I look forward to working with you again. Thank you Running Head: ETHICAL LEADERSHIP 1 Ethical Leadership Name Instructor Course Institutional Affiliation Date ETHICAL LEADERSHIP 2 Important characteristics of ethical leadership Ethics is a broad concept that refers to appropriate and desirable morals and values that are based on individual actor observed by the society at large. It is important that in the actions, we focus on its purity and actual or real intention. It is at this point that then ethics offers guidelines that are appropriate in analyzing what is actually good or bad act on specific circumstances. When we correlate ethics with leading, we observe that ethics offers a leader an identity on the role they do (Mihelic, Lipicnik & Tekavcic, 2010). We cannot over emphasize the importance of ethics in leadership, if the leader is to influence and drive subordinates towards achieving a common goal. Therefore, it is deemed to be the ethical role of a leader in treating with respect for it is the ethical environment built and developed by leaders that would influence proper development of organizational values (Oates & Dalmau, 2013). The following traits, in my opinion are fundamental into being an effective ethical leader: Dignity and respectful An ethical leader is one who respects others and treats them with dignity as equal human beings. Using subordinates as medium of achieving persona... Assignment Overview In this assignment you will be asked to consider the role of organizational leaders with respect to ensuring companies work to create an ethical workplace culture. It is important for all upper level leaders to ‘walk the talk’ so to speak. In addition, many larger companies have a Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer who provides leadership and oversight to the company’s business ethics related endeavors. Recall that Lockheed Martin has such an executive level position. However, not all companies have such a position. In this assignment you will be asked to discuss the contributions of executive leaders and of the Ethics Officer with respect to building an organization that values workplace ethics. 1. What do you believe are the most important characteristics of ethical leadership? 2. Describe the relationship between the ethical leader and the follower. 3. Why is this relationship important for organizations that are attempting to do the right thing? 4. Based on your readings (both the articles provided and Terris’ text), what is the role of the Chief Ethics Officer and how does the role of this person relate to the success of the ethics related endeavors within large organizations? SLP Assignment Expectations paper should be 3 pages, double-spaced and in 12-point type size. paper should have a separate cover page and a separate reference page. Make sure you cite your sources. Use APA style, What Students Are Saying About Us.......... Customer ID: 12*** | Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐"Honestly, I was afraid to send my paper to you, but you proved you are a trustworthy service. My essay was done in less than a day, and I received a brilliant piece. I didn’t even believe it was my essay at first 🙂 Great job, thank you!" .......... Customer ID: 11***| Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "This company is the best there is. They saved me so many times, I cannot even keep count. Now I recommend it to all my friends, and none of them have complained about it. The writers here are excellent." "Order a custom Paper on Similar Assignment at essayfount.com! No Plagiarism! Enjoy 20% Discount!"
This article was republished with permission from Michael Volkov’s blog, Corruption, Crime & Compliance. To bring some continuity to my blog, I try to start the New Year off by acknowledging the most significant person for the past year. Over the last three years, I recognized the Chief Compliance Officer, the Whistleblower and the Prosecutor, respectively, as the Person of the Year.
