For my DEJ Post #8, I decided to analyze the reading “Moral Person and Moral Manager: How Executives Develop A Reputation For Ethical Leadership”, by Linda Klebe Trevino, Laura Pincus Hartman, and Michael Brown as the authors. This is from our readings list in Module #4.

text-to-self: This article resonates with my own experiences of observing leadership in the places that I have worked in my lifetime so far. The concept of being both a moral person and a moral manager made me reflect about the first managers I ever had as it was a small local gardening store and landscaping company called New Bern Farm and Garden. My managers failed to set clear examples for the team, especially for my coworker and good friend Mike who is one of the most hard working people I know. My managers took advantage of his advantageous work driven heart and managerial skills that Mike had and instead of making him a manager which he more than deserved continued to use him until the eventual collapse of the business.

text-to-text: This article’s focus on ethical leadership and the emphasis on both character traits and management practices reminds me of the discussions from another reading we had this week and the article I did my DEJ post #7 on “Ethical Role of the Manager”. Both texts look into how ethics are a central principle in leadership but this article goes a little deeper than the role of the manager article by showing how a leader’s reputation is hinged on not only personal morality but also on having good consistent ethical actions.

text-to-world: The points raised in the article about the importance of managers being explicit about ethical values are extremely important in today’s world of corporate transparency where we live in a age of public knowledge and technology. Companies like Patagonia have gained global recognition for their ethical based leadership in which the top executives of Patagonia model great moral behavior and set the bar for employees and other managers alike. But not only Patagonia but other companies such as Apple have set great examples of what companies new bar is in terms of ethics, for example Apple’s 2030 carbon neutral footprint promise.