Ethics in Leadership: What Does it Look Like in Action?

It's not that responsibility comes into one of those four, it's about how we approach the whole thing. And responsibility is when I take ethics and turn it internally and I start asking the question, how should I act? But if we're focused just internally, like externally, how should somebody else act? That's when we're focused on things like rights or laws or policies or social norms or whatever it happens to be and this is pretty much, when you talk about government or Congress, they're focused solely externally. That doesn't lend itself to thinking about responsibility because responsibility is I turn it back to myself and I ask what should I do here? That's I think actually a pretty significant problem in our society right now is that there's always a tug of war between rights and responsibilities; the external and the internal. But we've gone so far over to the external that it is really hard to engage people with talk about responsibility anymore. People are just they're so fired up, becoming indignant, with the people they disagree with that they're not asking questions about their own behavior.

Welcome to St. Louis In Tune, where we size up current and historic events involving people, places, and things in areas such as the arts, crime, education, employment, faith, finance, food history, housing, humor, justice, and sports. Our weekly podcast gives you the edge to live a more informed life. We discuss more than just St. Louis as we connect the Gateway City to our country's current cultural fabric and lives. Today, we're going to talk about ethics in leadership. I think something that good people in Congress can't even spell the word.

What a concept.

Yeah. What a concept. It's a great concept. My interest in having our guests today, Mark stemmed from a conversation we had several weeks ago when we talked to James D'Angelo from the Congressional Research Institute. I always wonder why Congress does some of the things that they do or that they don't do. And I look at some of the decisions that leaders in local state and national government make, and my words, the ethical background behind their decision. Sometimes there are some ethical dilemmas and sometimes people confuse the word moral and ethical. Cause we're gonna, we're gonna talk about all those things. Character, character counts in leadership people have always said. I was reading an article in the Post-Dispatch it's actually a syndicated column..

Okay

...by our guest and was taken by some of the things that he said in there. And one of the things he said, "a good rule of thumb is this, if you have both knowledge and ability, you have responsibility, whether you then take responsibility is a matter of courage. Courage is the middle path between recklessness and hesitancy. It is the willingness to take responsibility coupled with the knowledge of how to do it appropriately." He had mentioned something about Congress in this article. So I contacted him and our guest is Rick Kite; he's the director of the DB Reinhardt Institute for Ethics in Leadership and the Endowed Professor of Ethics at Turbo University in Lacrosse, Wisconsin. He teaches a variety of courses there dealing with ethical issues in business, healthcare, law politics, and the environment. He's published and lectured widely on topics related to justice, forgiveness, virtue, and the meaning of life. He has a PhD in philosophy from John Hopkins University. He's the author of several books and writes a syndicated column for the Lacrosse Tribune title The Ethical Life. He also hosts podcasts and you need to listen to those folks; he specializes in the areas of ethics, leadership, critical thinking, social and political philosophy. Rick, welcome to St. Louis In Tune.

It's good to be here. Thank you very much.

We gave you a great introduction there so we're expecting a lot from you.

That was a really long introduction. I'm looking forward to talking to that guy.

We like to have fun on the show and we take our guests very seriously and want them to feel welcome as if they were sitting right here in front of us and having a conversation in the living room. I really love reading your columns. I know that you've put a lot of your columns into a book and folks, you need to check that one out by the way. We'll give Rick's information a little bit later on in the broadcast, but it was the article, "Taking Responsibility is a True Test of Character" where you walked into the rental shop and the rental business. What was really burning inside me at the time was all of this stuff going on in Congress. It was right after January the sixth and some other things that they do and don't do. And you mentioned that recklessness is one of the chief ways we fail to act responsibility. I looked you up. And I thought, wow, this is great. So when I asked you define ethics for us, because we don't really talk about it a lot anymore. I think we don't even talk about moral character or what that is, or morality or things like that. Define ethics and lay that out for us so we can build upon that. Okay.

It's actually it's really hard to define in part because we. We get an understanding of ethics from our culture. And here we're living in a pluralistic society with which virals from a lot of different cultures. So there's a lot of disagreement historically in our country about how to define it. So I'll give a shot, but I'm always changing my mind. It's ethics is how we orient our lives in relation to the right or the good.

