What is effective and ethical leadership?
Episode 6 - November 26, 2019. The caption to state this question is asked and answered around 38.47
I was recently a guest on the Ethical Evolution podcast where I was asked by Bindi Heit to define what effective and ethical leadership means to me.
Gees, I thought, that’s a BIG question. People with a lot more expertise than I have written whole books on the subject. To be honest, I think I’ve messed up leadership more than a couple of times. I don’t really feel qualified to answer.
But if my host wanted a definition from a book she’d go to the books, right? It’s where I first got my Branson, Google, and Simon Sinek ideas of leadership from. The books weren’t enough though. They didn’t stop me running into all sorts of strife.
Bindi was asking me to define effective and ethical leadership. Not what I’ve read in a great leadership book, but what I’ve found through doing this messy thing called leadership.
What is effective and ethical leadership?
Effective is doing what works.
Ethical is doing what is right.
That means doing what is right not what looks right - for your team, and your customers or clients. And I think perhaps extending that to doing what is right in the world, which might be for people you never meet.
I don’t claim to be an expert but in my experience, ethical leadership is leading the right people in doing the right things for the right reasons.
Requirements for effective and ethical leadership:
Getting to know your team, what motivates each of them, what they care about, being interested in them.
Having everyone working towards a clear objective, with a clear strategy to guide how it’ll be achieved.
Utilising peoples skills and talents, and giving them the space to do their job. Give them the space to plan their own quarter and their weeks, and ask them ‘how can I help? What do you need?’
Listening to your team and really being humble.
Reflecting and learning.
Good communication.
Being really real about things.
A level of decisiveness.
A willingness, or better still a determination, to do what needs to be done.
Bindi asks this question of each of her guests so do explore the rest of her podcast to hear how others answer. And drop me a line to let me know how you would have answered this question.
LESSON LEARNED: Keep things as simple as they can be. Effective and ethical leadership, in my opinion, is leading the right people in doing the right things for the right reasons.
Where next? You might like a copy of my book Do What Matters; what leading a child protection organisation in Cambodia taught me about life and leadership, which details some of the leadership challenges I’ve encountered, and the lessons I learned. freetoshine.org/dowhatmatters