The sum of who you are.....

Tuning into this week,

We will be exploring ethics and morale and how they seemingly intertwine with each other. Through our assigned reading I noticed the author relied heavily on these two concepts, but it was in the latter that I realized why. Her defined leadership definition was having good ethics and effectiveness essentially. Hitler was mentioned in the reading, but there was speculation as to whether or not he was a ‘leader’ in a sense that under the fore-mentioned Great Man and Trait theories he can be listed as a leader, but under the Behavioral, Situational, and Process he cannot. So we digress keeping this in mind and learning about ethics and morale.

To start off, there are a few definitions including values, morals, ethics, and character. These definitions ‘sum’ up who you are as person and what you live by:

- Values: Freely chosen personal beliefs
- Morals: Relating to right or wrong, commonly thought to be influenced by religion or values
- Ethics: Social rules that govern and limit our conduct, especially the ultimate rules concerning right and wrong
- Character: Who you are

As one can see, paying close attention to morals and ethics they both include similar context. The million dollar question that can be drawn here is, “Is there a universal code of ethics?” This question still relays in my mind as I have yet to come up with a solution. However, what shapes our ethics? These can include, school, family, religion, culture, media, friends, and experiences. I like to consider myself as having decent ethics in terms of working for example. Going into work each day, I say to myself, ‘think about all the people who don’t have jobs’. This alone makes me feel a sense of job security knowing that I will strive to increase my stores sales by relating to the customers needs and working with them to close a deal. This is just one of many rules that I live by on a daily basis.

Focusing on morals, we all have our ways of ‘going through the motions of life’ but some people can take advantage of this in different ways and abuse the system. According to changingminds.org morals can be further defined as “having a greater social element to values and tend to have a very broad acceptance. Morals are far more about good and bad than other values. We thus judge others more strongly on morals than values. A person can be described as immoral, yet there is no word for them not following values”. Note that ethics and morals have been used interchangeably over the years. This relates to everyone as it does to me, yet some of the morals I live by are: ‘Be happy with what you have, life is not fair, be thankful for every new day, and treat others as you would want to be treated’. I am still working on building my self morale and it will always be a continuing process that I am willing to keep up with. How do you value yourself in the above concepts and what will you do to change the bad to good?