This year I am recognizing the Chief Ethics Officer as the Person of the Year. Many companies have embraced the importance of ethics as an important function as related to, but separate from, the compliance function. Wal-Mart has appointed a Chief Ethics Officer, and more companies are refocusing compliance programs on the importance of ethical culture. I have written often this past year about the importance of an ethical culture, the significant benefits of an ethical culture and the role that ethics can play in the overall effectiveness of a compliance program. To that end, I have reminded my readers (and clients) that a Chief Compliance Officer is actually a Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer. Some have taken this concept even further by separating the ethics and the compliance functions to underscore the importance of managing and promoting a company’s ethical culture. The rise of the Chief Ethics Officer, whether combined with compliance or not, is the most significant trend we see today in compliance. This past year was an important year for compliance – not because of any significant changes in the profession itself, but because of business leaders recognizing (finally) the importance of ethics, not for some altruistic reason, but as an essential priority for any successful and sustainable business organization. In the past decade, businesses have started to pay attention to compliance as an important function of a successful business. With the focus on compliance, in the past year, businesses have suddenly discovered the value of ethics as a separate and important part of the company’s compliance function. Businesses now see a strong ethical culture as the most effective protection against compliance failures. Employees at ethical companies are more likely to question and report what they see as unethical behavior. More companies are starting to realize that investing in a company’s culture is an important priority for company growth and sustainability. The new focus is on values and ethical behaviors, as opposed to compliance policies, procedures and guidelines. One goes hand-in-hand with the other – ethics means nothing without compliance, and compliance means nothing without an ethical culture. As part of this trend, companies have re-examined their codes of conduct to simplify the message around a core set of values and beliefs. Once the values and beliefs are embedded in the company culture, compliance policies and procedures take on a new meaning, a new life. A code of conduct is now being used to endorse and promote a set of aspirational values. That is just the beginning part of the process. Companies have rolled out targeted training on their respective codes of conduct and are reinforcing this ethics messaging through blogs, social media and other internal communications techniques. All of this emphasis on ethics, codes of conduct, values and beliefs is welcome news, but now the question boils down to leadership commitment and ultimately, demonstrating commitment to ethical conduct. The ethical culture has to extend through every layer of a company, including the behaviors of sales personnel who are on the front lines of every business. Employees have to believe in the company rather than just comply with the company’s rules. A believer is a happier and more productive employee, as opposed to an employee who performs his or her job while making sure they do not violate company rules. A Chief Ethics Officer has an important function in every company – they have to ask the question of whether a company should act in a certain way, as opposed to whether the company can act in a certain way. The transformation in business thinking is not easy to accomplish, but with the rise of the Chief Ethics Officer, many companies want to give it a try. A 2018 survey by Deloitte of 1,400 U.S. executives knowledgeable about artificial intelligence (AI) found that 32% ranked ethical issues as one of the top three risks of AI. That’s a surprisingly high number given that just a few years ago there were no such issues. Questions around bias and equality had yet to be raised. Today, that situation is rapidly changing, and progressive enterprises are starting to think seriously about the intersection of ethics and AI. Much of that work is beginning to find its way to a position that’s also on the rise—the chief ethics officer. Unlike many CXO roles, the chief ethics officer—also known under numerous other titles, including chief trust officer and chief ethics and compliance officer—doesn’t have a consistent job description. Much of the time, particularly in finance, the role comes from a need to ensure compliance with federal regulations and other rules designed to prevent monetary misdeeds, such as money laundering and insider trading. But a few forward-looking companies are turning to the position, regardless of specific title, to help steer corporate values more broadly and oversee everything from fair trade discussions to, more recently, ensuring AI algorithms are unbiased. A New Management Discipline That said, in much of the tech world, the concept of a chief ethics officer remains a hard sell, in large part because of pressures to stay competitive. “Being first in ethics rarely matters as much as being first in revenues,” says Timothy Casey, a Professor in Residence at California Western School of Law and a member of the Ethics Committee of the San Diego Bar Association. The other big issue is simply a matter of history. Casey notes that while certain professions have ethics baked in from the start, computer programming decidedly does not. “In medicine and law, you have an organization that can revoke your license if you violate the rules, so the impetus to behave ethically is very high,” he says. “AI developers have nothing like that.” The good news is that hasn’t stopped a handful of pioneers from wading into this complicated territory, working to create their own code of conduct and rules for ethical behavior, even in the absence of outside guidance. Salesforce, for instance, is one of the most visible companies to hire an ethics chief. Paula Goldman, who joined the company in January 2019 and carries the title of chief ethical and humane use officer, has a broad mandate: “To develop a strategic framework for the ethical and humane use of technology.” That could cover everything from averting “fake news” to protecting the environment, but one likely focus of her work will be to ensure that Salesforce’s use of AI is not subverted to nefarious ends. Google is another