As the speed of decision making in organizations
increases we are becoming more dependent on our values to guide our
judgements. Although rules are still important in guiding ethical
decision making, they can also be a burden to developing timely and
innovative responses.
On the other hand organizations have seldom had greater exposure to
ethical risk. Contemporary organizations, and the products and services
they produce are more complex and more likely to have unforeseen
consequences in production, delivery, and consumption. When mistakes
happen in an increasingly interdependent world the repercussions can be
far reaching. Whether the issue is employee, consumer, or public
safety, or fairness in the way we treat our stakeholders, organizations
which are proactive in addressing ethical concerns are much better
positioned to deal with problems once they arise.
The benefits of being proactive are enormous: improvements in
organizational reputation, stakeholder good will, employee recruitment
and retention, organizational effectiveness, and cost savings
associated with minimizing ethical mistakes.
Carleton’s workshops in organizational values and ethics are
unique in Canada. The program blends theory with practical guides to
improve organizational ethical capacity. All workshops use a case study
and interactive approach in discussing program content.
Register for the certificate program or one or more of the workshops.
Find out how you can make a difference in your organization.
Recommended By
Did
you know that organizational ethics programs are recommended by:
The World Bank
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development
The U. S. Federal Sentencing Guidelines
The Public Service of Canada’s
Modern Management Program
Did you know that building cultures of integrity
are recommended by:
British Columbia Securities Commission
Alberta Securities Commission
Ontario Securities Commission
Quebec Securities Commission
Find out how your organization can modernize its
approach to organizational ethics.
Who
Should Attend
The workshops in organizational values and ethics provide an
outstanding opportunity for people who are committed to improving the
ethical performance of their organization and building reputational
capital. People in the following positions would find the certificate
program or one or more of the workshops beneficial:
Senior executives who are trying to improve
organizational ethical performance and who wish to minimize
organizational ethical mistakes
Executives who wish to improve stakeholder
relations with local communities or public interest groups
Executives who are considering establishing an
organizational ethics office
Directors of Corporate Planning and
Organizational Development who are responsible for corporate change
initiatives
Ethics officers and members of ethics
departments who wish to improve their understanding of ethics programs
and learn the tools of the trade
Ethics officers and members of ethics offices
who would like to network with other ethics officers in the private and
public sector
Corporate social responsibility officers
Senior Employee Relations Managers who may be
contemplating introducing ethical programs and who wish to maximize
employee retention
Plant and manufacturing managers who wish to
improve organizational responsiveness through improvements in employee
commitment
Human Resource Directors who are in charge of
ethical programs or who are interested in understanding the
relationship between effective HR programs and employee commitment
Independent ethics consultants
Who
Has Attended?
Representatives from leading edge organizations in
the public service and crown corporations:
Agriculture Canada
Canadian Border Services Agency
Canadian Forces Personnel and Family Support Services
Canadian International Development Agency
Canada Mortgage and Housing
Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission
Citizenship and Immigration
Consulting and Audit Canada
Correctional Services Canada
Department of Fisheries and Oceans
Department of Foreign Affairs
Department of National Defence
Good Corporation
Health Canada
Indian and Northern Affairs Canada
Industry Canada
Infrastructure Canada
International Joint Commission
National Research Council
Natural Resources Canada
Parks Canada
Private consultants
Public Works and Government Services
Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Senate of Canada
Service Canada
Transport Canada
At
these Workshops You Will Learn
How to design a comprehensive and successful
ethics program tailored to your organizational environment.
How to avoid common pitfalls in designing and
sustaining ethics programs.
How to measure program effectiveness.
How leaders and managers can shape and sustain
organizational ethical culture.
How to recognize ethical problems and apply
situation specific ethical decision making tools to resolve such
problems.
How to develop customized ethical awareness
sessions for employees, managers and different communities of practice.
How to align the organization with ethical
initiatives.
How to identify and reduce ethical risks.
Sources and differences in personal, cultural,
and organizational ethical values.
What employees value and why some ethics
programs are counterproductive.
