Common Individual Mistakes

• Introduction to Common Individual Mistakes

• Here we’re going to look at common individual mistakes. We’ll focus on areas of Personal conduct and Decision-making. This video takes a real, practical example from sport and then relates it to business.

• Intimidation

• Tempers sometimes flare. Patience can wear thin. Because people can be infuriating. And when we’re working under pressure, we may be guilty of the occasional angry outburst. But these outbursts need to be the exception. Aggression should never be a used as a tactic to get a result.

• Social Proof

• Social Proof is one of our habits of thinking. It’s a cognitive bias that we talk about in our Critical Thinking course. We also saw it in the introduction to this section, where Lance Armstrong persuaded his team that doping is acceptable because everyone else is doing it.

• Comments and Jokes

• You can’t talk about work all day. And you shouldn’t. Any group of people needs to share thoughts, feelings, ideas and jokes. It helps us bond, and we work better together a result. The trouble is, you can take it too far without thinking.

• Digital Communication

• Everything you post is permanent. Every word, every picture, every exclamation mark and emoji. Even when you have the option to delete something you’ve written, the chances are that it’s still sitting on a server somewhere. And it may have been shared a million times already.

• Conflicts of Interest

• When you’re at work, you’re being paid to act in the interests of your client, or your employer, and your decisions should represent what’s best for them. A conflict of interest occurs when you have two different interests to serve.

• Enemies of Ethical Behaviour - Financial Gain

• People know the difference between right and wrong. We all agree that lying, cheating, stealing or harming other people is bad. So why do people end up behaving badly? And what can happen when money enters the equation?

• Enemies of Ethical Behaviour - Self Image

• Self-image is a big factor in our decision-making and the desire to be seen in a certain way can be the seed of ethical failure.

Best Practice

• Introduction to Best Practice

• You don’t need to make every decision yourself, starting from scratch. You need some generally agreed upon rules, guidelines and goals to refer to. That’s why in every profession there are standards of Best Practice. Best Practice means doing more than the minimum.

• Competition

• Competition is the cornerstone of the market. Every player in the market will compete with every other. So how do we make healthy competition more likely?

• Diversity and Inclusion - What it is

• A diverse workforce contains different kinds of people. It should reflect the society from which it’s drawn. Why should we have this as a goal?

• Diversity and Inclusion - How to Do it

• In the last video we defined Diversity and said why it was important to have a diverse workforce. In this video we talk more about ‘how?’.

• Transparency and Openness

• Now, let’s look at how, in good times and bad, Open communication is essential to your ability to do business.

• Fairness

• Professor Joel Brockner of Columbia Business School has a great real world example of the importance of fairness. He tells a story that illustrates what he calls ‘Process Fairness’. It goes like this...

• Economics vs. Ethics

• Here’s a strange thing. In business, we can be as selfish as we like. Or at least according to Adam Smith, the founder of Economic Theory...

• Accountability

• This video provides a case study in accountability to illustrate that it's about thinking outside the cycle of blame and self-defence.

• Broadcasting Your Values

• Your values are what you do, not what you say. People perceive your values in your day-to-day interactions – and even more at the important moments, where there’s lot at stake.

Four Ways of Making Decisions

• Introduction to Making Decisions

• In this section we’re going to describe a scenario and examine it from 4 different perspectives.

• Consequences

• First we’ll try to make our decision based on the consequences, which probably sounds like an obvious basis for making a decision, but we’ll soon see that it’s not always so simple.

• Rules

• In the last video we saw how assessing the consequences of your actions can be a risky way of making a decision. Now let’s look at it through the lens of setting Rules.

• Character

• Thinking again about that takeover we’ve been discussing… another way to come at the problem is to think about character – or brand. We ask: am I the sort of person who does this? Or… what sort of person does this make me?

• Feelings

• Now let’s see how feelings can be a guide to making the best decision. This video suggests some questions you might ask yourself.

• Conclusion

• In this section we’ve tried to show how Business Ethics, like any ethics, are complicated, especially once you’re out there in the real world, being pulled ten ways at once.

Actions

• Actions

• This final video looks back over what we’ve done and summarises the main advice.