Right, or that good.

How we orient our lives to the right or the good.

Yeah. In relation to the right or the good. You have to have some kind of standard by which you make determinations about how we should live. And whenever you're ask that question of how should we live? There's some references, some idea of the good life or what kinds of things say right or appropriate to do. And so how we make these decisions for ourselves and negotiate them with one another. That's what ethics is about.

Now you have a four way method for ethical decision-making and I've pulled that up. I'm sharing that with Mark right now. How important is ethics and ethical decision-making in leaders and their behavior and the decisions that they make?

Oh, boy, that could be the topic for the whole show, right? Yeah, I think it's of the first importance that is it's more important than anything else, because this is where you either get people on board or you push them away as by the decisions you make. And if you don't, if you don't make decisions that people can get on board with that, they can see either agree with, or at least understand that it's reasonable. You've lost them. You've lost your leadership authority. And so that's why it's really important to make good decisions, but good decisions in a way that are persuasive or at least understandable to others. And this is something we don't do a very good job of teaching and it hasn't to my mind, it hasn't been enough of an emphasis in all of the leadership literature. So you have a lot of stuff about communication and transparency and say engagement and so forth. But what I find is the biggest cause of disengagement among employees, when you ask them, like why they've stepped back, why they're not showing up to work or like taking work home anymore, that sort of thing. It has to do with decisions that were made that they disagree with?

No, I think it was you, if I'm not mistaken, called the CEO it really shouldn't be chief executive officer, it should be the chief ethics officer. Take us through this because we've got a whole, we've got a whole hour to talk about this and that's one reason I wanted to talk with you because it's become diminished in discussions in leadership. I want you to lay this out for us, so our listeners can get a kind of a semi correspondence course from you and be grounded in what ethics and ethical leadership is. So go back to where we're, where we talk about the truth and facts.

This is part of what I lay out and what what I call the Four-way method for ethical decision making. I changed the way I was teaching, I used to be teaching theories, it was the way that I was taught and there's competition among different kinds of ethical theories and how comprehensive they are. I realized it wasn't working to actually help my students, especially undergraduates but graduate students also, actually become both better decision-makers; but better at talking through problems when they got in a real life situation. So I started just listening. How do people talk when they make ethical decisions and when they, when they go back and forth in dialogue with others? I realized that there's four kinds of reasoning that people use. The first is truth. The first thing people do, is they just talk about what happened, who said something or did something, what the context is, are there laws or policies that are relevant to bend? And there's a lot of debate about that, about the facts and the context and everything else. That's one kind of thinking that we do, and it's really important to get that because if you don't get that part, you can't go forward with anything because then you're operating very different pictures of what the world is like or what the situation is. Just briefly, I'll just say the other ones are consequences, where people say what are the results of my decisions like who's affected and how are they affected? Then the third way of thinking is fairness, that is how are people being treated? And then fourth is character and that's looking at motivations, like what motivated somebody to do something or how would I be motivated if I did one action rather than another? So it's four types of thinking: truth, consequences, fairness, and character, and pretty much any ethical decision that somebody makes when they're trying to defend it or argue about what's appropriate, you can find out which way of thinking they're using just by listening to them.

So they're either using one of the four or is this like a cyclical pattern that they go through

Generally people will just stick with one, it's not a conscious choice. It just how we learn the language and when we figure out a way of thinking that works to give us a reason and we're satisfied with it we stop there. We don't look for other kinds of reasons. So generally people use one.

And they should probably be looking at all four of those ways.

Yeah, because if the person you're talking to is using a different kind of reasoning, so you're looking at consequences and the person you're talking to is looking at fairness. Then you're not even talking persuasively to one another. You're using words and you're talking about the same subject, but you're thinking about it differently. And so you don't really connect, you ended up getting really frustrated with each other.

It's almost where the breakdown in conversation comes and just trying to move issues forward, important issues of our day forward. It's where it breaks down. You're talking truth. I'm talking fairness. You're talking character. I'm talking consequences. Yeah.

Happens all the time with kids and parents. Yeah. So it's so dependent on your context, if you're a parent you're concerned with your kids' safety, so you focus on consequences. Kids, especially teenagers, they're concerned with how they're being treated. They want to have more freedom or more autonomy. So they're focused on fairness, right? So that's kind of like why parents and their children, especially teenagers, middle schools kids teenagers they talk right past one another over and over without knowing it. And then they get really frustrated with one another.

