TOOLS OF ETHICS

Consciously or unconsciously, we engage in some kind of ethical reasoning every

day of our lives. To improve our ethical reasoning, we must analyze it explicitly
and practice it daily. The key terms of the ethical language are values, rights,
duties, rules, and relationships. Let’s consider each in turn.

Values:

When you value something, you want it or you want it to happen. Values are
relatively permanent desires that seem to be good in themselves like peace or
goodwill.

Values are the answers to the why questions. Why, for example, are you reading
this book? You might reply that you want to learn about management. Why is that
important? To be a better manager. Why do you want that? To be promoted and
make more money sooner. Why do you need more money? To spend it on a VCR.
Such questions go on and on, until you reach the point where you no longer want
something for the sake of something else. At this point, you have arrived at a
value. Corporations also have values such as size, profitability, or making a
quality product.

Recently AT&T CEO articulated a set of values called “Our Common Bond”
intended to serve as the anchors or the future The telecommunications industry
is changing so fast that it is difficult to make decisions on common management
principles so he turned to values for an answer. Our Common Bond lists respect
for the individual, teamwork, dedication to customers, innovation and integrity as
the ground rules for AT&T and its subsidiaries.

Two important values at L.L. Bean are providing top quality customer service and
employees development. Over the years, employees of this mail-order and retail
dealer in Freeport, Maine have gone above and beyond to carry out Bean’s
tradition of quality service sustaining the company’s reputation for quality. For
example, when a customer in New York failed to receive his canoe in time for
weekend trip, an L.L Bean sales representative drove the canoe to the customer.
That was not the end of it, however; the incident made company managers
questions why the canoe did not arrive on time. They discovered that although
company employees were committed to customer services they were not
empowered to make the type of decisions necessary to prevent such
occurrences, nor did they have the necessary knowledge of processes elsewhere
in the company that affect such situations.

To correct the system, L.L. Bean employed total quality management approach.
However, rather than focusing in process improvements as most companies do
when starting in this type of change, L.L. Bean centered its efforts on employee
development. Bean’s definition of total quality reflects its valuing of employees:
Total quality involves managing an enterprise to maximize customer satisfaction
in the most efficient and effective way possible by totally involving people in
improving the way it is done. The total quality approach also involved challenging
all the company’s assumptions and redesigning its processes. The change has
been very successful, leading to higher profits and increased customer
satisfaction.

Rights and Duties:

A right is a claim that entitles a person the room in which to take action. In more
formal terms, one might call this room a person’s sphere of autonomy or more
simply, his or her freedom. Rights are rarely absolute; most people would agree
that the scope of individual rights is limited by the rights of others. Ordinarily, you
have a right to speak your mind freely until you make slanderous statements
about another person.

Moreover, rights are correlated with duties. Whenever someone has a right,
someone else has a duty to respect it. A duty is an obligation to take specific
steps to pay taxes, for example and to obey the law in other respects.

Moral Rules:

Moral rules guide us through situations where competing interests collide. You
might think of moral rules as tie breakers guidelines that can resolve
disagreements. Moral rules, which are rules for behavior, often become
internalized as values.
Human Relationships:

Every human being is connected to others in a web of relationships. These

relationships exist because we need one another for mutual support and to
accomplish our goals. From a small child’s relationship with parents to a
manager’s relationship with an employee, relationships are a pervasive aspect of
moral life. We constantly decide how to maintain and nurture them. These
decisions reflect our values and our concern for ethics. So, when we say that
management is about relationships, we are claiming that it has a large ethical
component.