Modern business environment hides many threats and challenges for a leader. As for leadership ethics, today’s world includes much of the old values, and some that are new and truly exciting. Ethics principles that can be seen rebottled versions of dimensions and knowledge, skills, and abilities.
Unlike this principle, the idea of the decision-making process is more about the combination of old and new issues using certain training setting. It aims at solving business problems to develop job experience within a regular and appropriate learning environment. Finally, some current practice is altogether new—for example, using executive coaches, delivering training through interactive media, and including “world tours” (trips for participants to different countries) in development programs.
Ferrell et al. (2000) admit that the style of leadership influences ethical decisions. Leadership today is expected to produce specific business results, an expectation that has both good and bad attributes. Under current conditions, leadership development undergoes considerable changes: on the one hand, its investments and visibility are increased; and on the other hand, offered expectations are considered to be too high and proper development may fail to meet the competitive challenges within the global market.
Modern leadership is influenced by company policies, state laws, and industry regulations. Ferrell et al. (2000) call it “immediate job context” (p.128). Each of the four elements discussed—content, method, learner, and context—reflects a shift in perspective from the past.
Three evident areas are known in current leadership: developing desired attributes in the leaders themselves, frequently called competencies; developing the individual’s capacity to solve business problems; interchange of organizational values and working strategies.
Leadership development is characterized by a variety of targets, and ethical competencies (also known as a competency model) is one of these targets that effort in the vast majority of organizations. The approach to relating development and business results is to use the organization’s targets and its problems as a powerful ground of the development content. The following situation serves as a good example. Company’s target is partnerships and the development of joint ventures.
The content of its company’s leadership is the performance and development of necessary organizational arrangements. Decision-making content is all about problems’ identification like forecasting of possible customers’ needs within still undeveloped markets on the international level or defining them as trainees.
In fact, there are two main goals of development: improvement of appropriate leadership capability and business promotion. With the help of real-life example, it becomes clearer that a business-oriented approach may vary considerably because of business needs’ alterations. For example, one company’s strategy called for restructuring to give more autonomy to its business units.
To succeed in this operation, it is necessary to start a captivating presentation and explain the basics of a strategic business plan, the essentials of the coaching business, and the main characteristics of leadership teams. The participants both learned a new discipline for crafting strategic plans and created viable plans. Another organization needed its technical professionals to assume responsibility for leading a significant organizational transformation, including relationships with unions, customers, and nonprofessional employees.
They created a development program to expose these new leaders, who until then had operated in narrow silos, to these critical constituencies, including presentations by satisfied and dissatisfied customers and by union presidents whose members were threatening to strike.
Business-centered ethics about the content of development opens up almost limitless possibilities. It has the advantage of creating both individual values and immediate business payoff. Still, it is not without limitations.
In our experience, the projects chosen for development over time may become less significantly; important problems may gain ethical purposes and make decision makers free from responsibility to solve them all the time; business issues inherent to development may become of less importance that they are now; the possibility to solve predictable outcomes of the strategies appear; business issues are not amenable to resolution in a program setting; and the approach can be theoretical to a fault, with little logic to guide an individual’s cumulative development.
“Ethical leaders need both knowledge and experience to make the right decision” (Ferrell et al, 2009, p. 135). It becomes more and more difficult for high-potential leaders to define their actual connection to the sphere of ethics. Constant time pressure or lack of time, time zones, and huge distances are harmful to classroom-oriented instructions.
In general, the role of the leader in business strategy is influential. Its missions, values, and purposes are perfectly described in the examples of this paper. The recognition of corporate culture is a key element in organizational performance. Organizations are responsible for any changes within decision-making, and leaders need to be ready to identify their missions and actions in order to assist other organizations.
One more business-oriented approach makes us pay more attention to individuals but not to organizations. This approach aims at developing a person’s experience to evaluate and improve business plans and to present proper individual coaching during the time when this plan is carried out. People inclined to leadership have to forecast the outcomes of this approach and demand more to achieve more.
Those organizations that cannot support and develop leadership properly are under threat to falter. The idea that a leader may be hired from different organizations on clear grounds serves as the sign of shortsightedness indeed.
References
Ferrell, O. C., Fraedrich, J., and Ferrell, L. (2009). Business Ethics, Ethical Decision Making & Cases, Seventh Edition. Boston, MA: Prentice Hall.