I think we should post this on the wall everywhere; in my office.

Would be a great billboard.

Oh yeah. Oh, it would be. When you put it in this context, yes! It's duh.

And as I was looking at this, I thought it was a continuum. I thought it was something that you went through. As I look back when I was a leader in a school district and in a school building we would go through this process. We would actually go through all four of these. It says truth. What are the facts? What are the relevant laws? What's the company policy? What's the professional standard? What are possible solutions to the problem? Then you go to consequences. Who's most likely to be effected? How are they going to be effected? What are the solutions which will be beneficial or harmful? Fairness? Do the proposed solutions treat others the way you want to be treated? Does it involve respect and dignity? Is it motivated by goodwill? Does it diminish the autonomy? And then character? Is it enacted virtuously? Are the proposed actions more or less virtuous? And does it build relationships? When I was taught leadership and when it was modeled for me and the courses and the discussions and the people that I've had as mentors, all four of those were part of the decision making process.

Right?

You're describing a pretty functional group.

I was going to say, I think I've fallen into just taking one of these ways. One of these methods, myself in my decision-making or maybe two of them, if I'm really lucky. But all four of them, I can see where a good leader, a real leader, someone that's leading would be very in tune to the four way method.

Rick, where is it broken down?

What do you mean where is it broken down?

Where has a continuum of these broken down to where people just choose one over another?

The reason that happens is just because of cognitive load. So this is a term that's a psychologist use and linguists used to talk about how we're always trying to reduce the amount of work we have to do. And once you come up with a really good reason that works, you stop because what's the point of doing extra work. You do ethical reasoning for a reason and that is to get an kind of adequate justification for your actions. And once you get it, you stop. Unless there's a group that people that are pushing you and saying no, I'm not convinced and then you might keep thinking, okay. And this is how really good group deliberation works. It forces you to keep thinking and then you get more and more adequate reasons. And so a really good group process does get around to all four. One way it breaks down in a group that's more dysfunctional is if you get somebody with quite a bit of power in the group. They might keep pushing people back to just their way of looking at this and and not be willing to really engage in discussion about the other ways of reasoning. And then the other people just shut down. They start, they quit trying to push against the really powerful voice. So that's a temptation leaders have if you have power in a group, you can shut people down pretty quickly. And then what happens is you make a worst decision because you really aren't pulled into a broader consideration of the issue.

When you were talking about that, Congress came to mind, but then what also came to mind is I've been in an organization where the leader did that. I've been in a classroom where the professor's done that.

Oh yeah. It almost makes you angry.

There's that old saying power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is one of the main ways that it it corrupts by leading us into foolishness by thinking that we already have the answer. When, when you get anything that's fairly complex We don't have the answer and you get the answer through dialogue with others and by asking good questions. And so that the way power can be a dangerous thing and you see it happen all the time in really successful corporations where they push people to do things and don't allow like people at the ground level to object anymore. And then at the upper levels, they miss really obvious things because they aren't getting the information that makes them uncomfortable, but that's also the information they need. Like people on the floor at, Boeing had real concerns about the 737 max and it just never reached the top levels because they were pushing pretty hard to get that plane completed and approved and out for sale.

Speaking of that, where does responsibility that word come into play with all of this? If you're going through one of these or you're going through a couple of them or all four. And then the decision that's made there's always consequences. Now it's put into action and you have to live with what's going on and there will always be people that say, yeah, this is great. And they'll always be people that say, this is the most horrible thing. Then where does responsibility come in? Ethically in a leadership position.

Yeah. See that now this is interesting. I'll just shift the way we think about this a little bit. It's not that responsibility comes into one of those four, it's about how we approach the whole thing. And responsibility is when I take ethics and turn it internally and I start asking the question, how should I act? But if we're focused just internally, like externally, how should somebody else act? That's when we're focused on things like rights or laws or policies or social norms or whatever it happens to be and this is pretty much, when you talk about government or Congress, they're focused solely externally. That doesn't lend itself to thinking about responsibility because responsibility is I turn it back to myself and I ask what should I do here? That's I think actually a pretty significant problem in our society right now is that there's always a tug of war between rights and responsibilities; the external and the internal. But we've gone so far over to the external that it is really hard to engage people with talk about responsibility anymore. People are just they're so fired up, becoming indignant, with the people they disagree with that they're not asking questions about their own behavior.

