BLIND SPOTS – ETHICAL DILEMMAS – PART ONE
By Zsolt Szalai   -  March 27., 2023.

Perhaps one of the most difficult and challenging areas of leadership in everyday life is ethical decision - making. The root of the difficulty lies in the fact that, while we can formulate value systems to be followed on a theoretical level, in practice we do not always recognize that we are facing a decision that pushes the boundaries of our accepted ethical principles. One of the basic thesis of Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunell's book Blind Spots suggests this: Organizational ethical solutions and attempts start from a fundamentally wrong assumption: people recognize an ethical dilemma when confronted with it. If the assumption is wrong, then only faulty practice can be built on it.

The authors name five distortions in the book that can lead to unethical decisions and actions: poorly formulated goals, motivated blindness, indirect blindness, slippery slope, and valuing outcomes over processes. In this article, poorly formulated goals and motivated blindness are explained, while the other three topics are discussed in the next article.

Most organizations, whatever their activities, organize their operations around well-defined objectives. The stated goals help to organize work, properly allocate resources and decide on the importance of a particular question or problem. However, it may be the case that a goal that seems good, pushes the organizational and the individual or group decisions of the people in the wrong direction, and unethical actions and decisions are made. For example, when customer service goals are mixed with revenue growth expectations, employees might be tempted to use unethical tools resulting is cheating customers.

SET GOALS, FORMULATE PLANS – AND PRAY
By Robert J. Tamasy  -  January 9, 2023.


Since we are early in the year, some of us might still be in the process of setting goals for 2023. These can take many forms, both long-term and short-term, but I have always found it helpful to establish clear, measurable, attainable goals to begin the year. They give me something to strive toward. As someone has said, “If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.” So, goals serve as a useful target.

Goals help us answer the question, “Where am I going?” But the next question is, “How am I going to get there?” For some, it requires taking overarching goals and formulating objectives and plans for attaining them. Recently, I was facing a major project that seemed daunting. To relieve some of my stress and anxiety about completing it, I broke it down into smaller objectives and laid out plans for meeting them.

Perhaps your approach is somewhat different from mine, but I have found that one important element is often ignored, overlooked, or forgotten in the goal setting and planning process. That element is prayer.

What does prayer have to do with it? Don’t we reserve prayer as a last resort, kind of a “when all else fails” option?