Ethical Leadership: Personal and Professional Practice
Author: Dr. Harpreet Kaur Dhir
Ethical leadership can be interpreted via multiple perspectives based on an individual’s value system. Blanchard (2013) sounded the alarm for the need of ethical value-based leadership in the modern society with data documenting the American erosion of trust in establishments. Three quarters of the American citizens distrust media and big businesses including the country’s financial systems. The organizations have begun to view trust-building as a core competency in their potential leaders despite a wide array of interpretations of ethical leadership.
Ethical Leadership: Connecting Values, Ethics, Morals, and Trust
According to Marsh (2013), ethical leadership leads to actions affecting decisions and culture of an organization. A leader’s responsibility is to develop a community based on morals of honesty and integrity instead of establishing a power-based structure with rules dictating the do’s and the don’t’s. Based on the Marsh’s study, the relational structure between values, ethics, morals, and trust was evident. The study revealed ethical leadership includes a system where the personal values of a leader, if trusted by an organization, could develop a moral community.
Valued Aspects of Ethical Leadership
As a leader of my students and their parents, I was motivated to explore my personal values which affected the professional practice regularly. The Center for Ethical Leadership (2002) informed values being a mixture of popular cultural values and virtues. Some examples of popular values were influence, success, and wealth. Virtues were values based on habits in practice which led to common good of the society such as justice, peace, and integrity.
The Center for Ethical Leadership (2002) defined ethics in leadership as knowing the core personal values and incorporating them, with courage, in the actions for the common good. I believed that in order to clarify my personal core values, a self-evaluation was necessary. The website for The Center for Ethical Leadership included an instrument to assess one’s core values. After conducting the self-evaluation of personal values, I concluded as having two core values from the assessment. The two core values are authenticity and justice. Authenticity and justice are also considered virtues rather than popular cultural values as these led to the common good of the community.
Evidence of Leadership Goals: Personal and Professional Practice
Marsh (2013) reported ethics based on virtues as preferred values in the development of business leadership. Their purpose is to connect the organization as a whole to the human values. A model of ethical leadership included in Marsh’s study centered ethical leadership around the idea of sustainment or a holistic approach to work and life connecting it to mindfulness, authenticity, and enagagement. Being able to establish systems-thinking and reflective practices, knowing oneself, valuing diversity and developing positive relationships are skills which sustained ethical leadership.
In my personal life, holistic approach has sustained my life’s events with authenticity and justice as core values. Practicing one’s core values consists of an experiential process and not a stage of perfection as asserted by The Center for Ethical Leadership (2002). Spirituality, as a follower of the Sikh faith, is a center most point of that learning process. Authenticity developed with daily meditation or Simran and, following a system of beliefs, created the habit of mindfulness as a virtue. My name including a Kaur, an authentic identity of every Sikh woman, conceptualized a sovereign woman who is designed to lead her family and society with an identity independent of any patriarchy elevating women to an equal status or higher as some believe. The value of justice through equality is the core value of being a Sikh.
Beyond the personal life experience as a Sikh, the core values of authenticity and justice has also affected my professional experience. My students experience learning in an authentic manner where the problem posed could have multiple solutions while they all follow the same criteria or a rubric for designing a solution. The design thinking includes the four C’s of the 21st century skills including communication, critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration. The authentic performance of the students allows them the justice they deserve to express their unique thinking through their creations as they participate in the process of designing a unique product. The core values of educational justice and authentic learning are the goals of my classroom.
Conclusion
The two core values of authenticity and justice have been the focus of my personal and professional life. As a leader, the challenge would be to develop the trust of the organization’s members through the practice of promoting authenticity and practicing justice in decision making. Following the suggestion of Blanchard (2013), the researcher would need to practice the four basic competencies to build trust in the context of authenticity and justice: being able with skills to solve problems, being believable and having integrity, connecting with others, and being dependable and reliable. In other words, ethical leadership requires a leader to practice being ethical before expecting others to do the same.
References
Blanchard, K. (2013). The four pillars of trust. Chief Learning Officer, 12(5), 14.
Center for Ethical Leadership. (2002). Self-guided core values assessment. Retrieved from http://www.ethicalleadership.org/uploads/2/6/2/6/26265761/1.4_core_values_exercise.pdf
Center for Ethical Leadership. (2002). Self-guided core values assessment. Retrieved from http://www.ethicalleadership.org/uploads/2/6/2/6/26265761/1.4_core_values_exercise.pdf
Marsh, C. (2013). Business executives’ perceptions of ethical leadership and its development. Journal of Business Ethics, 114(3), 565-582. doi:10.1007/s10551-012-1366-7