Reference no: EM132188159

Stakeholder Theory and Social Responsibility

Some notes on the Personal Ethics Project (PEP)

This assignment asks you to respond to one simple question:
"How will you bring who you are to what you do?"

What is implied in that question is that we are talking about *what you do* in the context of organizational life.

Since students vary widely in terms of their perspectives on life, work, leadership, ethics, etc., I expect that each project will reflect that diversity.

Thus, there is *no* hard-and-fast outline I can provide you for this project as I can with the research project (sorry!). I can share with you a couple of the ways past students have approached this paper:

1. Describe your own framework for acting with character (i.e., ethically) at work. Analyze your framework, explain it, and trace its origins. What are the implications of your framework? What does your framework tell you, and why?

2. Start at the beginning (this is a popular approach). What values were you taught and what lessons did you learn early in your life, formative to who you are (or that you have rejected outright)? How do you incorporate those values in how you do your work? What challenges have you faced in your career so far that has tested those values? What do you anticipate might test your values in the future?

3. Pose - and answer - a number of the questions Maister (and, if you like DesJardins) explicity asks you in his writing. e.g.: What are your values? What are you intolerant of? What do you stand for (and why)?

4. (Purely thought-starter here) What you do believe about ethics so deeply that you would want to pass those beliefs on to a mentee, a child, or a niece or nephew?

Other comments:

a. For any approach you take, think of this paper as a living document that you plan on revisiting every year or two to see if your values have changed.

1 Even though our lives may include potentially long periods of time when one is not "working" in an "organization" (e.g., serving as a caretaker for a parent, as a stay-at-home parent, as a full time student), we all still are faced with decisions everyday.

Some of those decisions undoubtedly will involve decisions, power (both its use and its potential abuse), and how we come to terms with difficult issues.