Ethical leadership responsibilities

Ethics start from the top. The leaders of an organization embody its ethics. Most companies have documented ethical standards to guide behavior, but ultimately, the ethics demonstrated by an organization's leaders represent its true values.

As a leader, you must accept that you are the topic of conversation for all your employees. How you are perceived comes from what you do at work but also in the community. How you represent the company reflects its ethics and status as a community asset. This means that your ethical standards apply to your public image, such as what you create when using social media.

Fulfilling your ethical responsibility as a leader has three key steps:

• Ensure ethical standards are documented. Most companies have an ethics code. If not, work to create one for the group you lead. Documented or not, however, as a leader, you must know and understand the ethical code for your work community.
• Recognize the code's limitations. It won't cover every situation. You'll need to interpret grey areas through a leadership lens, considering both short- and long-term impact. Although it may be imperfect, when necessary, choose the least damaging path.
• Evaluate decisions systematically:
• Is it honest?
• Does it maintain personal and company integrity?
• Does it produce good short- and long-term business results?
• Can you transparently explain the context and rationale?

If a decision passes these four tests, it is likely ethical.

The ultimate outcomes of a leader's choices depend on how situations are rationalized. By owning decisions and weighing trade-offs thoughtfully, leaders can act ethically while driving positive organizational impacts.

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Coming up

Wednesday, February 14, 2024 10:00am AEST AI-Assisted Agile - Real World Recommendations

Agile is here to stay. And the use of AI is becoming a daily routine. Done properly, they each result in quality products, delivered faster. Bring them together, and the results can be game-changing. In this Live session, I’ll be joined by fellow LinkedIn Learning instructor Christina Charenkova. We’ll discuss ways we can easily enhance Agile delivery by using AI tools. Come join us and bring your recommendations and questions. We’ll share what we have learned and answer your questions live. And, as a bonus, we’ll provide you with a prompt to help you guide your agile initiatives. By attending this session, you will: ? Understand the pros and cons of using AI in an agile environment. ? Learn about the areas where AI can help guide agile projects and where the capability of AI may be over-hyped (at least for now). ? Be able to frame prompts efficiently to help increase your productivity. ? Walk away with a prompt you can use TODAY to help guide agile project delivery.

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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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