That's an interesting observation. It's a great observation. It reminds me of a conversation I had with someone about character and building character in children and students, and about where is the moral compass? Where is the individual's moral compass? Here's a quote by Plato. Mark will love this, Rick. Someone who would rule the world must first rule himself.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

That kind of plays exactly what you're saying.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

How can a leader lead a group if they're not leading themselves,

To be honest to themselves? Yeah.

Yeah. We have a program in servant leadership which comes from the work of Robert Greenleaf. And it's primarily this, if you're going to lead other people, you have to know how to lead yourself first. And so you start out by being introspective; otherwise your internal problems are going to play out externally on other people's lives.

Amen.

And that's going to be really disastrous if you've got some kind of significant internal problems and these are playing out in ways that you don't even realize that you're doing it but you are. And I think we've all experienced this in dealing with other people.

Do you see, based upon your comments at the beginning of our discussion, that the teaching of ethics is going to become more prominent and then as a followup to that, is it going to become less theoretical and more what I would say analytical of the times? Or where do you see that going?

Whether it's more prominent. Yes, I think in some ways, because we're under more pressure. And I think we're under more pressure because society's becoming more complex and in a way more crowded and changes taken place more quickly. So it's harder for us to to keep up with the changes and the technological change brings with it, new ethical problems we hadn't encountered before. And yeah, I think it's going to be pretty prominent. What form it takes, that's a little hard to predict. When I started at Viterbo University with the DB Reinhardt Institute for Ethics and Leadership, I was hired as the first director of it and a really big book at the time was a couple of books by Stephen Carter, one on integrity and one on civility. Pretty introspective, things like, like this is really important like how we engage with one another people and so forth. And we're at a time right now where there's not much focus on integrity and civility. We use the words quite a bit, but they've become really secondary or maybe even farther behind than that. So it's hard to say where it's going.

We're talking ethical leadership and ethics with Rick Kite who's Director of the DB Reinhardt Institute for Ethics in Leadership and the endowed professor of ethics at Viterbo University in Lacrosse, Wisconsin. Rick. I think about coaches and players and parents, and many times you see these little league soccer games or baseball games or football games or basketball games. And parents get really wound up about why isn't the coach doing this, or the coach yelling at the players or all this kind of craziness. One of the things about ethics is clarifying a culture, what you are going to tolerate and what you are not going to tolerate. How does a leader help define that culture and make sure that culture is cultivated within the organization.

That's a really great question because I think it's, one of the most important things that leaders do is they get to help organizations define their culture. And the one common exercise that leaders will do is when they go through some kind of strategic planning identify a set of core values. The problem is that they oftentimes stop at the naming of them and don't really become part of the culture. So then the next step is how do you turn the values, which are something we think is important to be virtues. A virtue is of value that we embody and it's evident in our daily actions so that you don't have to say it people just see how you act and they see what you believe in what you stand for. So that's this process of just on a daily basis, looking at how do our behaviors reflect the values that we profess and paying really careful attention to that.

How have your students reacted to the courses? I don't know whether they are upper level classes or freshmen classes, introductory kinds of things. But I can see people maybe pushing back because maybe this has never been discussed or maybe they're like embracing it. Yeah. Finally somebody is talking about this. How have they reacted?

Yeah. Fantastic. I mainly teach seniors who are graduating sometime in the next year and they're going into the workplace. One of the things I emphasize to them is the fact that they're going to find this current generation of students is going to find themselves in leadership roles faster than any generation going before, because we have the baby boomers are retiring. There's a huge, massive shift in the workplace and so we're going to have all kinds of people in pretty significant leadership roles in their mid and late twenties. Instead of going through a period of mentoring of say 10, 20 or 30 years, they're going to be thrust in these roles right away. So we start talking about that, how do they get prepared for that? Where are they going to have to do? How do they seek out mentors and develop a relationship with somebody who can actually give them advice when they encounter problems that they don't really know how to deal with? They tend to be really receptive to this.

