DEJ Module 1 Prt 2

Posted on by Ryan Christopher Kast

The other reading that stood out to me was the article “Why Ethical People Make Unethical Choices”. I am a finance major here at State and after college, I want to go into higher finance which consists of large banks and financial firms. Although this industry is very profitable it typically is tainted with unethical behavior and decisions. Despite good intentions, organizations set themselves up for ethical catastrophes by creating environments in which people feel forced to make choices they could never have imagined. Former Federal Prosecutor Serina Vash says, “When I first began prosecuting corruption, I expected to walk into rooms and find the vilest people. I was shocked to find ordinarily good people I could well have had coffee with that morning. And they were still good people who’d made terrible choices(pg2 line 9-19).” This passage from the text perfectly describes why there is unethical behavior, especially in banks and financial institutions. These companies have their employees buy into the belief that the most important thing is profit and nothing else. By having employees believe that their only goal should be to boost profits and make as much money as possible with no regard to anything else you will find unethical behavior. This is why you see companies such as Wells Fargo open thousands of fake accounts without people knowing, and companies making their employees work 100-plus hours a week. When a company instills the wrong values in its employees consequences will shortly follow as it has for many large banks and financial firms in the past. 

DEJ Module 1 Prt 1

Posted on by Ryan Christopher Kast

For module 1 of SLC 300, we were assigned to read three different articles. These articles were focused on what characteristics make good leaders, how to identify your own values and implement them into your style of leadership, and why leaders may make unethical decisions sometimes. While reading Forbes’s top 10 list of characteristics in leadership they touched base on what I believe is the most important and that is communication. Forbes describes communication as an essential part of being on a team and more importantly, leading a team. If you can not clearly communicate then your team will be on different pages and not working towards the same goal. I saw the importance of communication firsthand this summer during my internship at Fidelity. I strongly believe that part of my success this past summer was due to the communication between me and my manager. We met the first week of work to go over how I like to work, the best way to critique my work, and how we should go about communicating with each other throughout the internship. This was critical to my success in so many ways. This provided me and my manager with clear expectations going forward from the first week and allowed us to openly communicate with each other whether that be in regards to a project I was working on or her helping when I got stuck. In today’s world, I believe communication is overlooked by many people because they believe it is so simple and unimportant to success when in reality it is a pillar to any successful relationship in the workspace and especially as a leader.