The Trouble with Ethics

"All that is required for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" - Edmund Burke

You know, sometimes we discuss or learn about a topic for what seems to be forever. You tend to just go through the motions to get the "credits for the course", or you do it because it is the new "buzz-word" in the profession to be talking and focussing on.

This particular topic to me, is Ethics.

I think to give those of you reading this entry today, a visual of just how underwhelmingly indifferent I use to be to this topic, I suppose I need to take you back a few years...

In 2000, the year of the end of the world as we now it, where my childhood mostly involved trying to "bunk" history and maths class by slipping away during second break to listen to the latest pop music playing on the radio, I was mixing with some of the more shall I say "liberal" kids in school. One break-time we all sneaked out to the tennis courts to have cheeky little cigarette. It was amazing, that rush of adrenaline - I think I've always kind of enjoyed the dangerous side to life since then. But in anyway, I am getting distracted. The next minute we see about 5 or 6 matric guys coming our way at one helluva pace. It turned out to be 6 prefects, and naturally all 6 would be in the first team rugby squad at Grey as well... #myluck

The next minute all I remember was being pushed & punched to the floor. Let's just clear one thing up now, I was a total nerd at school - I smoked because of peer pressure, I think I hung out with the "bad-boys" so they won't beat me up. Back to the story, needless to say we nearly got suspended but instead we were not allowed to wear our ties with our school uniform for the next month. I don't know what was worse, I use to be able to simply hide below the radar - but not wearing a tie in an-all boys school of roughly 800 pupils, you kind of stand out like a sore thumb. I felt terribly "embarrassed" - almost as embarrassed as what I felt this week for not taking ethics in the workplace more seriously.

As I am typing this I am thinking how exactly I was planning on tying this childhood story with the topic of ethics today? Oh yes, that's right. It was to convey two significant feelings I recently experienced in the week about Ethics. They are "embarrassment" and "flabbergasted" (yeah, I checked - it is an actual word #lol).

I think the intensity of the embarrassment I felt that day at the tennis court, walking around school with no tie, seeing the teachers' disappointment in their faces - that's what I want you to feel if you're not taking ethics in your business more seriously. But it's the second feeling, the feeling of being "flabbergasted" about it, that shook my world hard enough in order for me to write about it today. The importance of ethics approached me like a "gorilla tactic soldier", it literally came out of nowhere and it smacked me in my face. And the hard part is, once your mind's open to it - it can't close to it again. It can not be undone.

You know the saying, the "penny has dropped"? Well that's how my experience with ethics this week has been. I've learnt about a company called WorldCom, who, up to the mid 2000's was the worlds 2nd biggest telecoms company and whose top management literally caused the demise of this multimillion dollar corporation due to their lack of business ethics. The "goss" is, (let's face it, we all love a bit of goss), that the financial guys committed fraud by over-valuing their assets, stocks & shares by about $12 billion. WorldCom's bankruptcy filing in 2002 was the largest such filing in U.S. history. The WorldCom scandal is regarded as one of the worst corporate crimes in history, and several former executives involved in the fraud faced criminal charges for their involvement. Most notably, company founder and former CEO Bernard Ebbers was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and former CFO Scott Sullivan received a five-year jail sentence, which would have been longer had he not pleaded guilty and testified against Ebbers.

Alas, I eventually realised that it's the Ethics, the things we do at work when no ones watching, that is so important. How we treat our staff, our stakeholders and business partners. Are we honest in our daily interactions with our customers & suppliers?

Look, I get it - "we all live in glass houses", and in no way am I saying I can always distinguish between what's right and whats wrong. What is legal and what's not legal. The beauty is of course sometimes even when something is illegal, it can be ethical... Consider the case where you run a traffic light or speed, even though this action is illegal, it can be an ethical issue if it's someone's life that was depended on you getting them to the hospital as quick as possible.

Ethics is like Carma - you reap what you sow. I also feel there may be a lot of businesses in PE that feel they can't be doing business in an ethical manner all the time due to the increasingly tight and volatile market we find ourselves in. Whether it may be short-paying staff below the thresholds of collective agreements set at the bargaining councils or selling a product that may not be working as well as it should. I get it, we all need to make a living. But the aim of this entry is to get people to slowly change their perceptions - to realise that creating an ethical business climate will positively, unconditionally and rewardingly lead to better prospects and ultimately a better financial position for your business.

Start off by drafting your Code of Ethics Policy today. This will underpin your core values of your business and serve as a road map for the future of its success.

