Ways To Improve Your Ethical Decision-Making

I don’t want to pass up the opportunity to share an article I read about Ways To Improve Your Ethical Decision-Making. Here are a few highlights:

Any management position involves decision-making.

This is where ethical decision-making comes in. As a leader, your decisions influence your company’s culture, employees’ motivation and productivity, and business processes’ effectiveness. It also impacts your organization’s reputation—in terms of how customers, partners, investors, and prospective employees perceive it—and long-term success.

With such a large portion of your company’s performance relying on your guidance, here are ways to improve your ethical decision-making.

1. Gain Clarity Around Personal Commitments

You may be familiar with the saying, “Know thyself.” The first step to including ethics in your decision-making process is defining your personal commitments.

To gain clarity around those, Hsieh recommends asking:

·        What’s core to my identity? How do I perceive myself?

·        What lines or boundaries will I not cross?

·        What kind of life do I want to live?

·        What type of leader do I want to be?

Once you better understand your core beliefs, values, and ideals, it’s easier to commit to ethical guidelines in the workplace. If you get stuck when making challenging decisions, revisit those questions for guidance.\

2. Overcome Biases

A bias is a systematic, often unconscious inclination toward a belief, opinion, perspective, or decision. It influences how you perceive and interpret information, make judgments, and behave.

Bias is often based on:

·        Personal experience

·        Cultural background

·        Social conditioning

·        Individual preference

It exists in the workplace as well.

3. Reflect on Past Decisions

The next step is reflecting on previous decisions.

“By understanding different kinds of bias and how they can show themselves in the workplace, we can reflect on past decisions, experiences, and emotions to help identify problem areas,” Hsieh says in the course.

Reflect on your decisions’ processes and the outcomes. Were they favorable? What would you do differently? Did bias affect them? Through analyzing prior experiences, you can learn lessons that help guide your ethical decision-making.

Want to know more? Head on over to the full article here for more ideas and perspectives. Afterwards, why not drop me an email to share your thoughts at robert@businessvaluepartners.com.au; or call me on 0467 749 378.

Thanks,

Robert