10 Things Ethical Leaders Believe:
- Our purpose is to create value for others.
- How we treat people matters.
- Our moral grounding is more important than our goals and opinions.
- Everything we do has a ripple effect, and that ripple is global.
- We must take responsibility.
- We need to be proactive.
- We should serve as positive role models. We model ethical leadership through our character, integrity, behavior, and choices. Our role is to listen, learn and improve, serving as a role model for what ethical behavior looks like. We model the ethical behavior we ask of others. We realize that we can only bring out the best in those we lead when we demonstrate our commitment to ethics and show them the way.
- We will embrace the learning journey. There is no check-box for ethical leadership. It is an ongoing individual and organizational journey. We will never know everything that there is to know. We never arrive. We understand. We struggle. We grow. We realize what we don’t know. We get past ultimatums and boxes on charts and work to be better leaders every day.
- We will enjoy a competitive advantage.
- We will build a better world.
Next time, we’ll dig into the last two beliefs in the 10 Things Ethical Leaders Believe.
This post is an excerpt from What Ethical Leaders Believe: A Leading in Context Manifesto by Linda Fisher Thornton.
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