Why are ethics so important?

Why are ethics so important? Because you can't make good decisions without them. 

Thinks about this. What is a good decision? Or a good solution?  Without defining what "good" means in the particular situation you are in, you cannot answer that question.

All good decision making requires the active application of ethics to decide between options. There is ALWAYS some metric being used to define good. Whether we are talking about a good hire, or a good customer or a good solution. 

If we don't actively and explicitly discuss what we mean by good, we a) have trouble creating consensus and b) often end up with bad results because we used bad ethics without questioning them.

Whenever I am on a team having a disagreement, my first effort is to ask questions. What is a good outcome? Or an ideal outcome? And most importantly - why. 

For instance, I was at a tower company, a good tower to the marketing team is a tower they can market. A good tower to the maintenance team was a tower that didn't require a lot of maintenance. A good tower to the financial team was a tower that brought in more cash flow than debt. 

Until we talked about the various differences in how the groups were defining good, we couldn't get consensus on this question. Once we did get clarity on the various versions of what good means, we could.

Now, I know what you are saying, but Jennifer, those aren't- ethics, like we think of ethics. But they are. They are closely related to them. 

Once you start discussing what good means, you can start bringing in the more moral aspects of ethics. Do this help or hurt the community? Does it help or hurt people in general? What about the climate?  These are all valid ethical considerations that should be integrated into decision making, both on a personal and a professional level.

So, stop worrying about whether you can discuss ethics. You are already. Or should be already. And don't be shy about bringing in moral metrics in addition to the business cases for what is good. Doing so will elevate the discussion. Engage people in the problem solving effort and make it collaborative. 

As always, I do have courses to help you learn this. My courses provide certificates of completion and are approved by HRCI and SHRM for continuing education credits.

Reality Based Decision Making for Effective Strategy Development - https://humanistlearning.com/realitybaseddecisionmaking/ - 1 hour business

Principles of Humanistic Leadership https://humanistlearning.com/principles-of-humanistic-leadership/ 2 hours 

Or become a certified humanistic leadership professional - https://humanistlearning.com/certified-humanistic-leadership-professional/

Reality

Reality isn’t always pleasant. But we don’t solve our problems by pretending they don’t exist.

Accepting reality will help you be a better leader.  A leader who sticks their head in the sand isn’t a leader. They are a coward that is too afraid to lead.

Good leaders accept reality, even when it is unpleasant. The don’t flinch from their responsibilities, they just get on with the job of fixing the problems whatever they are.

Resist the temptation to ignore reality or to plan for the best case scenario.  Plan for the worse case and be pleasantly surprised if it turns out to be easier to deal with then you thought.

I am currently running numbers for a property rental business. Sure, I could run optimistic numbers, but I would be lying to myself. Instead, I run real numbers. What is it I have right now. How much is it really going to cost me to do whatever it is I need to do.  A good cost benefit analysis is based in reality. Anything else is a flight of fantasy and won’t lead to good problem solving.

I used to be in franchise sales and I helped a lot of people create their business plans. Almost all of them were overly optimistic about income and overly optimistic about expenses. My advice was always - halve your income, double your expenses. Do you still want to do this?  That is reality based decision making.

To learn more about reality based decision making – check out this course.

The benefits of critical thinking.

5 Reasons to make the effort to think critically.

1) Better decisions. Basing your decisions on facts yields better outcomes. To make sure what you think you know is actually so requires a little critical thinking.

2) Better strategies. In order to have an effective strategy you have to know what all your options are and you have to weigh the pros and cons of all of them to choose the one that will give you the best chance of success. Again, this requires thinking

3) You won’t waste your time on proxy problems. A lot of people fail because they try to solve the problem they think needs to be solved when what they are really working on is a proxy problem that is standing in for their real problem. And because they never bother to question the assumptions they made about which problem needs to be solved, they never realize that they are working on the wrong problem. Critical thinking, questioning why you are solving this particular problem will help you avoid wasting time and energy on proxy problems.

4) Better relationships. We all make assumptions. But if you never bother to find out if your assumptions are true, you may be making a mistake. This is especially true when your assumptions are about other people. Taking the time to recognize that other people don’t think like you and aren’t necessarily motivated the same way you are allows you to figure out what really is motivating them. Again, the challenging of your assumptions IS the art of critical thinking.

5) You won’t get taken in by charlatans. Charlatans and scam artists make their money from people who don’t bother to check their claims to make sure what they are saying is true. Don’t be duped. Learn how to question and challenge claims being made.

3 Strategies to Help you Make Better Decisions.

Three ways you can eliminate bias in your decision making process.

Question: 

Do you have to make important decisions all the time? How does one get better at making them, and feeling confident with their choice?

Answer: 

I always encourage people to do their best to make reality based decisions. The task is to try and eliminate confirmation bias and figure out whether what you think you know about something is really true or not.

Something might look good in a brochure or in a commercial, but until you see it in person, your judgment may be clouded by wishful thinking.

Here are 3 strategies I use: 

My mother always encouraged me to make pro and con lists – consider the benefits and the downsides to all my options and then use those as a guide to help me prioritize what is really important to me.  This works wonderful.

Sometimes you just have to give it a little time. If all things are equal in my mind and the pro and con list didn't help, I will often decide not to decide right now, if I have that luxury.  What usually happens is that my true preference becomes clear within a few weeks as my brain relaxes out of decision making mode and starts to contemplate what the future might be like. And it usually really likes one of the options. So – that’s what I go with. Again, I only use this method when I have no other way of making a decision or when I find I’m too confused to make a decision.

Finally, there has been some recent research that suggests if you don’t have a good reason for making a decision, you may be better making a random decision. So, if all things are equal – go ahead and flip a coin and see what happens.

Feel like you don’t make good decisions. Learn how to integrate your ethics and science into your decision making process with my Living Made Simpler Course:
https://humanistlearning.com/livingmadesimpler1/