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As a managerial leader, you want others to perceive you as ethical in your communication, leadership, and decision making. But what are ethics and what does it take to be ethical? I believe ethical behavior starts with character.

Character

Character means knowing who you are. The American Evangelist Dwight Moody said, “Character is what you are in the dark.” Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.” Character means that you know your values, beliefs, strengths, skills, and personality. Good old Socrates maintained that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” If you are to impact your organization, you must fi rst examine who you are, what you have learned through life, and how those lessons have helped shape who you want to become. You must start with a clear concept of who you are and what you stand for to have the best chance of communicating and leading from an ethical perspective.

Chick- fi l- A, the second largest quick- service chicken restaurant chain in the United States, has more than 1,500 locations in 39 states and in Washington, D.C., and annual sales of more than $3.5 billion.²⁸ Speaking about her role, Dee Ann Turner, vice president of human

resources, said, “We select for character, competency, and chemistry.

Character always comes fi rst.” As Dee Ann Turner has shared, charac-ter needs to be at your core, especially if you aspire to be a managerial leadership communicator. Character is something that is formed over a lifetime, and the elements of character can be discovered and developed at any time. No one can be a leader until he or she has examined his or her own strengths, weaknesses, values, and beliefs. I recently had the opportunity to meet Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The 8th Habit. Stephen stated that more organiza-tions are recognizing the need for character. More and more people are seeing the need to look deeply into their own souls, sense how they themselves contribute to problems and fi gure out exactly what they can do to contribute to the solution while serving human needs. I believe you must have character to be an ethical managerial leadership commu-nicator as ethics is character in action.

Ethics

Ethics is both a fi eld of study and a personal code guiding thoughts and actions. Some would argue that ethics cannot be taught, but the teaching of morals and values is not a new phenomenon; rather, it has been part of our history. Plato and Aristotle in fourth- century Greece believed the role of education was to train good and virtuous citizens.

Ethics, or character in action, requires critical thinking and an under-standing of the dynamics of moral development. Ethics concerns how we act and how we live our lives. Within the fi eld of ethics there are two types: descriptive and normative ethics.

Descriptive ethics. This type of ethics refl ects on facts about the moral judgment of a person or a group. For example, a manager might determine that John, an employee, appears honest because he returned a telephone to its rightful owner. It describes how and why people act the way they do.

Normative ethics. Normative ethics involves formulating and defi n-ing moral principles. This type of ethics concerns our reasonn-ing about

how we should act. It seeks an account of how and why people should act a certain way instead of how they do act.²⁹ In other words, it means determining appropriate actions to perform.

As a managerial leadership communicator, you must realize that eth-ics is not just an “add- on,” but an absolute necessity. Before Walmart’s CEO Lee Scott retired in 2009, he allowed the press, for the fi rst time ever, to hear him speak to about 7,000 Walmart employees and suppliers.

As reported in Workforce.com, “Scott shared that the company would redouble its efforts to improve the effi ciency and reduce costs in health care, make environmentally friendly technologies affordable to custom-ers and businesses and exert greater pressure on its supply chain to meet higher ethical standards in the way it produces goods.”³⁰ Lee Scott’s talk about how Walmart can be ethical, more environmentally friendly, and health care– focused represented a huge change in the company’s tradi-tional approach. His action showed that the leadership team realized that Walmart’s scale and scope give it a unique opportunity to leverage its relationships for the common good just as it has leveraged them in

Photo courtesy fl ickr user WalMart, CC 2.0

Rob Walton, chairman of the board for Walmart Stores, Inc., speaks to shareholders at the 2011 Walmart Shareholders Meeting in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He says being a global company isn’t just about having stores around the world; it’s about being relevant to people no matter where they live. With more than 9,000 stores in 15 countries, Walmart is not just an international company, but a global one.

the past for business effi ciency and lower costs. By inviting the press to hear his comments, he sent a clear signal that Walmart was committed to communicating from an ethical perspective. Scott seemed to have learned that although growth and profi ts are at the core of any successful busi-ness, a huge market leader such as Walmart needs to do more than be successful; it needs to be an ethical leader. Current Walmart CEO Mike Duke seems to be continuing the work begun by Lee Scott. On Ethis-phere’s 100 Most Infl uential in Business Ethics list for 2010, Mike Duke was ranked number 15.³¹

Another ethical leader who has risen to the occasion is Randi Menkin, director of workforce diversity at UPS, a global company that historically promotes internally. UPS is listed number 2 in social responsibility and number 12 in the Global Top 20 of Fortune’s Most Admired Organiza-tions. Menkin shared:

Women were leaving UPS at a disproportionately faster rate than any other employee group. What was happening to us was alarming, and then when you look at workforce trends in general— we realized that we had to compete for talent. We not only had to compete to recruit talent, but we had to do things to retain our talent, especially women. As a company we want more diversity, and if we’re losing our women, then we’re always playing catch- up.