By Ruaan Kriel de Andrade - Contact us today to help you with your code of ethics policy. info@enigmahr.co.za WorldCom Source: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/worldcom.asp

Numsa vows to fight against any limitations on right to strike

EWN reports that the National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) has vowed to launch mass demonstrations against the state if limitations are put on the rights of workers to strike.  The union concluded its international symposium of left parties and movements in Benoni this weekend.  Numsa's general secretary Irvin Jim raised serious concerns about labour reforms proposed by the state and supported by the ANC and said any forced arbitration would be rejected.  "We must fight and reject the limitation of the right to strike that Gwede Mantashe wants to introduce," he stated.  Jim blamed economic instability in SA on what he said has been two decades of anti-working class policies from government.  He claimed the reason why investors have become hesitant to come to SA was not because of labour problems but rather the policies implemented by the post-apartheid administration.

Top 10 Mistakes Managers Make Managing People

Avoid the Top 10 Mistakes Managers Make

By Susan M. Heathfield

Many managers lack fundamental training in managing people. But, even more importantly, managers lack thevalues, sensitivity, and awareness needed to interact effectively all day long with people.

Skills and techniques are easier to teach, butvalues, beliefs, and attitudes are much harder to teach - and harder for managers to learn. Yet, these are the underlying issues that will most make managers successful - or not.

How important is it to help managers succeed? Beyond description. Managers and how they manage their reporting staff set the tone for your entire business operation. Managers are the front line representation of your business.

The majority of communication about the business is funneled through your managers. When employees resign, the top reason for their resignation is their relationship with their manager. People leave managers, not jobs or employers.

Select Managers for Managing People

In a job description for a manager, core job functions, traits, and abilities are listed. With this as a guide, manager selection should focus on both the management skills and the candidates'cultural fit.

Within the cultural fit component of your interview and selection process, a candidate for a manager position must demonstrate that he or she has beliefs, values, and a work style that are congruent with those of your organization.

In a people-oriented, forward looking organization, you'll want to select managers who exhibit these characteristics.

• Value people


• Believe in two-way, frequent effective communication and listening


• Want to create an environment in which employees are empowered to take charge of their jobs


• Able to hold people accountable and responsible without punitive measures


• Demonstrate leadership and clear direction


• Believe in teamwork


• Place the customer at the center of their reason for existence and regard reporting staff as customers

Mistakes Managers Make Managing

With all of this in mind about managers, preventing management mistakes and dumb decisions is paramount for a successful organization. Do you want to become a better manager? Here are the managing mistakes you most want to notice, prevent, and avoid.

• Fail to get to know employees as people:Developing a relationship with reporting employees is a key factor in managing. You don't want to be your employees' divorce counselor or therapist, but you do want to know what's happening in their lives. When you know where the employee is going on vacation or that his kids play soccer, you are taking a healthy interest in your employees' lives.
  
  Knowing that the dog died, expressing sympathy, or that her daughter won a coveted award at school make you an interested, involved boss. Knowing employees will make you a better manager, a manager who is more responsive to employee needs, moods, and life cycle events.


• Fail to provide clear direction: Managers fail to create standards and give people clear expectations so they know what they are supposed to do, and wonder why they fail. If you make every task a priority, people will soon believe that there are no priorities. More importantly, they will never feel as if they have accomplished a complete task or goal.
  
  Within your clear expectations, if you are either too rigid or too flexible, your reporting employees will feel rudderless. You need to achieve an appropriate balance that allows you to lead employees and provide direction without dictating and destroying employee empowerment and employee engagement.


• Fail to trust: When managers don't trust people to do their jobs, this lack of trust plays out in a number of injurious ways. Micromanaging is one example. Constant checking up is another. Treat people as if they are untrustworthy - watch them, track them, admonish them for every slight failing - because a few people are untrustworthy. Are you familiar with the old tenet that people live up to your expectations?


• Fail to listen to and help employees feel that their opinions are valued. Active listening is a critical management skill. You can train managers in listening skills but if the manager believes that listening is a way to demonstrate that he or she values people, training is usually unnecessary.
  
  Listening is providing recognition and demonstrating your values in action. When employees feel heard out and listened to, they feel important and respected. You will have much more information when you daily open the flood gates.


• Make decisions and then ask people for their input as if their feedback mattered. You can fool some of the people. but your best employees soon get the nature of your game and drop out.
  
  Along the same lines, create hierarchical permission steps and other roadblocks that teach people quickly that their ideas are subject to veto and wonder why no one has any suggestions for improvement. Enabling people to make decisions about their work is the heart of employee empowerment and the soul of employee engagement. Don't throttle them.


