Jack Radke Ethical Leadership The Power Of One Analysis

Jack Radke, currently an attorney, gave an insightful speech on “Ethical Leadership: The Power of One.” Mr. Radke was able to demonstrate how ethical values can affect businesses through the use of personal experiences and examples. In the beginning of the speech, he showed a clip from the movie Liar Liar where Jim Carrey says, “And the truth shall set you free.” Showing this clip set the tone for the speech and reminded me that even though telling the truth can be difficult during one’s professional career, it is necessary. Radke also used the “waiter rule” to explain that a lot can be said about a person’s character by the way they treat the waiter, which is much like the golden rule, treat others as you wish to be treated. This piece
He described leadership as someone who inspires people to achieve a goal. He elaborated on this concept by stating that ethical leadership is when a person leads by influencing their followers and use input from the followers to shape goals and purposes. Moreover, an ethical leader should be consistent in both words and actions, lead by example, and can be referred to as a role model. These ethical leaders are extremely important to employees. Radke shared some astounding statistics as to why employees need role models: 56% of employees personally observed misconduct and out of those who observed it, 42% did not report it. This shows that the tone at the top is extremely important in firms. If the management is more likely to behave unethically, then this attitude trickles down and negatively affects the ethical values of everyone in the company. In addition, he discussed how peer commitment is important. For example, most times, an employee will look to see what colleagues are doing in order to make a decision. This information relates to me professionally because I will be starting my career as an auditor soon and the attitudes and ethical culture of the company and my colleagues will definitely affect how I perform my
These ten pieces of advice would definitely help me in a professional setting because at one point I will be leading a group of people on an audit engagement. The first piece of advice is to walk the walk, which means that the leader needs to lead by example. Next, he states that the leader should keep people in the loop. This means that the leader needs to involve the employees and inform them on various changes and adjustments happening in the organization. Radke suggests that the leader should also encourage thoughtful dissent and show the employees that he/she truly cares. Furthermore, Radke states that in order to promote and ethical culture, the leader should not sweep problems under the rug, but should deal with each problem in an ethical manner. In addition, the leader should celebrate the successes in the organization and be fair to all employees. Also, the leader should make ethics a priority. Often times in the professional world, leaders behave ethically but do not truly make ethics a priority. Although sometimes difficult, leaders need to make tough calls in order to maintain and promote and ethical culture. Lastly, Radke states that the leader should “get the right people eon the bus and keep them,” which means that the leader should find employees that share the same ethical values and do whatever is possible to keep them on