Making Ethics Real Makes Leadership Real
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Making Ethics Real Makes Leadership Real
What is the key to effective leadership? The answer is ethics. However, if this doesn’t seem an easy sell…stay with it. Making ethics real makes leadership real. We’ll look at four ways to bring this home. First, some context. Ethical Failures When ethics isn’t a key driver in an organization, the fallout from ethical lapses […]
read more »Gillette’s Leadership, the Backlash and Possibility
Gillette released this week a short film “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be.” Some criticize it as an attack on men; others disagree and see it as inspiring and hopeful. My take is the under two-minute video illustrates another Fortune 500 company’s courage and leadership to try and use the power of its brand […]
read more »2018 Leadership Lessons
It isn’t just leaders’ abilities and experience that give them confidence. Authentic confidence means leaders realize that as smart as they are, their view or approach might be wrong. And what they do about that either fuels ethical leadership or spawns disaster. A significant cause of leadership failure in 2018, as in the past, was […]
read more »Thanksgiving 2018, What Creates Customer Loyalty
Too often we forget what creates customer loyalty: what it is about a business and its leaders or owners that resonate with a community and causes them to take action when needed. In a small town in Orange County California, customers are having a chance to demonstrate how a community responds to a business owner […]
read more »Can Civility Be Saved? Should It Be?
by Gael O’Brien (Reprinted with permission from Business Ethics Magazine 8/26/18) An abundance of research on incivility points to the mountain we need to scale. Incivility (which includes behavior or language that is rude, disrespectful, offensive or demeaning) is on the rise. It’s also contagious – which is why it’s called “the incivility bug” – […]
read more »It’s Not Altruism. Just Good Leadership
Reprinted with permission from my 5/26/18 column in Business Ethics Magazine Leaders who believe they have a responsibility to create conditions so that employees can flourish aren’t altruists. They’re just good leaders equally committed to maximizing financial success. They know the two are connected. They also know engagement occurs when employees feel accepted and […]
read more »Leaders and Culture
We know that fostering the right culture promotes engagement, nurtures innovation and fuels both purpose and profit. The key word here is “right” culture. It is about the desire to pursue what enables people and financial results to flourish together. According to the Fortune Magazine commentary on the Best Companies to Work For 2018 list […]
read more »Fraternities, Charlie Rose and the Hope of Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving invites our being more aware of others’ impact on us. How it feels to be seen, heard and valued for who we are. When we think about gratitude, it is people who generally first come to mind: those who have made a positive difference in our lives. Events this year have shown what happens […]
read more »Wells Fargo Culture Lessons 8 Months Later
After eight months of headlines, with likely more to come, Wells Fargo’s consumer fraud (affecting at the very least two million customers) echoes so many other corporate crises….what some of us did isn’t who we are. The drama playing out at the bank underscores the importance of companies regularly addressing how their values and actions […]
read more »Corporate Citizenship in a Trump Administration
Circumstances have caused an increasing number of companies and CEOs to speak out in recent years on hot-button social issues that previously weren’t part of traditional corporate citizenship. For example, nearly 400 companies filed an amicus brief on marriage equity with the Supreme Court, and employers and organizations banded together using economic leverage to fight legislation discriminating on the […]
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The Oklahoma Business Ethics Consortium was privileged to host Gael O’Brien as our guest speaker in January 2014. Her program was insightful and resonated with our participants. Her leading-edge concepts were innovative and practical, providing tools to better equip our business leaders in continuing their endeavors to promote ethical standards in the workplace. We appreciated the depth of knowledge she brought to the table and inspiration she provided. It was truly an enriching experience; we would definitely welcome her back.