• Fail to react to problems and issues that will soon fester if ignored. Managers have a habit of hoping that an uncomfortable issue, employee conflict or disagreement will just go away on its own if they don't provoke it or try to resolve it. Trust me. It won't.
  
  Issues, especially among people, just get worse unless something in the mix changes. Proactive intervention from the manager tocoach and mentor, or to make sure employees have the skills necessary to resolve the issue, is imperative. Drama and hysteria do interrupt productivity, motivation, and employee engagement.


• Trying to be friends with employees who report to you. You can develop warm and supportive relationships with employees who report to you. But, you will have difficulty separating the reporting relationship in a friendship. Friends gossip, go out together, and complain about work and the boss. There is no room for their manager in these kinds of relationships.


• Fail to communicate effectively and withhold important information. The best communication is transparent communication. Sure, some information is company confidential. You may have been asked to keep certain information under wraps for awhile, but aside from these rare occasions, share what you know.
  
  Being a member of the in-crowd is a goal for most employees and the in-crowd has information - all of the information needed to make good decisions. Ask for feedback, too. Ask people for their opinions, ideas, and continuous improvement suggestions, and if you fail to implement their suggestions, let them know why, or empower them to implement their ideas themselves.


• Not treating all employees equally. You don't necessarily have to treat every employee the same, but they must feel as if they receive equal treatment. The perception that you havepet employees or that you play favorites will undermine your efforts to manage people.
  
  This goes hand-in-hand with why befriending reporting employees is a bad idea. Employees who are not in your inner circle will always believe that you favor the employees who are - whether you do or not. This perception destroys teamwork and undermines productivity and success.


• Throw employees under the bus. Rather than taking responsibility for what goes wrong in the areas that you manage, blame particular employees when asked or confronted by executive leadership. When you know the responsibility is ultimately yours if you are the boss, why not act with dignity and protect your employees? When you blame employees, you look like an idiot and your employees will disrespect and hate you.
  
  Trust me. They will find out and they will never trust you again. They'll always be waiting for the other shoe to fall. Worst? They'll tell all of their employee friends about what you did. Your other staff members will then distrust you, too.
  
  Your senior managers will not respect you either. They will question whether you are capable of doing the job and leading the team. When you throw your employees under the bus, you jeopardize your career - not theirs. And, it won't remove one iota of the blame from your shoulders.

Best One Word Ice Breaker

My Best One Word Ice Breaker

My Favorite Simple Opener for Meetings and Training Classes

By Susan M. Heathfield

Need a quick, no preparation ice breaker that works like a charm to break the ice in a meeting or training session? Highly adaptable, this ice breaker leads the participants right into the content of your meeting or training class. Here is my one word ice breaker and my suggestions about how to endlessly adapt this ice breaker to your participants' needs.

One Word Ice Breaker Steps

1. Divide the meeting participants into groups of four or five people by having them number off. (You do this so that your participants get to know fellow attendees. People generally begin a meeting by sitting with the people they already know best, when your goal is normally team building across a group.)


2. Tell the newly formed groups that their assignment is to think for a minute and then to share with their group the one word that describes X. In my first venture with this ice breaker, I was leading a session about organizational culture. So, my request of the group was that they think about their current culture and come up with one word to describe it.
   
   This ice breaker helps the group explore their thoughts on a common issue. This ice breaker is a perfect segue into the topic of the meeting or training class. The group was fascinated with the variety of the words chosen. Consequently, the ice breaker did provide a snapshot into the current thinking of the group about their culture. (The group's one-word culture descriptions ranged broadly: funky, family, fun, bipolar, fractured, cohesive, inspiring, and motivational are samples of their chosen words.)


3. This ice breaker sparked spontaneous conversation in every group as the participants questioned each other about the meaning of their one word. They asked for examples and found that the combination of the participants' chosen words did describe their current organizational culture.


4. Upon completion of the initial spontaneous discussion, ask the participants to share their one word with the larger group. Ask for a volunteer to start and then, ask each participant to share their one word that described their culture. (Even your most quiet participants were comfortable sharing their word.)


5. Next, after the participants have listened to the variety of words from the larger group, ask them to explore several questions in their small group. In this instance, asking each participant to select one word to describe their organizational culture, I then asked these follow-up questions.
   
   --Is this culture consistent across buildings and departments?
   
   --Is this the culture that you want to have in your organization? Does this culture support the accomplishment of the environment you desire for employees and the accomplishment of your company goals?
   
