Ethical Leadership

 

ETHICAL LEADERSHIP

Ethical Leadership

The ethical part of leadership has been sharply questioned particularly by leaders who failed to live by some intact principles & standards. But the question is: Is it helpful to fully manifest your potential as a leader by remaining ethical? Or should you run into the same cat & mouse race as is done by some corrupt and unethical leaders? The answer to the former question is an absolute YES! Because leadership is an act which involves trust of the followers. And in any given scenario, if you violate that basic entity which is the very foundation of a stable relationship between a leader and a follower, you have uprooted yourself from being a transformational leader to merely an authoritative leader.

HOW TO BE ETHICAL?

Ethical Leadership

Followers are motivated by the leaders promises, praise and rewards, or they are corrected by their feedback, reproof or some disciplinary course of action. In other words, there needs to be some authority which generally acts as a lighthouse for others and sets the standard. And that somebody should be the leader himself.

·        Stay Actively Engaged: When leaders engage in active management-by-exception, they monitor followers performance and correct followers mistakes. The number one advantage of staying actively engaged with the followers is that you can monitor their growth and the use of resources.

But when the leaders engage in passive-management-by-exception, they wait passively for followers mistakes to be called to their attention before taking corrective actions with negative feedbacks. And the result is that they end up disconnecting themselves with the followers and the latter’s trust in the former collapses eventually.

·        Focus on being effective not popular: Do you know why most leaders perpetuate against their principles and ethical boundaries? Most of them do it because they focus too much on being a people’s person. And the argument is that if you align yourself away from your ethical standards, you will always be misguided. Why? Because different people will have different opinions about you. They will have different set of beliefs for your accomplishments. And if you indulge yourself in petty popularity, you will end up moving away from your ethical considerations and lose the trust of people you lead.

Ethical Leadership

·        Build a strong character: The key here really is to understand your beliefs and values which you will never compromise even in the advent of adversity. That means, you become a convict of your own convictions. Leadership is a tough business and requires the leader to be morally & ethically stern, so that he do not gets carried away when the tough & turbulent times strike him. Great leaders of the history like Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and many others showed an exemplary character which formed the foundation of their leadership abilities. No wonder why vast majority of the people trusted and followed them. They had this unique quality of leading the masses that separated them from the crowd and helped them make a mark on their followers and on the world.

                                           The important thing to note here is that character should never be perplexed with charisma or even reputation. It doesn’t mean that you are acting a moral figure in public but doing immoral stuff in private. If you aspire to be an effective leader, your intent should be to stay envisioned on developing a strong & genuine character.

·        Focus on yourself first and not on others: In Plato’s Philebus dialogue, Socrates argued the point that people look absurd when they try to know obscure things before knowing themselves. The generalized concept is that if you always keep yourself occupied in looking faults or problems faced by other people, you don’t have the time to check whether you are still on the ethical spots or not. Therefore, always keep in touch with yourself and readily make changes when you notice any deviation from your standards.

 

·        Share your values: This is generally one of the best practices that a leader must inculcate in order to stay ethically sound. Although this part comes in the transformational leadership also, but mainly it is based on the idea of creating an environment or culture within the organization where the followers, managers & the leaders have same belief patters & value system.

The core values are an integral part of sustaining and thriving an organization. And that’s the reason why core values must be assimilated by the leaders beginning from day one. And then shared with the followers. As the Roman philosophy goes, “if you can make a large group of people believe in something, you are actually creating a culture’. And if the culture in your organization is based on its core values, there is no better alternative than that. The inputs that you feed into your people, they return it in the form of their performance and help in thriving the organization and sustaining it in times of crisis because of the trust that has been established.

CONCLUSION:

The conclusion is very plain. There are not many complexities in staying ethical if a leader really wishes and desires to do so. Is it worth staying ethical? Yes, we have seen leaders who made a difference just by not compromising on their standards and staying ethical. You can check and maintain your ethical behavior by following these prerequisites:

·        Stay Actively Engaged.

·        Focus on being effective not popular.

·        Build a Strong Character.

·        Focus on yourself first.

·        Share your values.

If you keep in touch with the above points, it will help you to stay ethical and lead in a much better way.