Paul Falcone - Workplace Ethics: Mastering Ethical Leadership and Sustaining a Moral Workplace

2022 Paul Falcone

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by HarperCollins Leadership, an imprint of HarperCollins Focus LLC.

Topic 16: From Attorney-Client Privilege: What You Need to Know. SHRM HR Daily Newsletter, March 4, 2020. Copyright 2020 by the Society for Human Resource Management. Topic 22: From Viewpoint: Make This Checklist Your DE&I Launching Point. SHRM HR Daily Newsletter, October 5, 2020. Copyright 2020 by the Society for Human Resource Management. Topic 23: From Educate Entry-Level Workers on Workplace Ethics. SHRM HR Daily Newsletter, December 6, 2018. Copyright 2018 by the Society for Human Resource Management. All of the above used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Any internet addresses, phone numbers, or company or product information printed in this book are offered as a resource and are not intended in any way to be or to imply an endorsement by HarperCollins Leadership, nor does HarperCollins Leadership vouch for the existence, content, or services of these sites, phone numbers, companies, or products beyond the life of this book.

This book is written as a source of information only. The information contained in this book should by no means be considered a substitute for the advice, decisions, or judgment of the readers professional advisors.

All efforts have been made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this book as of the date published. The author and the publisher expressly disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects arising from the use or application of the information contained herein.

ISBN 978-1-4002-3007-5 (eBook)

ISBN 978-1-4002-2997-0 (TP)

Epub Edition December 2021 9781400230075

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021951202

Printed in the United States of America

22 23 24 25 26 LSC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Its not always easy to decide between right and wrong at work. Making ethical decisions can help you discern the right thing to do in difficult situations. At its core, ethics is a set of guidelines to help you choose right from wrong. In reality, however, its so much more than that and has substantial implications in the workplace. For example, ethics drives employee loyalty and engagement as much as it does corporate liability and litigation vulnerability. Its by far the most practicaland interestingpiece of the leadership equation, yet it often gets short shrift in schools, workplaces, and even MBA programs. Its true that business, law, and medical schools require ethics courses and oaths, yet organizations tend to give scant attention in a world changing so quickly from economic, technological, social, scientific, environmental, and business standpoints. Maybe ethics is too time consuming to teach. Maybe its just too squishy a soft skill to invest in. Or perhaps weve simply lost awareness of the basics of ethical business decision-making and accountability because were moving too quickly as a society and global economy to look back and take a broader overview of the challenges plaguing us.

No matter the reasoning, now is the time to arm your leadership teams and yourself with the tools, wisdom, and stories to help you stand out from your peers and set your leadership brand apart. Make no mistake: theres nothing squishy about ethical decision-making. Organizations that value ethics perform better. If you genuinely want to strengthen the muscle of your frontline operational leadership team, if you want to be identified as an employer of choice, and if you yourself want to develop a reputation as a favorite boss and career influencer, start with workplace ethics.

A book of this size logically cannot cover the breadth of ethics in its many forms: environmental sustainability and corporate social responsibility are touched upon, but this book is intended to focus more specifically on workplace ethical dilemmas and internal corporate dynamics that touch your world every day. In many ways, weve lost the ability as a society to sit around the campfire and tell stories and permit the elders to pass on wisdom to the younger generation. Yet heres your chance to create an atmosphere of inclusion, share your hard-won lessons, and make an investment in your people that will provide a handsome personal and organizational return on investment.

Following are some of the practical applications well cover in this book:

• Why is it that well-intentioned managers keep stepping on land mines and exposing the organization to liability without even knowing it?
• How do we train our managers to become more adept at sensing when the preemptive strike of pretaliation may be lurking? Can employees somehow leverage HR against the company?
• How do organizations with perceived unfair or inconsistent hiring and promotion practices inadvertently suffer from low morale, excessive turnover, and a lack of customer loyalty?
• How do we train our managers to raise their awareness of workplace fact patterns that may lend themselves to claims of discrimination, harassment, or retaliation?
• How can focusing on creating a more moral and ethical culture help us with hiring, retention, employee development, and employee motivation?
• If workers are employed at will, why do we need to issue progressive discipline all the time? And why wont HR let us fire anyone?
• What does it mean and how does it apply when we say an organizations code of conduct is about the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law? Does that somehow give us some greater level of discretion as a management team to address problematic behaviors that may pull down the rest of our team?
• Is DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) really as critical an imperative as Ive heard or is it simply a nice-to-have? And where should we start if we want to transform our organization to become more inclusive and to provide greater equality of opportunity?
• How can too much documentation about an employees poor performance or inappropriate workplace conduct actually hurt our case in court?
• Can my company get sued for nonsexual harassment? Can I get sued personally?
• How can I encourage my organization to become more socially aware of its moral obligations to environmental sustainability and social responsibility?

And theres a lot more to workplace ethics that youre going to want to gear up for. Corporate America is experiencing evolutionary change at revolutionary speed. Arguably, the workplace is changing faster now than at any time in history. Youll want to ensure that youre staying informed of the changes resulting from artificial intelligence (AI), for example, since that will affect every aspect of your employee hiring, retention, training, and turnover practices as well as your customers buying behaviors. But algorithms and analytics can skew reality if not observed closely, creating tremendous ethicaland potentially unlawfulconsequences for the unsuspecting or inattentive organization.

You need this book to align your leadership teams, to encourage everyone to become more aware of the ethical and moral implications of their decisions, and to focus their energies on fostering a healthy workplace culture. And the advice needs to be practical, easy to understand, and flexible enough to accommodate your organizations changing needs. In short, youll want a resource that helps you establish an ethics baseline that all leaders and employees can adhere to, not because they have to but because they want to. Its not as hard as you think. You simply have to model the behaviors, provide the right tools, and encourage your frontline leaders to communicate and apply them. Welcome to step 1 of reinventing your culture, becoming an employer of choice, and reenergizing your workforce by incentivizing the right behaviors to benefit your organization, your employees, customers, and your community as a whole. Good corporate citizenship starts right here and right now. Im so looking forward to joining you on this journey!