i'll throw this out there for opinions.

I'm finally out of crappy job at a big DoD outfit.

I was in a small division that I joined last year.
We had a new engineering director join shortly after I did. when he joined he brought on board a bunch of engineers from his previous company.

Most of the large defenese contractors have intense ethics training.
They want to be very careful about even the appearance of impropriety. Let's just say they don't want to get caught with Duke Cunningham in their office.

Anyways back to this director. All new hires have to take all of the available ethics training which are online courses. Each course is a video sequence etc followed by a quiz. Most of it is very boring and takes about 20 hours to complete. When you working 80 hours a week trying to meet schedule, it is rather annoying to have to deal with. So the directors response to the training was to have one of his new employees take the training and copy down the answers for him. He would then just take the quiz and type in the answers.

how do you teach ethics if they cheat on the class. .......????

of course our division VP had a hard time with the truth as well.

This director was also very good at consolidating power. Those who disagreed with or even questioned his direction and policy would be shown the door. It didn't take very many before everyone quietly shutup and all dissent was suppressed.

The funniest part was sitting in a conference call meeting with the HR reps from the main office.
It seems that when the employees were surveyed most felt that the company was not committed to ethics. Further most employees felt they could not step forward if a problem was discovered without fear of retribution. well duh!!!!!!!


in the words of Braveheart FREEEEDOM .

I am so glad to be out of there.

 

I'm glad you're out of there and feeling freedom, too, even if this is the first post of yours I've ever seen. I worked for a defense contractor in the early 80s. General Dynamics Convair Division, in San Diego, CA. Our big boss was a total ass but I loved my group boss. I too was happy to leave though, when a jerk in the group became my boss. It's hard working under someone you can't stand.

 

Ethics training should pass common sense test in my opinion. You can't teach people to be ethical when they are out of school in professional setting. If majority got to be where they are by lying and cheating, those very "qualities" have served them quite well, thank you. I think ethics training basically informs workers what the consequences are when they get caught doing improper things while giving the companies grounds for firing or other adverse actions against the employees without fear of being sued.

Ethics training begins at home when kids are growing up in their families. In my opinion, either you are an ethical person or you are not. Sitting in front of the computer for 20 hours will not make you a more ethical person though it may make an impression of what could happen if you do the wrong things and get caught.

 

"Do as I say, not as I do" is not the best way to instill ethics in subordinates, is it? You're better off for being out of that situation. It never fails to amaze me that there are still managers who don't understand the most basic principles of managing, in this day and age of MBA proliferation and in-house mentoring and leadership programs.

That said, I think that 20 hours of on-line ethics training isn't the way to teach ethics. (For that matter, 20 hours of on-line anything isn't a very effective way to teach.) That just doesn't pass the common sense test -- or even the ha-ha test, for that matter. HPH

 

Ethics has been in the spotlight in my profession, Accounting and Auditing, for quite some time now. Ethics and integrity are the cornerstone of what we stand for. Unfortunately, over the years I have seen much of the same kind of thing that boltonblue has seen.

Cloudy is absolutely right. Good management starts with good leadership. If the managers and partners are willing to "cut corners" as far as ethics is concerned, it sends a terrible message to those working at the firm. And worse still, it creates an environment where ethics and integrity takes a back seat.

There is nothing wrong with on line or video ethics training so long as it is relevant and not silly morality stories that it usually is, and as long as it is used to augment all of the other training. It is not a substitute for good management or leadership, and if relied upon to teach ethics by itself, on line and video training has to fail.

There is another side to the coin as well. At least in my industry. The backlash to a lot of what has gone on in the past decade in Accounting and Auditing has been the creation of a large amount of codes and standards, some of which are just plain silly. Many are the result of overreaction.

 

Not to be patronizing, but you are all adding very worthwhile responses. Peter Drucker - a demi-god of management training going back near half a century - would say that managers and leaders are two very different persons, and that a person having both qualities is indeed a rarity. From an ethics standpoint the addage of "I will not lie, cheat or steal nor tolerate those who do" went out with the bathwater some time during the 60s and 70s. I agree with what Honda 367 said //people are unlikely to shed themselves of the questionable ethics that got them to their current positions in the first place // IMHO

 

[QUOTE=RC - Ryder,May 13 2006, 09:50 AM]Not to be patronizing, but you are all adding very worthwhile responses.

 

The most effective managers are good leaders. They don't have to squeeze every bit of effort out of their team, the team members are inspired to produce.

In theory, the manager is responsible to the shareholders, in reality the shareholders count very little in the scheme of things up to the point where they get disgruntled. Then and only then do they react, and usually it's only the upper level of management that feels the pain.

In fact everyone should be thought of as a stakeholder in the well being of the company. In a properly run company all of the stakeholders benefit.

 

Yeah, that situation really sucks. Unless you have worked for a big engineering firm, it's hard to realize that Dilbert is a documentary.

I sure hope this small division of yours is not part of my company.

It's not really true that ethics can't be taught. But even more so, tolerance for ethical lapses is learned behavior. That's a serious corporate culture problem.

What that company needs is to publicly fire that director. Of course, if nobody ever reports the problem, it isn't going to happen.

Did you company have a whistleblower policy and an "ethics hotline" and the like?

 

Fortunately, many of the best managers also seem to be good leaders of sorts. The conundrum is that good managers perhaps are dispensible - whereas good leaders are indispensible - to an organization. That is, the pinnacle of a manager's achievement would be to make his job unnecessary. In the latter scenario, the key people step it up, and the show goes on (at least until company goals change or requirements change. I'm certain many/most would disagree with the latter, but give it some thought. Certainly, management theory has a lot of dissenters. I'm sure many of you have better and more diverse first hand experience in modern approaches.