Ethical Decision-Making as a PM

Project managers can have significant influence. Therefore, it’s important to behave ethically. PMI provides an Ethical Decision-Making model to help navigate what can sometimes be a tricky ethical minefield. The model recommends 5 steps. They are:

1. Assess the facts.
2. Consider alternatives.
3. Make and evaluate your initial decision.
4. Apply PMI’s ethics.
5. Decide!

Let’s look briefly at each of these steps.

First, you assess the facts you have against the ethics of your business and your personal views. The culture of your country and your local environment’s norms may also be relevant. In some cases, evaluating the law may also be important, so consider the legal implications of your actions and decisions as well.

Given those facts, you move to the second step - consider alternatives. This is the time for due diligence. Derive alternative actions and evaluate the pros and cons of each alternative. If risks are involved, consider what mitigation activities you might utilize.

Next, make and evaluate your initial decision. Examine the positive and negative implications of that decision on the project, stakeholders, and your organization. Look at the situation today, and how that decision might impact things a year from now. Finally, assess your objectivity and fairness. Focus on anything that may be influencing your decision and ensure they are appropriate influencers and not the result of bias or personal preference.

After that evaluation, return to ethics and apply PMI’s ethical standards. Remember the adage, measure twice, cut once! Ensure your decision is suitable when evaluated against PMI’s ethical pillars: responsibility, respect, fairness, and honesty. Ensure you are fulfilling your responsibility properly, and respecting the process and people involved. Assess the fairness of your decision to all stakeholders, especially vendors. Finally, make sure all of your communication about your decision is honest, and transparent and tells the full story of your decisions or actions.

Then, execute the last recommended step – decide on the best option. Share your evaluation process openly and take ownership of the decision you have made. When appropriate, review that decision with your sponsor and stakeholders before acting.

By the way, in the interest of “measuring twice,” I recommend going through all these steps twice for crucial or emotionally charged decisions. You may just find other ethical implications or business possibilities that will help you in the long run.

Follow this approach and you’ll ensure your decisions, and you personally, are perceived as being ethical.

This article is based on my LinkedIn Learning course entitled "Project Management Foundations: Ethics".

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Additional thoughts can be found in my project management and outsourcing classes on LinkedIn Learning, including:?

• Project Management: Technical Projects
• Strategic Leadership: Deploying Intelligent Disobedience??
• Outsourcing Fundamentals, the first of six courses on outsourcing. This series of courses focuses on defining services, performing service-level?management, and helping figure out what is required to support a business in an outsourcing or service provider scenario.??

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This article is part of?Bob’s Reflections newsletter series, which discusses project management, outsourcing, and “intelligent disobedience”, a leadership approach. If you want more of this content, you can?subscribe?to receive notifications when a new article is posted.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch?my courses?in the LinkedIn Learning Library or check out?https://intelligentdisobedience.com/

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