Sunday, September 09, 2007

The values we cherish

I believe as managers we must take responsibility, accountability and headaches that come with the job during a crises. You cannot hold someone in your team accountable if you don't provide enough resources to perform his job. As a practicing manager, I always thought we should provide necessary directions, tools to enable our team perform the job and be productive. And if you need to fire some one from your team, you better make sure that the person is utterly responsible for his wrongdoing.


Then I read this article about the US Vice President handling a shooting incident and how he did a sort of cover up. This gave me a totally different perspective to my earlier thought about responsibility ,accountability, ethics when handling a crises.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/02/15/cheney/index.html

I should now take to believe that this sort of polity and approach is perfectly accepted and approved in the US. Why I am writing this is because as managers in a culturally complex workplace, we are faced with tough choices about the values we cherish and the organizational values.

The business ethics across borders is very diverse. Within the same organization, the ethical standards in place for one country is not the same as while working for it in the another country.

So when an issue arise or when faced with a crises, we are forced sometime to make value judgment based on "my way or your way".