TAAENV501A Maintain and enhance professional practice

Modelling high standards of performance

The uniqueness of an organisation's culture is due to the mix of the factors that can be heavily influenced and shaped by the manager's actions. This mix will be specific to an organisation's workplace(s). If communication practices ensure that these elements promote effective employee relationships and performance, then this attribute is almost impossible for a competitor to replicate. It is not a machine or a design for a product and service, it is embedded in how people want to work together.

How an individual frontline manager models effective behaviours (i.e. is a role model) will vary dependent upon the subordinates, the context and the manager's experience. But the attainment of trust, empathy, respect, and integrity in communication relationships needs to pervade all communication practices.

Figure 5 Communication cornerstone

Creating a cornerstone of empathy, trust and integrity requires frontline managers to adopt what have been called the four 'Cs' within communication practices:

Credibility You say what you mean and you mean what you say.
Confidence You deal with even the most difficult circumstances and seek input from others.
Consistency You set a standard that does not vary requirements without clear evidence and participation by staff.
Context You can make all the separate actions fit into a real workplace situation and the related issues.

Confidence of colleagues and customers comes from repeat and competent performance. Adhering to the four 'Cs' continues to reinforce the unique interaction customers and staff can enjoy with an individual or team.

Being a role model in an organisation that has integrity and credibility

Clampitt (1991) proposes a three-way strategy for personal communication and ethical standards that builds both the team and the organisation's integrity and credibility.

Figure 6 Clampitt's ethical organisation (Clampitt, 1991:282)

Clampitt argues that ethical organisations are sustained by individual standards of personal integrity, operating in a responsive culture , and governed by conscientious policies. The more these three factors are integrated, the stronger the organisational capacity to harness individual performance and create an enduring sense of purpose through a shared basis for ethical action (Clampitt, 1991: 282).

Corporate culture

Clampitt's content has become more important as he forecasted that the three fundamental ethical concerns-a person's relationship to God, to things and to each other-would be joined by an individual's need to process information within any information-driven economy:

Building consensus on informational values may be one of the great cultural challenges facing leaders in the future. For example, only in the last few years has an ethic about copy-protected software started to emerge. Another issue involves the concept of 'corporate due process' which has a toehold in the business conscience . . . as 'effective mechanisms and procedures for ensuring equity and justice among employees' (Clampitt, 1991:283).

However, as Clampitt notes, principles are not enough. They must be translated into policy.

Organisational policy to enable integrity and credibility

Policy with an ethical base can establish integrity and credibility by guiding how an organisation determines what information should be gathered, how information should be gathered and how the information should be used. This is illustrated in Figure 7 (Clampitt, 1991:284).

Figure 7 Clampitt's policy issues

Deciding what information to gather involves considerations about privacy, particularly information about employee privacy. Leaders should determine what information they actually need about employees and to what ends it will be applied. The amount of information available to managers about employees, customers and organisations can distort decision-making. Conversely, information that managers do not act on can lead to litigation.

Deciding how the information is to be gathered does pose ethical considerations. For example, employee performance appraisal has a longstanding ethical basis, while hidden cameras and tape recorders monitoring employees may not be considered as acceptable in past decades. Yet, in a survey conducted in early 2001, more than 70 per cent of all US companies with 200 or more employees were found to do one of the following:

• Monitor all staff emails;
• Use hidden cameras to monitor staff;
• Require employees to undertake regular drug tests (US Privacy Commission, 2001).

As the complexities of the Knowledge Age increase, and new technologies and ways of work are introduced, the ethical boundaries of organisations have become blurred. Employees under the influence of narcotics may damage corporate business but compulsory drug testing of employees is in many countries considered unethical. Similarly, an HIV+ employee in a professional contact sport raises vexed issues about ethics towards competitors and colleagues. Then there is the concept of benchmarking in which corporations align their own practices with that of their competitors. This involves some corporations participating in something close to espionage but the information about competition is vital to their own survival.

How information is collected and used involves ethics and directly impacts the standards of performance and behaviour that the organisation wishes to achieve. Workplace leaders who trade information that rightfully belongs to the organisation are liable for prosecution. How long to keep information or whether to not report information impacting organisational standards and practices may pose ethical problems and often has to be balanced against the possibility of supervisory managers' obligations to uphold the organisation's standards and values. At the interpersonal level of a leader's role, the issues of gathering and applying information are equally problematic. All these factors have to balance and this becomes more difficult where the organisation's standards and ethical basis are inconsistent with the supervisor's or their team's. Such differences require leadership action to model acceptable behaviours and to resolve or communicate to senior management where standards of individual performance contradict the organisation's culture.