I'm a scout and we do a wood badge it's for mainly the adults and we talk about servant leadership and how we try to teach. If you take a pyramid and you turn it upside down, I think that's how we look at servant leadership, where you, as the leader of the unit you try to help everyone else become leaders. So you're working on immediately at a young age, we do it in scouting it's one of our the pillars of our staples of what we do, but we're always trying to develop those young youth to become leaders. Letting them take the lead but being there to help them and guide them and whoa, don't go that way maybe try it this way. We do that in scouting it's called wood badge and it's the best training I think that the scouting program has where they really get into the weeds with things like servant leadership and things like that. Yeah, I agree with you saying we need these young people of our society to really understand what's going on cause they're going to have a lot of responsibility very soon in their lives. Yeah.

I find that we have a lot of talk in our society right now about things like toxic leadership and so forth. We're really good at identifying bad behaviors and identifying and centering it but we're not very good at paying attention to how do we cultivate good behaviors?

Great point.

Especially in leadership, because it's not easy and this is something that we don't; I guess we talk about it I don't think we do it very well. Organizations like scouting, which I think are intentionally trying to do this, a pretty good job of it; unfortunately, there's a smaller percentage of our kids that are going through these kinds of membership organizations that help them to cultivate leadership in a positive way.

True. Very true.

So to piggyback off of what both you and Mark were saying You had discussed a little bit about servant leadership and I'm going to jump ahead on a question that I had because it's on the table right now that we're talking about; when you discuss servant leadership, what do you talk about in the talks that you give to businesses and other kinds of groups?

So one is that the servant leader has a focus on the common good. And this goes way back to when the phrase servant leadership was first coined by Robert K Greenleaf. He thought of his own work as being about applied ethics. How do we take ethics and apply it in organizations? And he thought this is so important because it's by transforming organizations that we transform our whole society. Because most people face at work in some kind of organization or another. And it is also where they spend the majority of their working hours during the prime, most productive years of their lives. And so if you really want to transform society you do it by an internal kind of reform of organizations. The way you do that internal reform is first of all, you have to have people engaged and focused. So you engage them by meeting their legitimate needs, and then you focus on the good, because the good is something that you can get loyalty and a unity of purpose if you're focused on the good. If you're focused on self-interest, you've got a fragmented kind of organization. Anyway, that was long-winded, but those are a few things I talk about.

That's not long-winded at all, that really defines that. I think it gives people who are listening a structure that they can chew on a little bit and understand, and then read more about that to get further clarification and identification with what you're talking about.

If I could just add this common criticism, servant leadership that is just soft. It's about the touchy, feely side of leadership and so forth. That's something I really disagree with strongly. Servant leadership is incredibly hard. Generally, if you're a leader you have access to certain kinds of power, certain kinds of coercion or pressures you can put on people that do the thing you want them to do. And to put your ego aside and say, I'm only going to use that power responsibly for the benefit of others and for the good of my organization, never for myself interest that is a terribly hard thing to do. Most people don't handle that very well. That's what servant leadership about. It's about the responsible exercise of power, which is just very difficult.

I would add that leader is saying, I'm not asking you to do something I've not done or am currently doing myself. I agree with you that somebody who is like a, my words, dictator, it's easy to make that decision and Lord it over people. It is very difficult to come down to someone else's level and understand where they are and not exert your power for the benefit of that individual, a group of individuals or the organization.

Right

Yeah. Yeah.

So going back to, oh, go ahead. Keep going.

No, you go ahead. You had a question. I interrupted you a bit ago.

No. I always want to listen to what the guest has to say. That's why.

Okay. Okay. Quit with the fairness here. Okay.

Which level are you on here Mark?

Quit with the fairness.

Which decision making portion are you on Mark? It has to do with questioning, when people are in different ethical portions, whether truth, consequences, fairness, or character, you mentioned previously that asking questions helps clarify or define. Go into that a little bit more, I want people to understand exactly how that works and what the outcomes should be.

There you go.

