Integrity Stress And Business Ethics
I received a warm welcome from Alastair Macdonald. He is the business development manger for Ernst and Young in Aberdeen. I know Alastair pretty well we spent a week together travelling around Tanzania earlier this year. He has a fantastic sense of humour and has been a great supporter of the work Vine Trust is doing both in South America and Africa. Here is a picture of Alastair with some of the boys at Fookie. They're wearing football strips he had carried all the way from Aberdeen.
As Business Development Manager Alastair was inviting some clients and colleagues to join him for an informal dinner to discuss the importance and significance of values in the marketplace. I was delighted to receive an invitation to join them around the table and contribute to the discussion.
We had an interesting group of people, mostly from the oil related sector, but we also had a not for profit represented .
There was a remarkable sense of unity around the table. Each company representative spoke with a convincing degree of passion that values were not only important but essential in business. One interesting area that we strayed into was a discussion cantering on the meaning of the word integrity. One entrepreneur defined it as being able to make a decision that your employees will accept even when they can't understand the logic, but they know when all is revealed the decision made by management will have had integrity.
I was taken with one particular executive. His statement was made up of three words being human, being humble, and having a sense of humour. I like that, having talked to him for a good while it was obvious that he was a man who spoke with authority and passion about the things with which he was involved. His life experience was certainly impacting on his business activities.
Everything was very convivial, in some ways too convivial. I thought it was time to open the discussion a bit wider. I asked a question relating to the working culture which seems to pervade so many of our professions. I asked them if they were aware of the work ethic that amounts to a kind of abuse where young professionals in training are so eager to please, that they work such long hours they are stressed out, over worked, under-paid, competing against their young colleagues for the too few jobs that will be available when they qualify. I asked them, are you aware of managers, who use these tactics to promote a spirit of fear and competition among young employees?
I think many of them thought I was talking about young people who were too sensitive, but I'm not. I'm suggesting that we need to look again at the culture that surrounds the working lives of professionals. In some professions trainees are being used to complete work and are being charged out at the rate of qualified people. They are also being held responsible when things go wrong as though they were qualified.
More people are off stress in the work place than you might ever imagine. The thing is, its not just in the corporate world. This culture is to be found also in the caring professions. Whether it is the NHS or the educational world many people are feeling stress, bullied and undervalued.
It would be interesting to see how many hours are being lost at work because of the stress factor. In case someone thinks the church is above this, we too are in the thick of this culture. We have our fair share of staff and ministers who feel over worked and under pressure. Often this pressure is linked with people who will not make clear decisions or who feel the treat of a lawsuit, or who fear they may be making apolitically incorrect decision. Fear stocks so many of or institutions. The other end of the debate is the need for things to happen quickly.
It would often appear that everyone wants things to happen yesterday. Speaking to a senior executive in the Hospital I visited in Fife the other I could sense the empathy when I started to talk about this subject. "It's the inferred demand that emails are answered within minutes that gets to me" she said. We all know that when emails are written in haste, they leave a trail of disaster behind them. I know a senior manager who has banned staff from emailing each other with complaints. We need to take time to consider and reflect before we respond.
So What do you think? it would be good to hear from those out there in blog land. How do we make life a lot easier for ourselves in our work places. lets here some good news stories of how stress is being managed. After all it is related to ethics is it not?
Getting it right for every person who work with must be a worth while aim and value even if it is seen as a counsel of perfection.
Posted By: Helmut On: 13 Sep 2012 At: 2:55pm
Albert, your post should be mandatory reading!
-We urgently need to rediscover slowness - life is way too fast now, as even the stock market people would agree now.
-We need a spiritual and ethical framework to live in and to hold on to. For me that’s Christianity (and I am trying to read a book on Buddhism in management, it does not satisfy me!), for others it might be something else.
-It might be worth looking into the fact (?) that apparently the banking crisis is limited to the non-muslim interest-taking financial world
-We do not want austerity, but do we need all we want - and the hours coming with it?