Manager

The Discipline of Building Character

Mind is what our brain does consciously. Our minds perform a series of information processing in order to form strategies needed to live our daily lives. This process is known as decision making. However, aside from making decisions, because of many kinds of uncertainties we also face a problem, which is the fear of making the wrong decisions combined with nervous agitation. Moreover, fear of judgment by others is a sure path to unhappiness which is a state of mind. Making decisions taken cumulatively over many years form the very basis of an individualÐ''s character. An ethical decision involves choosing two options which is to be right or to be wrong. In these days's workplace, there are three kinds of defining moments. The first type is an issue of personal identity: who am I? The second type is organizational as well as personal: who am we? The third type of defining moment the most complex and involves a company's role in society: who is the company? These three moments define the discipline of building character.

Who am I? It defines moments for individual. Managers resolve urgent issues of personal identity that has serious implications for their careers. There is no one right answer. When caught in this bind, managers can begin by taking a step back and looking at the conflict not as a problem but as a natural tension between two valid perspectives. To flesh out this tension, we can ask, what feelings and intuitions are coming into conflict in this situation. Our feelings and intuitions are both form of intelligence and a source of insight. We can remove the conflict from its business context and bring it to a more personal, and manageable level. Then we can consider a second question to help resolve the conflict: Which of the responsibilities and values that are in conflict are most deeply rooted in my life and in the communities I care about. Tracing the roots of our values means understanding their origins and evolution over time.

I am applying the concept: Who am I? Recently, I had a personal conflict issue. After interviewing for the position of supervisor within my group, I was not promoted. A large part of the reason I was not awarded the opportunity was my lack of communication skills. Following this event I began to feel depressed and could not focus on my work. I believed I was qualified for the position as over the course of the past ten years I have successfully presided over some of the most challenging projects within my engineering group. Despairing, I was to the point of almost quitting my job. Slowly though, I began to view the incident in a positive matter. I looked to myself for my core values, and determined how I could better improve them from the experience. Learning what the weak point was in my leadership skills, I resolved to improve my proficiency in communication, knowing that this improvement combined with my other strong points would someday present another opportunity for advancement.

Who are we? As a managers move up in an organization, defining moments become more difficult to resolve. In addition to looking at the situation as a conflict between two personal beliefs, managers must add another dimension: the values of their work group and their responsibilities to the people they manage. Many managers suffer from a kind of ethical myopia, believing that their entire group views a situation through the same lens that they do. This way of thinking rarely succeeds in bringing people together to accomplish common goals. The manager must ask, what are the other strong, persuasive interpretations of the ethics of this situation? Identifying competing interpretations, of course, is only part of the battle. Managers also need to take a hard look at the organization in which they work and make a realistic assessment of whose interpretation