   Your opportunity for follow-up questions is endless. These debriefing questions can support the content of your training class or meeting.


6. Debrief the ice breaker by asking for a volunteer from each group to share a point or two that highlighted their discussion. (I noticed that many session attendees took notes.)


7. Because participants are almost always your best source for laughter and fun, each of these steps generated remarks, insights, ah-has, and examples.


8. Upon completion, move into the rest of the material you have prepared for the session.

This one word icebreaker takes 10 – 15 minutes with the initial enthusiastic, unstructured discussion that the ice breaker generates. Total time will depend on the number of additional questions that you ask the group to discuss as part of the debrief of the one word ice breaker.

More Applications of the One Word Ice Breaker

While I developed the one word ice breaker for the above described session about organizational culture, the applications of the one word ice breaker are limited only by your imagination. Here are a few ideas for adapting the one word ice breaker to your needs.

• Session about teams: what is one word that you would use to describe your team?


• Session about communication: what is one word that you would use to describe the effectiveness of your communication?


• Regular weekly meeting: what is one word that you would use io describe how work is going for you this week? Or, in one word, describe your most significant challenge this week.


• Managing up session: in one word, how would you describe your relationship with your boss?


• Session about empowering employees: what comes to your mind first when you think about empowering employees?


• Class about performance management: what is one word that describes your current employee appraisals?

Platinum strike has knocked economy to its knees

Ntsakisi Maswanganyi and Karl Gernetzky write that SA’s costliest and longest strike brought the economy to its knees in the first quarter.  Some economists are warning of a recession as there is still no end in sight to the 18-week wage strike on the platinum belt.  It has now spilt over into the second quarter, with mines in Rustenburg crippled in April and May.  That spans the first two months of the second quarter, strongly suggesting that economic data for the period will disappoint.  These factors, coupled with constraints such as disruptions to the electricity supply and a slow roll-out in infrastructure spending, are weighing on growth.  A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of contracting economic growth.  SA’s last recession, caused by the aftershocks of the global financial crisis, was in 2009.  A 24.7% contraction in mining and quarrying — the biggest contraction in almost 50 years — saw economic growth falter in the first quarter.  Manufacturing also fell.  Renaissance Capital economist Thabi Leoka said a recession was possible given that the strike had not yet been resolved.  But, Econometrix chief economist Azar Jammine said a recession was only possible if the strike at platinum mines continued for "the rest of the year".

• Read more at BDLive

Solidarity says withdrawal of racial equity regulations a step in the right direction

Trade union Solidarity on Tuesday welcomed the Department of Labour's reported undertaking to scrap racial regulations in the draft Employment Equity Act (EEA) regulations and said this was a step in the right direction.  The regulations, published in February this year, stipulated that employers employing more than 150 employees may only use the national race demography when appointing persons to the top three management levels.  Solidarity said implementation of those provisions would have meant that coloured persons in particular, but also many white, Indian and black persons inevitably would have had to relocate in order to find jobs.  According to Dirk Groenewald, Head of Solidarity's Centre for Fair Labour Practice, it seemed as if the provisions in the regulations dealing with the mirroring of the national demography would now be withdrawn.  “At the moment, we are trying to obtain official confirmation of the withdrawal as well as of the full new wording the codes are to assume.  We are still keeping options open for legal action after having undertaken earlier this year to fight the provisions in question right up to the highest courts.”  Groenewald commented: ‘It seems as if the huge public pressure brought to bear by Solidarity and others against the codes made the department rethink the matter.”

• Read Solidarity press statement at Politicsweb

Edgars gears up for job losses

Sowetan reports that the axe is about to fall on workers at Edgars.  Retail group Edcon last Thursday sent a circular to employees of Edgars telling them that the group's bottom line was under pressure and that the company had instituted steps to retrench staff.  Staff in Edcon's other subsidiaries, including Jet and Boardmans, will, for now, not be affected.  Edcon's Urin Ferdale said in the circular that over the last year the company had engaged in various initiatives valued at R61m to prevent job losses.  These included reduction in total travel and transport, communication expenses, rental and leasing charges.  He wrote that the job cut process will "result in a reduction of head count in the identified stores as per the approved staffing blueprints."  It is expected to last until 13 May.  Store managers and administration managers in all stores will survive the axe, as will "brand specialists, cellular sales and administration, cosmetics specialists, visual staff, and drivers, among others - will not be affected."  All other store-based staff will be affected, but numbers have not been confirmed..  The company has undertaken to consult with the SA Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers' Union (Saccawu) through a facilitated process at the CCMA.