LEAD 5673 Module 5 Personal Ethical Leadership Framework Example

Four Questions Before the Switch: A Personal Ethical Leadership Framework for a Cooperative Program Manager

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD5673: Ethical Leadership

Module 5 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 4, 2027

Introduction

Over this course I examined the smart meter program I lead at Ozark Valley Electric Cooperative from four angles: which ethical theories and leadership models fit it, how the Project Management Institute's code applies to a vendor's offer and a reporting shortcut, how honest conduct can rebuild the trust of the board and members, and how to make remote disconnection fair. This final paper gathers those lessons into a personal framework I can use after the course ends. It has five parts: commitments, a decision process, tests for hard choices, habits for leading others and safeguards against my own weaknesses, followed by how I will keep the framework alive.

Part One: Commitments

My commitments come from three sources. From ethical leadership, I take a double duty: to behave well myself and to set and enforce standards for the team. From servant leadership, I take a focus on the people the program serves, especially members least able to protect themselves. From the cooperative's values and the PMI code, I take four concrete commitments: report what is true, including bad news, in numbers that can be checked; disclose and step back from any decision in which I have a personal stake; protect members' data and safety ahead of savings; and give members a voice in decisions that affect them. Each commitment answers a situation from this course. Writing them down matters, because a commitment I cannot quote is one I will bend under pressure.

Part Two: A Decision Process

Rest (1986) broke moral action into four parts: noticing that a choice carries ethical weight, working out what should be done, putting that answer ahead of other goals and having the backbone to follow through. My process follows those steps. First, I ask who could be harmed or misled, because the smart meter program taught me that ethical issues often arrive looking like technical ones, such as a counting method or a cost saving. Second, I reason through the options with the lenses from Module 1. Third, I name the competing goal, usually schedule or money, and decide openly which comes first. Fourth, I commit to a date and a person to whom I will report what I did.

Part Three: Tests for Right Versus Right

What made the program's hardest calls hard was that both options were defensible: savings for all members versus protection for a few, loyalty to a contractor versus honesty with the board. Kidder (1995) described four common dilemmas of this kind, truth versus loyalty, individual versus community, short term versus long term and justice versus mercy, and three ways of resolving them, based on consequences, on rules and on care. When I face such a choice, I will name which dilemma it is, apply all three resolution approaches and write down why one wins. The remote disconnection policy is an example: a community-wide saving set against individual safety, resolved in favor of care with the cost stated plainly.

Part Four: Leading Others

A framework that governs only my own choices is not enough for a leader. Mayer et al. (2009) found that ethical leadership at the top of organizations was related to ethical leadership among supervisors, which in turn related to less deviant behavior and more helping behavior in their groups, so ethics flows downward through managers. I will therefore build ethics into the team's routines: weekly meetings that start with what is behind schedule, recognition for people who raise problems, status reports that separate mounted and verified meters and a standing agenda item on member complaints. I will also coach the program's three supervisors to do the same with their crews, since most installers rarely hear from me directly. Supervisors will also bring one ethical question from the field to each monthly program meeting, so that the framework is discussed in the language of real installations rather than theory.

Part Five: Safeguards Against My Weak Points

Honest reflection on the course revealed two weak points. The first is optimism: like my predecessor, I am tempted to believe a delay will be recovered and to report accordingly. My safeguard is the rule that reports show raw counts, not my judgment of them, and that any forecast of recovery is labeled as a forecast. The second is conflict avoidance: I delayed telling the contractor that its milestone definition rewarded the wrong behavior. My safeguard is to raise any disagreement that affects members within one week, in writing if necessary. I have asked the cooperative's general manager to tell me if she sees either pattern returning.

What the Framework Does Not Settle

A framework cannot decide every case in advance, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. It does not tell me how much member safety is worth in dollars, only that the tradeoff must be stated and decided openly. It does not settle disagreements between me and the board, which has the final authority on policy; when we disagree, my duty is to give the board accurate information and my honest recommendation, then carry out its decision unless it would require me to deceive members or break the law. And it cannot replace conversation with the people affected, which is why member input appears in the commitments rather than being left to my judgment alone. Knowing these limits keeps the framework a guide rather than a script.

Applying the Framework

A test of the framework came this month, when the vendor proposed a firmware update that would collect more detailed appliance-level usage data at no cost. Following the process, I first recognized the ethical dimension: members had not agreed to appliance-level monitoring. I reasoned that the duty-based and care lenses ruled against enabling it without consent. The competing goal was a free improvement in load forecasting, which I named in my memo. I recommended that the feature stay off until the member-drafted data policy addresses it, and reported that recommendation to the board's operations committee. The framework turned a technical question into a decision I could explain.

Keeping the Framework Alive

The framework will fade unless it is reviewed. I will keep a short decision journal recording each significant ethical choice, the dilemma involved and what I decided. Every six months I will review the journal with a peer program manager at another cooperative, and once a year I will revise the commitments if experience shows they were incomplete. When the smart meter program ends, I will rewrite the framework for whatever role comes next, keeping the process and safeguards and replacing the program-specific commitments.

Conclusion

This framework combines commitments from ethical and servant leadership, the cooperative's values and a professional code with a four-step decision process, tests for right-versus-right dilemmas, habits that carry ethics through supervisors to crews and safeguards against my own optimism and avoidance. Its first real test, a data collection feature, showed that it can turn a technical choice into an ethical decision made openly. Its value will depend on using it when the schedule is tight and the savings are tempting.

References

Kidder, R. M. (1995). How good people make tough choices: Resolving the dilemmas of ethical living. William Morrow.

Mayer, D. M., Kuenzi, M., Greenbaum, R., Bardes, M., & Salvador, R. (2009). How low does ethical leadership flow? Test of a trickle-down model. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 108(1), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2008.04.002

Rest, J. R. (1986). Moral development: Advances in research and theory. Praeger.