks aligned with your values and know what your bottom line is.
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How to Earn Respect: Everyone Else's, and Your Own
Don't respond to baiting. You'll earn everyone's respect, including your own.
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Corporate Ethics: The Golden Rule of Growth
Living by the Golden Rule drives profitable growth.
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The Next Level: Pick Up Accountability for Many Results, Let Go of Responsibility for Few Results
Scott Eblin explains the difference between accountability and responsibility.
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Building Trust and Credibility
Leaders build trust and credibility by making their values come alive for others.
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Having Complete Creative Skills and Integrity
Writing ability predicts success in college and beyond. A good writer is a good reader and oral communicator.
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Individual Accountability
Bob Sutton describes organizations where everyone feels individually accountable. People are recruited who reflect that mindset, and are placed in groups that live the mindset. These employees feel obligated to correct each other, and admit their mistakes publicly.