In Howard Gardner’s book, Five Minds for the Future, he talks about the disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind, the creating mind, the respectful mind, and the ethical mind. Without these "minds," we risk being overwhelmed by information, unable to succeed in the workplace, and incapable of the judgment needed to thrive both personally and professionally.
In a conversation with Dr. Gardner for my Leadership: A Master Class video series, we zeroed in on what influences the development of an ethical mind throughout one's career. Here’s what Howard had to say.
“One of the things about an ethical mind is that it’s not something that one can develop early in life. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be respectful. It doesn't mean we shouldn't be a good person, and it doesn't mean we shouldn't be moral, but to think ethically, you have to be able to think of yourself abstractly.
So you're Dan. You probably were Danny at some point, and we expected Danny to behave himself and to be respectful, and my guess is you did pretty good there. But we begin to talk about ethics when we talk about Dan as a reporter, as you were for many years, and we talk about Dan, let’s say as a citizen of the United States, and as a citizen of the world. You have to be able to take yourself out of the kid who played baseball or played the piano and think of yourself more abstractly - in terms of the role of the professional, and in terms of the role of the citizen.
Even though clearly things before adolescence can be relevant, adolescence is the first time in life where you really can think of yourself in those roles. That’s because of the way the mind develops cognitively and its neural development.
Groundwork for ethical thinking
We find that there are three kinds of support for ethical thinking. We call them, horizontal support, vertical support, and wake-up calls.
Vertical support, which has traditionally been the most important, is who are your teachers, who are your mentors, who are the people whom you respect. Did you go to work for a reporter who just said, ‘Go report’, or were there people who you looked up to and tried to emulate, hopefully not just in terms of bylines, but the way they went about their business. We learned, as a parenthesis, that many people are more influenced by the tormenters and the anti-mentors, because the one thing I want to be is not like so and so! So if I were playing God for a young doctor, young lawyer, young accountant, young business person, I would look at their vertical support: who are the heroes, who are the inspiring figures?
Horizontal support is very important too, particularly in a very peer-oriented society like ours. What are the other people doing - the other citizens, the other professionals? How are they behaving? Particularly if they don't set a high standard, then that's very difficult. If you're a reporter and everybody else is cutting corners and cheating, you're facing an ethical dilemma very quickly. Do you join them or do you leave the paper, or do you try to change the way things are?
Wake-up calls can be good or bad. That's when something happens in your work or your citizenship where you say, "Oh my God.” What happens when the person in the next cube is found to have actually plagiarized a lot of stories? Or what happens if somebody who you thought was a schnook gets a Pulitzer Prize and you say ‘My God, that person really knew what he or she is doing.’ All of us have that in our professional life. Things are never smooth.
Is it Al Dunlap who got great pleasure out of decimating companies, or is it a heroic figure likeAaron Feuerstein who saved Malden Mills, even though he could have just collected the insurance and closed it down? I would look at who's a peer, who else is hired, and on what basis. Who gets promoted and who gets fired?
If a real schmuck gets promoted, that's a very different lesson than if somebody you would think really is doing a fantastic job gets promoted. And then what happens to the wake-up call? The wake-up call could be the company puts out something that causes somebody to die. How is that handled? That is really important because in a majority of the cases, it’s denied or covered up, and that's always the disaster.”
Watch my discussion with Howard Gardner about “Today’s Leadership Imperative” inLeadership: A Master Class.
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Emotional Intelligence author, Daniel Goleman lectures frequently to business audiences, professional groups and on college campuses. A psychologist who for many years reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times, Dr. Goleman previously was a visiting faculty member at Harvard.
Dr. Goleman’s most recent books are The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights andLeadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence – Selected Writings. (More Than Sound). Goleman’s latest project, Leadership: A Master Class, is his first-ever comprehensive video series that examines the best practices of top-performing executives
Destacado en:Leadership & Management