The greatest cause of unethical behavior is self-deception; we convince ourselves that we know more than we actually do. And then we end up taking actions and actually doing harmful things. Not because we want to do something bad, but just because we don't know better because we haven't taken the time to find out. And the only way to find out the only way to get outside of our own heads to learn what we don't know and we don't even know that we don't know is to ask questions and engage in serious dialogue with others. We ask questions and we allow ourselves to be questioned without getting defensive. And this is where the kind of classic virtue of wisdom comes from. It's what Socrates says, the wise person is the one who knows what he doesn't know and or knows that he doesn't know and so the wise person is the one who's continually asking questions. So this is a path to wisdom, that's the kind of a rejection of cleverness a rejection of kind of being wanting to be perceived as knowing something or perceived as being an expert and instead paying really close attention to what people are saying and then where they aren't saying ask the right questions that get them to open up or reveal a little more about something that's important.

So the old saying what I don't know, could fill a book kind of fits. I use it all the time. I do. I use it all the time because I don't so much, I don't know. Yeah.

Many times we engage in conversations, we're thinking of what we're going to say rather than listening; It's a huge skill.

Yeah, it is a skill.

Then asking the question, explain that to me, because I don't understand that.

Yeah. Because you're not listening.

I think it helps people really understand what they're trying to explain and give their viewpoint or why they have that viewpoint.

Man this is a tough show.

So when you ask questions, when you listen it benefits both parties. Socrates claimed that this is the best way to teach and we even have that expression Socratic teaching by asking questions because it puts a burden on the student to give the explanation and it puts pressure on them to speak clearly and consistently, which is really hard to do. So asking questions is really important in families and organizations and say in politics, which we don't do enough of.

You are at the DB Reinhardt Institute for Ethics and Leadership, that was founded in 1999. I'm looking at the website right now, discuss what you do there and some of the things that the Institute does for not only the students, but I'm going to guess the community and internationally, because you're on the web.

Yes. So we have a number of initiatives. Best known the most public things they do is they hold a series of public lectures. A whole bunch of topics related to ethics and what I try to do as over the course of several years, get speakers that will come in to talk to about students in our community that are related to just about every discipline that are students could be studying. So if it's nursing or business or engineering or social work, get people on all these things. And then bring in audiences that are approximately half students and half community members. Because then you get a pretty good dialogue going. And then we hold a number of workshops and conferences. We'll hold an annual ethics conference that is mainly for academics but it's open to others to come, but it's mainly to promote more research and more discussion about ethics. We hold a annual workshop for teachers on teaching the Holocaust where we bring in a survivor every year, and then we bring in kind of experts at Holocaust education in a week. Teachers mainly from the Midwest that come in for two days; it turns out to be a really intensive workshop on how to teach the Holocaust. I could go on and on about that. If you really want to say reduce bullying in the school, one of the best ways is to teach something like the Holocaust, because what you get is you get a focus on how disastrous things can become and what we should do to keep things from becoming that way and how we have to treat each other really well. Then we do a lot of other kind of programs, I do a podcast and then, some things like that and work with the community, business community, and professional community and our students.

Talk about your podcasts that you do. It's one with the university. Then you have one on your own, correct?

Yeah. So I started one. That was called ethics today that I was doing right after the pandemic hit, I had, what we were doing at that time, back in March, we were just canceling programs. We had things planned for a year and a half out, and we're just, like putting everything on hold, like everybody else was. And I thought how do we keep some activity going? So at that point I started a podcast where I was just calling up people and interviewing like we're doing here. But these are the people that we would ordinarily bring in as speakers and just like having about a 45 minutes discussion. That eventually evolved into something; that's the Inspired Minds Podcast that I do with Sam Shinta and say Inspired Minds is a non-profit organization that's engaged in civic education. So this is a podcast focused on civic virtue. So Sam and I do that one together and that's we do that twice a month. Then I have another one, twice a month that I do with Scott Rada from the Lee Market, so all the Lee newspapers and it's called the ethical life. In that one, we really talk about the news of the day kind of ethical implications of the various news stories that are going on at the time.

You write that syndicated column that we get here in the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

Yeah. That's every two weeks I've been doing that for 12 years now, but it just, started being distributed to all of Lee's papers in the past six months or so.