Program
Description
Week
One: April 12, 13, 14, 15, 2010
Days One and Two:
Designing Ethics Programs
This workshop examines the essential elements of a
comprehensive ethics program, everything from conceiving, developing,
implementing, and reviewing organizational ethics. We examine program
rationale, elements of an ethics framework, integration and
implementation, alignment with related policies, and the challenges one
is likely to encounter in the many stages of program development.
Days Three and Four:
Setting Standards
The first component of an ethics program is
establishing standards of behaviour and ensuring standards are robust
enough to accomplish program objectives. We examine the rationale and
importance of rules in ensuring behavioural compliance and the
importance of values in shaping high performance cultures. We propose a
test for determining when rules are appropriate and when they are not.
We then examine why values based standards are the fundamental building
blocks of ethics programs and of establishing integrity and
accountability in contemporary organizations.
Week
Two: May 3, 4, 5, 6, 2010
Day One: Ethical Leadership
This workshop examines the lack of ethical focus
in traditional leadership theories and explores the consequences of
this lack of focus in modern leadership practices, particularly the
undermining of leader credibility and organizational effectiveness. We
review current research on the importance of ethical leadership to
organizational effectiveness and suggest practical ways in which
ethical leadership is enhanced.
Days Two and Three:
An Ethics Toolkit: Approaches to Ethical Problem Solving
How do we recognize an ethical problem in
organizations? Is it possible to disentangle business or organizational
decisions from ethical decisions? How do we deliberate and how do we
ensure that what we propose is a good or right thing to do? We examine
these questions in the context of different historical approaches to
ethical problem solving. Participants will apply different models to a
variety of cases drawn from business and public service settings to
understand the advantages and limitations of each. We will review
contemporary organizational decision making models and attempt to
construct a model based on a pluralistic or situation specific approach
to ethical decision making.
Day Four Measuring Program Performance
This workshop explores a logic performance model
applied to ethics initiatives. Participants will be asked to develop
short and medium term measures of program success and show the relation
between activities, outputs, and the long-term objective of building a
culture of integrity.
Week
Three: May 31, June 1, 2, 3, 2010
Days One and Two: Partnering for Ethical Success: Aligning
Organizational Policies
Organizational ethics programs will not succeed
unless all parts of the organization are aligned with the fundamental
objective of building a culture of integrity. This workshop focuses
particularly on how Human Resources policies and application of
policies influence perceptions of fairness or unfairness in
organizations. Participants will construct a model to review HR
policies to ensure minimization of perceptions of unfairness and to
align HR policies with organizational ethics initiatives. Participants
will also create values based performance assessments for a functional
area of their choice. We also consider whether contemporary
organizations are less dependent on procedural justice, and if this is
the case, whether organizations are at greater ethical risk as a
consequence. Days Three and Four:
Managing by Values and Ethics
Organizations seldom go beyond generic ethics
training. Little attention is paid to the different responsibilities of
various levels of management to shaping and sustaining an ethical
climate. In this workshop we examine the sources and differences of
personal and organizational values so that managers will understand the
importance of micro cultural values and the significance of aligning
personal and organizational values. We also examine organizational
ethical climate. Participants will construct an ethical climate survey
and develop ways in which managers may actively intervene in shaping
organizational ethical climate.
Workplace
Based Assignment
Registrants in the Certificate Program must
complete a work place based assignment before graduating. Ideally the
assignment should be a work in progress that benefits from material
taught in the program. Projects could include action plans,
communication strategies, design of ethics awareness initiatives,
decision making tools, values development exercises, ethics support for
managers, ethical climate surveys, ethical risk analysis, progress
reports to senior management, conflict of interest guidelines, etc.
Submissions may range from drafts to final products and may be in
written or in power point form. Registrants who are not members of
organizational ethics departments should consult with Dr. Maguire to
develop an assignment. Dr. Maguire can be reached by email at
stephen_maguire@carleton.ca or by phone at (613) 864-3004. All
registrants should identify their projects as early in the course as
possible. Assignments may be submitted in French.