Activity 7

Research and review the following websites for companies with a strong ethical basis to both their culture and purpose. For commercial companies reflect on how their ethics and culture reinforce brand identification and their core purpose.

Corporate bodies such as:

• The Body Shop http://www.the-body-shop.com/
• Johnson and Johnson http://www.jnj.com/

Professional associations such as:

• Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science (USA) http://onlineethics.org/
• NSW Law Society http://www.lawsociety.com.au/page.asp?PartID=547

Action groups such as:

• Transparency International, a global coalition against corruption http://www.transparency.org
• Greenpeace International http://www.greenpeace.org/

Individual responsibility

Individual leaders have responsibility to ensure ethical practices. This involves communicating with discretion:

At its best, discretion is the intuitive ability to discern what is and is not intrusive and injurious, and to use this discernment in responding to the conflicts everyone experiences as insider and outsider. It is an acquired capacity to navigate in and between the worlds of personal and shared experiences, coping with the moral questions about what is fair and unfair, truthful or deceptive, helpful or harmful. Inconceivable without an awareness of the boundaries surrounding people, discretion requires a sense for when to hold back in order not to bruise, and for when to reach out (Bronowski, 1978:41).

With discretion, leaders need to communicate relevantly to the purpose at hand; to apply information relevantly and dispose of it relevantly. Further, accuracy of communication, including acknowledgment of a range of interpretations, should be addressed. Finally, leaders need to consider the timing of communication and its fairness. Ethical communication, then, involves leaders' consideration of these five attributes. Power is frequently adopted by leaders to communicate decisions and directives. This power abuses the concept of partnership and returns to a leader-subordinate relationship. This has profound ethical considerations.

It is the responsibility of the leader to uphold ethics in communication. Perhaps this is most succinctly stated as follows:

Communication is ethical when it values the essential dignity of human beings and supports the ability of individuals to realise their full potential. Whether ethical communication is described as supporting informed choice making, contributing to growth and development, or valuing the innate worth of human beings, it depends on individuals taking responsibility for personal behaviours. This personal responsibility underscores the importance of developing criteria or guidelines for ethical communication behaviours (Shockley-Zalabak, 1988:327).

Reading 2

Seglin, JL (April 01, 1998) 'Brother, Can You Spare 30 Cents on the Dollar?', Inc. magazine . Sourced at http://www.inc.com/incmagazine/article/0,,ART905,00.html

WARNING : This article includes language some may find offensive.

Activity 8

Were the actions by George Naddaff (in Seglin's article) unethical or were his standards and values different to Daniel J. Driscoll's?

• Would all companies want to see such requirements implemented by law?
• Reflect on the scenario in the reading; what are some of the ethical concerns leaders should consider with regards to the following stakeholders?
• Shareholders
• Banks
• Staff
• Customers
• Based on your view of ethical behaviour, should the workplace leader communicate information or not in each of the following scenarios?
  • A leader meets with a key staff member who has failed to secure team commitment to a goal. The staff member gives valid, personal reasons for the failure to align with team effort. However, personal information is exchanged and the leader promises not to disclose information given in confidence by the employee. A circumstance arises where the leader has to make an exception and reveal the confidences to the company general manager. Should the information be revealed?
  • An engineering team leader has worked ten years in a design team to develop the most advanced piece of motor vehicle technology in its area. After release it become apparent the technology is fine, but how it has been installed is a safety hazard. Despite formal requests, the engineering team has neither the power nor the capacity to influence the company to initiate a recall. The engineer makes a personal decision and becomes a whistleblower. He informs the press and relevant government agencies. Was this a correct action?
  • A government program supervisor is in charge of implementing innovation and technology development. The agency is responsible for allocating funds to assist R&D in high technology areas. The public funds in the areas are significant and many prospective companies seek the supervisor's good will and assistance to ensure that available funds are allocated to support their project. The supervisor is offered a job with a significant multinational corporation. The job is to head up its team for an R&D project that is being proposed and considered by the aforementioned government agency for funding support. The job is very attractive and they need an immediate response. The supervisor's agency has not completed a preliminary assessment as to whether the proposed project is valid and eligible to receive the necessary public funding support to get it off the ground. Should the supervisor take the job?

Revisit your views on each. Are these judgments your own, or are these judgments likely to be held universally by all in the relevant workplace?