A good way of understanding ethics are to formalize a set of societal rules, laws, regulations, and yes, business rules. When we break an ethical rule, there are consequences or punishments which come along with a violation. With ethics, there is right and there is wrong. Flip the coin and you find Integrity, which refers to the quality of one's character and a persons guiding behaviour. In other words, integrity is a choice, and when we're acting with integrity, we do the right thing, even when nobody is watching us. Simply put, we can't have ethics without integrity.
However, when it comes to business, ethics and integrity are defined more so under the circumstances of a company's vision and mission statement, where the goals of the company fold, bend and in some cases mutilate the ethical landscape.
The standard understanding of ethics, that being black and white, good over bad, right over wrong, don't always apply to some in businesses. In a capitalistic society, the goal is to make money and the financial survival takes over the bridge steering the behaviour of a business.
Preston Townley the former Dean of the Carlson School of Management once said, "...it ought to be fairly easy to choose between right and wrong by relying on principles, but business activity often demands that we select from alternatives that are neither wholly right or wholly wrong.”
Over the past few weeks, the City of Wetaskiwin has given our publication the opportunity to service Wetaskiwin in a more vital role, by placing the legal notices in our community newspaper. To say that this family run newspaper was elated with this blessing, is an understatement. But what we did not fully understand was the level of vitriol politics that this decision was about to unleash.
The privilege of featuring these notices has been in the hands of other city newspapers for over 100 years. Suffice to say that residents of Wetaskiwin have read in the other city newspaper their reaction to this decision. The articles written have been terse, and the level of anger was skillfully conveyed by the publication, even going as far as using their media as a platform to stir anger in the readership.
However, last week a reporter from a Toronto Daily Newspaper contacted our Publisher advising that he was doing a story on the City of Wetaskiwin trying out the Pipestone Flyer for one year. The results of this published story was unfortunate because the reporter from this reputable daily newspaper employed misquotes, wrong statements of facts and referred to our weekly newspaper as a shopper, which is not only untruthful, but damaging. The article in essence attempted to reduce our publication down to a glorified business insert, stripping our community newspaper status in the eye of our readers and potential media buyers.
Combined with the references to our publication in the other city newspaper, it would be fair to say that the Flyer has been properly trounced. All this attention for offering a service for which any community newspaper provides. And yet, we are still very proud to be referred to as your community newspaper. The Pipestone Flyer will not change. We are still the newspaper that goes out of its way to provide as many people in our community with 15 minutes of fame and at the same time provide coverage of the largest geographical circulation area of nearby community newspapers.
It is important for any business leader to remember that their behaviour is a strong influence on the behaviour of employees in their organization. Inversely, you can always assess the integrity of an organization by the way their employees represent it.
In the print world, integrity is key to gaining the trust of the readership, for trust is a scale by which we are all measured.
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