Leaders
DR. STEPHEN MAGUIRE is the
Program Coordinator of the Certificate Program in Organizational Values
and Ethics at Carleton University. Dr. Maguire has done research on a
variety of issues in business ethics including the ethics of ethics
codes, organizational ethical infrastructure, the ethics of
organizational control, ethical risks, and organizational culture as
organizational conscience. Dr. Maguire has consulted and designed
workshops for numerous organizations in the public sector. He is a
co-author of a study of Canadian public service values and ethics
programs.
KEN STRAIN is an Associate
Co-ordinator of the Certificate in Organizational Values and Ethics. He
is a retired senior military officer with extensive experience, both
within Canada and abroad, in the leadership and management of human
resources and logistics at the executive level. In his last position,
Mr. Strain was Director of the Ethics Program for the Department of
National Defence and the Canadian Forces. In this appointment he was
responsible for leading the development and implementation of a
comprehensive organizational ethics program for the largest and most
complex organization within the federal government. He is a graduate of
McMaster University, the Canadian Forces Command and Staff College and
holds certificates in Managing Ethics in Organizations from Bentley
College, Waltham, Massachusetts, in Business Ethics from Colorado State
University, and in Corporate Social Responsibility from the World Bank
Institute, Washington DC. He has served as a member of the Corporate
Ethics Management Council for the Conference Board of Canada. Mr.
Strain is currently a consultant and an Associate Faculty member of the
Center for Military-Civil Relations at the US Navy Post Graduate
School, Monterey, California. In this latter capacity, Mr. Strain has
been involved in the development and onsite delivery of a number of
programs and workshops throughout Eastern Europe concerning defence
transformation, human resource management and logistics. Ken Strain
combines executive leadership background and international consulting
expertise with the practical experience of implementing a major
organizational ethics initiative to provide a practitioner’s
perspective.
DR. DENIS BEAUCHAMP is an
Associate Co-ordinator of the Certificate in Organizational Values and
Ethics. He has been working on ethics in government since
1992. He was instrumental in developing the theoretical
foundations of the ethics program in the Department of National
Defence, designed to meet the needs of both the public service and the
military organizations in Defence. He worked extensively in
all areas of ethics program: conception, development, and
sustainment. His academic background includes a PhD in
Philosophy (University of Ottawa) that emphasized the foundations of
Ethics Programs in Government, an MBA (McGill University), an MA in
Philosophy (McMaster University), and a BA (Hon.) (Laurentian
University). He has taught ethics and ethical reasoning at different
universities. He has over 30 years of military experience serving in
various roles in finance and procurement including 5 years as the
acquisitions comptroller of a multi-billion dollar fighter aircraft
project and 2 years as the Canadian Representative on a multi-billion
dollar NATO aircraft project. He has also acquired solid work
experience in the challenges of transforming paper-based systems into
e-based systems, from policy development to pilots to
implementation.
DR. PIERRE LECOURS presently
works as a project manager for Health Canada’s Ethics and
Internal Ombudsman Service. As part of his functions, he helped
establish the program, designed and delivered a vast array of learning
products, and has been a source of coaching and advice to many
colleagues in the federal public service. He has also given lectures on
values and ethics in various universities and at the Conference Board
of Canada, and has written many articles on organizational ethics.
Pierre holds a Ph.D. in Theology (practical ethics) from St-Paul
University and a Bachelor in Administration from the University of
Ottawa.
Tuition
Tuition for the Certificate Program is $5,500 +
GST. This includes reading
materials, handouts, lunches, and nutrition breaks.
Registrants in the Certificate Program must complete a work place based
assignment before graduating.
Registration form as a Word
document.
Registration form as an PDF.
Contact
For further information please contact:
Dr. Stephen Maguire,
Program Coordinator, Certificate in Organizational Values and Ethics
Telephone: (613) 864-3004
Fax: (613) 520-3962
E-mail: stephen_maguire@carleton.ca
Dr. Denis Beauchamp
Associate Coordinator, Certificate in Organizational Values and Ethics
Telephone: (519) 426-9652
E-mail: ethics@sympatico.ca
Ken Strain
Associate Coordinator, Certificate in Organizational Values and Ethics
E-mail: kncg.strain@sympatico.ca