pioneer in this space, and while the company doesn’t currently have an ethics chief, it does have a board that is focused entirely on ethics and AI. The board’s principles are published online and codified in a set of beliefs that AI should benefit society, should avoid bias, and should incorporate privacy principles, among other things. Since the principles were published last June, Google has said it is creating a formal review structure that will assess projects and products under these rules before they go to market. Getting Your Own House In Order But for a company like Google, which has a culture that’s steeped in technology, to bring ethical considerations to bear on emerging technologies like AI is one thing. What happens at a company that is still in the throes of digital transformation? These companies are finding their ethics chiefs being tasked with new types of challenges, and the transition isn’t always easy. Michael Levin, like many chief ethics officers, began his career in law before ultimately moving in-house. (“I got tired of cleaning up messes,” he says.) After a stint at an ethics-focused startup and BAE Systems, he became director of ethics at Boeing and then chief ethics officer at the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, aka Freddie Mac, where he’s worked since 2014. For Levin, the life of a chief ethics officer still revolves around critical baseline functions such as providing guidance and awareness of ethics to the entire business. “That includes training to shape the corporate culture and responding to allegations of misconduct,” he says. As part of that, Levin’s group runs web- and phone-based helplines where employees can ask questions anonymously or report problems they run across. While Levin says Freddie Mac’s use of machine learning, AI, and predictive analytics is evolving, he says the company is keenly focused on the ethics of data handling and protection. Freddie Mac buys, pools, and resells mortgages into mortgage-backed securities en masse, to the tune of millions of loans. “That data has to be protected the right way,” says Levin. “The more the markets change, the more competitive they get, and the more companies are going to be looking at ways to use data to get a competitive advantage. That’s why clear policies around data use and protection are critical and why the ethics office should be involved early.” A Bull’s-eye On Ethics At Target Robert Foehl is now executive-in-residence for business law and ethics at the Ohio University College of Business. In industry, he’s best known as the man who laid the ethical groundwork for Target as the company’s first director of corporate ethics. At a company like Target, says Foehl, ethical issues arise every day. “This includes questions about where goods are sourced, how they are manufactured, the environment, justice and equality in the treatment of employees and customers, and obligations to the community,” he says. “In retail, the biggest issues tend to be around globalism and how we market to consumers. Are people being manipulated? Are we being discriminatory?” For Foehl, all of these issues are just part of various ethical frameworks that he’s built over the years; complex philosophical frameworks that look at measures of happiness and suffering, the potential for individual harm, and even the impact of a decision on the “virtue” of the company. As he sees it, bringing a technology like AI into the mix has very little impact on that. “The fact that you have an emerging technology doesn’t matter,” he says, “since you have thinking you can apply to any situation.” Whether it’s AI or big data or any other new tech, says Foehl, “we still put it into an ethical framework. Just because it involves a new technology doesn’t mean it’s a new ethical concept.” Learn more about how companies are leveraging AI today. In other words, a big data project may raise questions about customer privacy. It’s part of the chief ethics officer’s role to figure this out whenever a new initiative or technology arises. “When a company thinks about an emerging technology such as AI,” says Foehl, “the company should not only ask, ‘How can we use it?’ but also, ‘Should we use it?’” It’s important to understand that a typical chief ethics officer is not personally scouring code and sifting through machine learning models to mitigate risk of “machine bias.” The role is more advisory and more strategic than tactical. At Target, Foehl’s job was to meet with the executive team to advise them on the appropriateness of decisions and to understand the ethical risks around them—and to train managers in how to do the same. You can see some of this at work in the Brookings Institution’s “Blueprint for the Future of AI,” which lays out five ethical dilemmas around AI and a six-step process for how to deal with them, ranging from the development of a code of ethics to building a remediation system when things go awry. But, says Foehl, the biggest challenge is more forward-looking: “Identifying and understanding new ethical issues as they crop up. For example, is an android with human-level intelligence owed human rights? This is something we haven’t had to cross yet, but eventually we will.” The Job Of The Future Many of these discussions around ethics and AI seem academic today, but that’s changing quickly. Research firm Cognizant included the “chief trust officer” in its 21 Jobs of the Future study, alongside gigs like quantum machine learning analyst and genomic portfolio director. And at a recent education conference, one consultant suggested that philosophy graduates would be in heavy demand by 2030, employed to “look into AI-related outputs through a human lens.” In other words, as AI becomes more and more intelligent, we humans are going to have to work harder to keep up. Doug Rose, author of the upcoming book “Data Dilemma: How Data Ethics Defines Your Business,” offers a tangible example. “Right now, if a crash is unavoidable, Google’s self-driving cars are designed to collide with the smaller of two objects,” he says. “That was an engineering solution to a deeply moral question.” That won’t be—or shouldn’t be—the model going forward as AI adoption grows rapidly across industries. More and more, companies need an ethics chief, Rose adds, “to insert themselves into these tough decisions. As these technology questions become more complicated, these ethical decisions might not be just about what’s right and wrong. They actually could turn out to be about life and death.” Learn more about how companies are leveraging AI today. |