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Leadership and Obstacles to Ethics Reform
Saturday, February 7th, 2009
Robert Wechsler
I recommend an
essay by Donald Menzel from the October issue of PM, the magazine of
the International City-County Management Association (ICMA), entitled
"Strengthening Ethical Governance in Local Governments." Menzel is a
former president of the American Society for Public Administration,
author of Ethics
Management for Public Administrators: Building Organizations of
Integrity, and
co-editor
of Teaching Ethics and Values:
Innovations, Strategies, and Issues in Public Administration Programs.
Of special interest to me in the essay is Menzel's look at the obstacles to ethics reform. These include (1) what he calls leadership myopia, the failure "to recognize the importance of ethics in getting the work of government done"; (2) leaders' lack of awareness of misconduct, which I assume involves open discussion of ethical problems as they arise, at all levels in an organization, and between levels, just as most work is done in a good organization; (3) an unethical history and culture, where leaders are forced either to accept norms or somehow break the culture; and (4) ethical illiteracy, where leaders cannot see the consequences of unethical conduct, often because they look at the world through a narrow, often legalistic perspective.
Menzel then looks at the two approaches to reforming an unethical culture, which he calls compliance and integrity approaches, but which are more commonly referred to as rules-based and values-based approaches. He comes out in favor of a fusion of the two approaches, which I agree with (see the City Ethics Model Code Project).
Menzel uses the example of Venice, FL, the Shark's Tooth Capital of the World. I'm going to jump to the last section of the essay, where Menzel looks at an ethics survey done in Venice. The most important variable in the strength of the city's ethical culture, the survey determined, was organizational leadership.
This is almost a given, and I've been stressing it constantly in my blog. But the Venice example shows that leadership, while the most important factor in improving a local government's ethical culture, can also be a problem.
Although its principal problem did not involve a conflict of interest (it involved illegal pollution), in 2006 the city of 22,000, led by a new city manager, put together what appears to be a very complete ethics program, with a code that includes both rules- and values-based approaches, ethics training, a system for frequently rewarding ethical behavior, and an ethics survey to provide a benchmark to see how the program works. For more information about the Venice ethics program, see Bonnie Beth Greenball's essay in PA Times.
But the Venice program is far from perfect. Its coverage of conflicts of interest is limited, and its language is not as clear as it could be, but this is typical of ethics codes in smaller jurisdictions. What is unusual about Venice is how dependent the program was on the city manager, who left his position last summer. Not only did the city manager do the ethics training himself, but he acted as the city's ethics compliance officer, the person in charge of enforcement (there is no ethics commission).
Having the chief executive officer enforce ethics against the elected officials he works for and the employees who work for him is so wrong that it undermines the entire program.
It appears that the cause for this decision, in the beginning at least, was the Environmental Protection Agency's desire to have the city manager be the city's environmental compliance officer. The ethics compliance officer position seemed to go hand in hand with that. But this would represent a serious misunderstanding of what government ethics is all about, a confusion that might have come about due to origins of the ethcs program and its unusual emphasis on aspirational goals at the expense of the usual conflicts of interest.
However, more than that, it appears that the decision was part of the city manager's hogging of the ethical limelight. Any leader who seriously cared about conflicts of interest would never have enforced ethics in his city.
The result is that, six months after the city manager left, there is no sign of the ethics compliance officer on the website (the position is held by the interim city manager and will, I was told by that person, be turned over to the new city manager). Nor is there any sign of the ethics program itself. For an all-encompassing ethics program, this absence is telling.
Leadership is extremely important, but it has to be good, responsible leadership, by a leader who understands that conflicts of interest apply to him, as well. The city manager must have been a great salesman, because Menzel's and Greenball's glowing reviews of the program say nothing about the worm that was sitting inside the beautiful apple. That is, there is no mention in either essay that the city manager was the ethics compliance officer (both were written when he was still in office).
Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics
---
Of special interest to me in the essay is Menzel's look at the obstacles to ethics reform. These include (1) what he calls leadership myopia, the failure "to recognize the importance of ethics in getting the work of government done"; (2) leaders' lack of awareness of misconduct, which I assume involves open discussion of ethical problems as they arise, at all levels in an organization, and between levels, just as most work is done in a good organization; (3) an unethical history and culture, where leaders are forced either to accept norms or somehow break the culture; and (4) ethical illiteracy, where leaders cannot see the consequences of unethical conduct, often because they look at the world through a narrow, often legalistic perspective.
Menzel then looks at the two approaches to reforming an unethical culture, which he calls compliance and integrity approaches, but which are more commonly referred to as rules-based and values-based approaches. He comes out in favor of a fusion of the two approaches, which I agree with (see the City Ethics Model Code Project).
Menzel uses the example of Venice, FL, the Shark's Tooth Capital of the World. I'm going to jump to the last section of the essay, where Menzel looks at an ethics survey done in Venice. The most important variable in the strength of the city's ethical culture, the survey determined, was organizational leadership.
This is almost a given, and I've been stressing it constantly in my blog. But the Venice example shows that leadership, while the most important factor in improving a local government's ethical culture, can also be a problem.
Although its principal problem did not involve a conflict of interest (it involved illegal pollution), in 2006 the city of 22,000, led by a new city manager, put together what appears to be a very complete ethics program, with a code that includes both rules- and values-based approaches, ethics training, a system for frequently rewarding ethical behavior, and an ethics survey to provide a benchmark to see how the program works. For more information about the Venice ethics program, see Bonnie Beth Greenball's essay in PA Times.
But the Venice program is far from perfect. Its coverage of conflicts of interest is limited, and its language is not as clear as it could be, but this is typical of ethics codes in smaller jurisdictions. What is unusual about Venice is how dependent the program was on the city manager, who left his position last summer. Not only did the city manager do the ethics training himself, but he acted as the city's ethics compliance officer, the person in charge of enforcement (there is no ethics commission).
Having the chief executive officer enforce ethics against the elected officials he works for and the employees who work for him is so wrong that it undermines the entire program.
It appears that the cause for this decision, in the beginning at least, was the Environmental Protection Agency's desire to have the city manager be the city's environmental compliance officer. The ethics compliance officer position seemed to go hand in hand with that. But this would represent a serious misunderstanding of what government ethics is all about, a confusion that might have come about due to origins of the ethcs program and its unusual emphasis on aspirational goals at the expense of the usual conflicts of interest.
However, more than that, it appears that the decision was part of the city manager's hogging of the ethical limelight. Any leader who seriously cared about conflicts of interest would never have enforced ethics in his city.
The result is that, six months after the city manager left, there is no sign of the ethics compliance officer on the website (the position is held by the interim city manager and will, I was told by that person, be turned over to the new city manager). Nor is there any sign of the ethics program itself. For an all-encompassing ethics program, this absence is telling.
Leadership is extremely important, but it has to be good, responsible leadership, by a leader who understands that conflicts of interest apply to him, as well. The city manager must have been a great salesman, because Menzel's and Greenball's glowing reviews of the program say nothing about the worm that was sitting inside the beautiful apple. That is, there is no mention in either essay that the city manager was the ethics compliance officer (both were written when he was still in office).
Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics
---
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