Ethics

“Leadership scholars are increasingly acknowledging that traditional, unitary approaches to leadership are likely suboptimal in team settings.” Translation: Objective study shows top-down team leadership, the way most business teams are led, is not the best way.

The confluence of a recent news story and journal article has demonstrated a reason beyond morality or ethics or law for protecting the protected classes as a manager. If for no other reason, do it to protect yourself.

You pull your coffee out of the microwave oven and settle down for a few moments with a book on persuasion from a psychologist. Into your smartphone goes an idea to try on your boss. Turning to your computer, you use the ergonomic mouse that has saved your aching thumb to drill through some e-mails, thankful the allergy pill you took has kicked in.

In another example of people relearning a well-established truth the hard way, plaintiffs in a U.S. Supreme Court case this week found out they could not use their work pagers for "sexting." More to the point of this blog, I hope their managers learned a similar message: don't tell people they have rights they don't actually have.

To both sides I say, "Duh."

"We're all going to die!" This was how Ryan Allis, CEO of iContact, started his presentation at a recent Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce event this week. He credited another speaker for the line, but his point was made: keep things in perspective. He shared stories that proved having and staying true to one's goals and values can contribute to the bottom line. He should know. He set a goal when he was 16 that he would have a $1 million business by the time he was 21.

If you would like to have a hard-working, loyal team member, consider hiring an ex-criminal. At the very least, it may keep you out of trouble.

"Be a team player" is one of the most abused phrases in business. Most of the time, what it really means is, "Shut up and go along with everyone." You know: the way people at Enron and Lehman Brothers and Toyota were "team players." How did that work out for them?

After all the U.S. media focus on schoolyard bullies in recent years, I'm glad to see a growing awareness of what those playground pugilists may grow up to be: abusive bosses. Prof. David Yamada and a growing chorus of researchers are out to change that by making workplace emotional abuse illegal in the Unites States. Among a host of other good reasons, Yamada wants to save lives.

I just finished reading a horror story, made all the worse because it is a true story involving failure to protect nuclear weapons secrets, lost management—and indirectly, me.