Menkin formed a task force that spent a year researching, benchmarking, conducting focus groups, interviewing, and reinterviewing the departing women. The end result was the Women’s Leadership Development pro-gram, a multifaceted effort designed to attract, retain, and develop female managers. This program rolled out in May of 2006 to 19 areas across the country. Menkin shared that “basically our women and, it turned out, a large percentage of our men as well didn’t feel connected to the company.”³²

After a year, the results were in. Turnover was down 25 percent in the pilot districts and more than 6,000 women were touched by the program. In 2007, the program was rolled out nationally and in Canada. Menkin believes the program works for several reasons.

Paramount was the commitment of the executive leadership, includ-ing the men.

It also melded nicely with UPS core values of diversity, promot-ing from within, and leadership development. It is in our fabric as a company to be involved in the community and this program actually helps facilitate our employees who want to follow their passion for community service. Employee morale was up and that helped in job performance.

UPS is not alone in realizing that their work environment might need to change. At Grant Thornton, a large accounting fi rm, the passage of Sarbanes- Oxley had a huge impact and caused them to rethink their way of doing work and how to deal with the high market demand for accountants.

We started losing accountants— particularly those in their late 20s and early 30s, which are traditionally the childbearing ages— and it became apparent that we needed to look at retention and do something about it. The feeling among female accountants was that they couldn’t make it work because they couldn’t be success-ful at the fi rm and have a life. So they left, according to Jacqueline Akerblom, national marketing partner.

Jacqueline found it diffi cult to explain the need to make the fi rm more family- friendly, especially to the senior male accountants.

But we convinced them that the future of their pension and the growth of the fi rm were tied into this. We said we needed to do something different for our female accountants and that if we did that, it would ensure the health of their pensions. That was a real awakening to some of the senior leadership. The Women at Grant Thorton program was started in 2004. The women partners, with a few men, “crystallized what they wanted and needed to do.” They partnered with HR, did exit interviews and lots of research.

Basically, it came down to fl exibility. The organization chose to embrace telecommuting. According to one worker, “The ability to leave the offi ce so I can have dinner with my family and then work from home at night was huge. Not being tied to our desks was an incredible benefi t.”³³

Grant Thornton is not alone in moving to a more fl exible work envi-ronment. According to a 2006 Business Week article, more than 40 percent of IBM’s workforce has no offi ce; at AT&T, it’s about 30 percent of all managers. Sun Microsystems, Inc, reports it has saved more than

$400 million over 6 years in real estate costs by having almost half of its employees not come to an offi ce. In fact, according to a survey by the Boston Consulting Group, nearly 85 percent of executives expect a large increase over the next 5 years in the number of unleashed workers.

Jody Thompson, who worked in Human Resources for Best Buy, felt it was time for a change in the way the company worked. So she led the company to adapting a results- only work environment (ROWE).

ROWE’s whole point is that physical presence does not mean productiv-ity. The goal is to judge performance on output instead of hours. When the whole organization embraced ROWE, its productivity had increased by 35 percent.

It’s all about control— taking control of your life [Thompson says]. Work should not be a place to go; it should be what you do.

The implementation of ROWE was a huge corporate and cultural change. One key difference when operating under ROWE is that you have to be clear about what is expected of you because you are managing yourself and you are responsible for the results.³⁴

As ethical managerial leaders, we must be willing to challenge the sta-tus quo or the usual way of doing work. We must make changes in the workforce that will benefi t all workers. Ethical managerial leaders have to realize that to stay competitive and attract and retain top talent, they may have to change how they recruit, treat, motivate, and evaluate the performance of their employees. At Alston & Bird, a law fi rm in Atlanta, Georgia, some partners started to realize that the way things had always been done was not working. They recognized that people wanted more fl exibility but also wanted to be on the partnership track. The fi rm cre-ated the Alternative Career Path, a more adaptable partnership plan that

does not lock an associate into a specifi c time period. Liz Price, a partner, has said, “The new generation wants more fl exibility and personal adap-tation of work. They see money as what it is. They want opportunities to live a great life.”³⁵

Ethical managerial leaders should realize that a leadership position is an opportunity to build relationships and to enable others to become successful. An ethical managerial leader must realize that the generations have different needs and fi nd ways to inspire trust, defi ne reality and pur-pose, align systems and processes, and unleash talent to deliver results.