Ethics

Leadership Ethics are the attitudes with which you approach and apply your leadership knowledge and skills.  Success gaining knowledge and skill in the other domains does not guarantee a leader has developed a positive leadership ethic.  For example, a person with high emotional intelligence can sacrifice themselves for others or manipulate those they lead for personal gain.  Your ethics are the foundation of your leadership because the ethics domain intersects each of the other domains while remaining an independent focus of leadership development. A common metric of leadership success or failure can hinge upon the existence of their leadership ethics. 

Objective

Learn how to be an intentional, ethical leader and how you can prepare yourself for leadership by establishing your leadership ethics now.  

Outcomes

Completing the entire program, you will be able to:

1. Establish your leadership ethics – a collection of principles based upon knowledge and skills from the other three leadership domains to guide their decisions.
2. Contrast your agenda with the team’s mission and welfare of the members of the team.
3. Assess how your ethics set the foundation for your leadership development.

Activities

Gathering

• Write down a list of questions that you feel need to be answered to establish your desired leader ethics. These questions should address how you manage responsibility through your team, how you maintain your example in the team, how we give and receive orders/direction/tasks, how we manage our egos.
• Identify scenarios when you can help someone and document the actions you take after encountering those scenarios.

Processing

• Read about other leaders and identify their ethics based on their actions and words.  You may use any ethical framework for this analysis.
• Write down three (3) scenarios where you might have to have an answer to your ethical questions.  These should be scenarios that have not happened yet and reflect your ideal response.

Applying

• Reflect on past situations where your ethics were challenged.  Create a plan for how you will respond closer to your ideal response.
• Forgive yourself for past mistakes in your leadership approach.

Supporting Theories or Approaches

Transformational Leadership, Authentic Leadership, Servant Leadership, Outward Leadership, Extreme Ownership