And if you want to catch back articles that he's written, he has put them in a book it's entitled Ideas Unite, Issues Divide: Essays on the Ethical Life. It's one of the books that Richard Kite, our guest has written. He's also written a book called An Ethical Life and Ethical Business. I want to give his website it's RichardKyte.net K Y T E.net, RichardKyte.net K Y T E.net. This is just great conversations, Rick. I would like to down the road, check in with you periodically and see what's cooking on your brain. And after I read some of your columns and get fired up or get wow, inspired by some things would love to have additional conversations down the road. Yeah,

Yeah. I would love that this has been a really enjoyable conversation. And I tell you what, I'm writing this week today, I was working on it, a column on gun control. And oftentimes when I write a column, I'm not sure where I'm going to end it or what direction I'm going to go. It's something that I have serious questions about. I have mixed feelings on it. One of the things I'd like to do is write the column as a way of getting clarity for myself. So there might be topics in the future that we want to discuss here and I'd love to do that because I'm always trying to figure it out.

Good.

That sounds great. We'd love to do that.

You want to run for Senate?

Absolutely not.

We could sure use you.

You'd have to move to Missouri, minor detail. Okay.

It's so incredibly important. I've met so many politicians that I really, I respect and admire. And I think that the shots that they take as in trying to do something that is absolutely essential for our society, it's really unfair to them because they're, very often, if you look at everything that they do, it's really good and it's important work, but boy, I wouldn't want to do it. I'm just grateful others do it for us.

Which plays into what James D'Angelo said about three weeks ago about transparency.

Oh yeah.

And how secrecy, which is in the constitution, really needs to be put back into place. This has been a great conversation, Rick I appreciate it. I'm looking forward to down the road us being able to get together and have some more conversations. We've been talking to Richard Kite he's the Director of the DB Reinhardt Institute for Ethics and Leadership and the Endowed Professor of Ethics at Viterbo University in Lacrosse, Wisconsin. Lots of books. Folks, go to Richard Kyte, K Y T E.net, Richard Kyte, K Y T E.net. Rick, you have a great weekend. It's wonderful talking with you. Look forward to the future.

Very grateful. Thank you.

Likewise, you have a good weekend too and I really appreciate you inviting me to be a guest on your show.

Wow. Those kinds of conversations, Mark are sorely needed in our time right now. It was just one of the reasons I wanted to have him on, but I thought about Congress and I thought about where's the ethics in their leadership. I Googled that and I got him and there are ton of ethical groups at universities. I couldn't believe all the groups that I saw. And I'm like, why aren't we hearing about this at all in current mainstream conversation? It seems to be an, and he'd had a really good answer for that at the front end of the interview.

Right? His work is so needed. Truth, consequences, fairness, and character.

The four way method for ethical decision-making

We all should be thinking about that. Yes, honestly, it should be on your wall, on all of our walls. The four way method of ethical decision-making truth, consequences, fairness, and character. I believe if people thought about these four, when they were making decisions and thinking things through, I think it would make a big difference.

I enjoyed his comment about people when they have unethical behavior, they engage in self deception. And, internal reform, then you engage and you can focus on some things. So a leader who doesn't have that internal ethical focus, will my words pollute an organization? And I've seen those kinds of individuals actually destroy organizations.

Oh yeah, many times. Selfishness.

They're like a cancer.

Yeah, it's absolutely like a cancer, an ego doesn't help either when it goes directed in the wrong way.

And you end up pitting one group of people within the organization against another, or you create all these factions. And when there's chaos, there's reasons for that. And it all rests at the very top, right? Who is heading the organization.

Who's the leader. There is always one person who is a leader.

That's correct.

It's always one person.

And sometimes they may have positional leadership but they may not be the actual leader.

Correct. There's a book called Power with People and it's all about it's not who the boss is, it's, who's the one that's the leader in the group. It might be the supervisor of the factory. He might be the guy or girl.

I read some things we didn't get into, but just because it's legal doesn't mean you have to do it, or just because you have the power to do it doesn't mean you have to exercise the power.

So much there, so much there.

We appreciate your listening to this episode of St. Louis In Tune. Take time to look at the show notes on the website for everything that was mentioned on this episode. St. Louis In Tune is produced in cooperation with KWRH 92.9 FM and Motif Media Group. For St. Louis In Tune I'm Arnold Stricker.