Introduction

Today more than ever, organizations have an overwhelming requirement to be founded upon strong Values, Ethics and Principles. This becomes even more critical for publicly funded organizations.

All too often, an organization can believe that it is founded upon a set of values that is known and understood by all its employees. When one scratches the surface, it soon becomes clear, however, that much of this ethical, principled foundation is not so well understood and in fact may only exist in the minds of those within the organization.

If one is to insist upon ethical conduct within the organization, such conduct can only be described and assessed against a backdrop of organizational values.

This, then, becomes the starting point for any organization in its efforts to strive for highly principled, ethical employees.

The Process

Moving any organization along the ethical continuum involves some well defined and meaningful processes; not necessarily significant in terms of cost or time but significant in terms of consistency in outcomes, attitudes, organizational commitment and organizational learning.

As the processes evolve, there are dynamic effects on participants in that they develop a sense of ownership or buy-in, and on the organization in that it created an opportunity to test the viability of existing beliefs, as well as form the basis for new, perhaps more responsive and reflective organizational principles.

It has been determined that a very viable methodology that can be employed is that of soliciting the views and opinions of a variety of people and groups in a focus group environment. The groups ought to include members of the following groups:

* Client groups

* Partners

* Community members

* Civilian oversight bodies

* Significant ethnic and/or cultural groups

* Education professionals

* Others

The Foundation

As previously stated, every effort toward moving an organization toward ethical excellence involves either defining, reconfirming or creating the foundation of values.

Frequently, organizations either make comment or at the very least tacitly imply that their people are their most valuable resource. This cannot be simply a catch phrase; indeed, it must be a demonstrable reality within the various levels of the organization.

If the Values of the organization are to be subscribed to by all members of the organization, there must be a process designed whereby the significant levels of the organization will have meaningful, observable input into the creation of the values.

One may be tempted to simply adopt a set of values that appears to fit. With a modest amount of research, the values of a variety of organizations can be obtained and adapted to the organization. Although this may appear to be more effective in the short term, in the longer term, this process has some inherent weakness, not the least of which is a total lack of buy-in and ownership throughout the organization.

A Typical Ethics Project - The Six-Week Plan

Steps:

1. Clarification of Project Charter

2. Collection of external data

3. Focus Group Activity Design

4. Focus Group Activity Testing

5. Focus Group Participant Identification

6. Focus Group Activities (on site)

7. Collation of Focus Group Results

8. Classification of Focus Group Results

9. Draft Values Document

10. Vetting Process