Who's Going To Step Up?

To hold council members, managers and employees to the highest standards of ethical conduct, a code of conduct must cover not just the clear and obvious improprieties but indirect, disguised, or careless conduct that looks like an impropriety to an observer who is neither overly suspicious nor unusually gullible.
Council members, managers and employees should avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all of their activities,” defining an “appearance of impropriety” as conduct that “would create in reasonable minds a perception that the public officials, ability to carry out their responsibilities with integrity, impartiality and competence is impaired.”
Human nature being what it is, it can be difficult to prevent all lapses of judgment. There are, however, some strategies an organization can pursue to minimize them. It all boils down to promoting a culture of ethics within the organization.
Clearly, ethics can shape and define the nature of public positions. Council members, managers and employees who are educated about ethics are more likely to know the right thing to do, to undertake those actions, to justify actions on the basis of professional and moral criteria, and to protect themselves against being blindsided by allegations of ethical impropriety. These competencies are critical in today’s governmental environment; ethics mold the aspirations and roles that public officials fulfill in their organizations and jurisdictions and help define core values and beliefs that direct an organization. By contrast, public officials who act with inadequate regard to core values and professional ethics take an increased risk of jeopardizing their careers, the reputations of their jurisdictions, and the public interest.
The legal response to ethical concerns has been the passage of laws and policies defining and prohibiting unethical activities such as sexual harassment, discrimination, and invasion of privacy and mandating ethical behaviors regarding conflict of interest, financial disclosure, and post-service employment with contractors. Governments have adopted such laws and policies, and the laws have helped to highlight the need for proper conduct in many situations and undoubtedly have had an effect on those who might engage in wrongdoing. Yet this track also has some limitations.
Legal standards do not exist for “appearance of impropriety” areas of government activity, nor would these ethics laws be sufficient to deal with a growing number of poorly defined situations. Laws cannot govern every foreseeable circumstance in which an ethics question is likely to arise. Moreover, public officials may not always be aware of the many provisions of ethics laws, and they may be unclear about how these laws apply to their situation. An interesting unintended consequence of vigorous prosecution has been to sharpen public distrust in government, as more corruption and other unethical acts are exposed. Thus, while the legal response continues to be important, it is increasingly regarded as insufficient for ensuring a proper ethical climate.
Organizations send messages in various ways to internal and external participants about what’s important. For example, one way people can get into trouble is if the prevailing culture of the organization is to value a "just get it done" or "do whatever it takes" approach to job tasks and responsibilities. It’s an issue of the ends versus the means. Are the ends all-important or is the process by which ends are achieved also an important concern?
Ethics, of course, is about the means by which ends are achieved. If your organization emphasizes and rewards only outcomes, you may be inadvertently signaling that the means or processes by which people go about doing their jobs doesn’t matter to the organization or - even worse - that the organization views the ends as justifying any means.
Another way of signaling that ethics is important to the organization is to have an adopted set of organizational values to guide council members and employees. Simply adopting such a set of principles is not enough, however. As the Ethics Resource Center counsels, "Don’t just print, post and pray." The organizational values need to be integrated and highlighted at every opportunity for such a statement to truly play a role in fostering a culture of ethics.
Sometimes public officials are unable “to grasp fully the intricacies of complex ethical issues and to see all of the consequences of their actions.” Typically, the problem surfaces when issues are seen from a narrow and limited legal perspective. This leaves a large ethical blind spot that can produce tunnel vision.
The challenge in overcoming this obstacle is to think and act outside the box of what the law requires. Sound ethical judgment calls for more than meeting the moral minimum of the law.