No easy answers - teaching high school students workplace ethics

Nation's Business, July, 1989 by Roger Thompson

No Easy Answers

Two dozen business people in North Kansas City, Mo., recently took the day off. And 170 local high-school seniors skipped class. But neither group stayed home.

Instead, they spent the day together in a community-center gym, where they pulled up chairs and got down to business of a different sort: exploring ethical decision making in the workplace.

Think of their six hours together as a crash course designed to introduce tomorrow's business-world recruits to the kinds of tough ethical choices faced nearly every day by those already in the workplace.

Among those types of decisions:

* Should an accountant sign a client's tax return when he knows the return contains false information?

* Should a salesperson push an inferior product just to make a quota?

* Should a defense attorney work for a client he believes to be guilty?

* Should a secretary keep quiet about a supervisor who adds personal expenses to business-expense reimbursement claims?

In discussions of such questions, the business professionals draw on their experience to "show students by example that the great majority of business activities are ethical," says David Lankford, vice president for education of the Missouri Chanber of Commerce. He moderated the North Kansas City session, which was organized by the Northland Chamber of Commerce and North Kansas City High School.

Lankford approaches the subject of business ethics by first helping students identify certain values that form the basis for decision making. The values include honesty, generosity, helpfulness, self-reliance, and kindness. He then encourages the students to examine the sources of their fundamental beliefs, sources such as home, church, school, and peers.

The next step is to put those beliefs into action by challenging the students to find the "best" solutions to examples of ethical dilemmas in the workplace.

In one case, a regional sales manager is being pressured by two major customers who say they might take their business elsewhere if the manager doesn't hire a certain person, who is incompetent. Should the manager hire the person? In another case, a plant manager finds that his brother-in-law is illegally--but cheaply--disposing of the company's hazardous waste to help keep the firm financially afloat. Should the manager blow the whistle?

Students tackle such problems in small discussion groups organized according to their career preferences. The business professional at each table mediates between conflicting values and presses for a consensus.

The idea for the workshop evolved three years ago from a mother's anguish over an ethical dilemma one of her daughters face during the early days of her first job. "That incident caused me to realize that kids today are forced to make tough decisions without the tools to do it," says Linda McKay of St. Louis.

A few weeks after her daughter's experience, McKay learned of a daylong business-ethics workshop to be sponsored at her church by the McDonnell Douglas Corp., one of St. Louis' major employers. The workshop was open to the public, and McKay attended. She was so impressed by the program developed by the company for its 120,000 employees that she asked for, and received, the company's help in adapting the materials for high-school seniors. She was a full-time homemaker at that point, and her efforts were voluntary.

Sanford McDonnell, chairman emeritus of the company, applauds McKay's work: "We want high-school students getting this type of training so we can reinforce it rather than present it for the first time once they are on the job."

Along the way, McKay teamed up with Lankford of the Missouri Chamber. He is a former teacher and is at ease presenting the program to a teenage audience. Lankford also has helped the program tap into local chambers of commerce for the business support it takes to give the workshop "real world" credibility in the eyes of its youthful audience.

The first session was held in April 1987 at Clayton High School in suburban St. Louis. It was so successful that principals at six other St. Louis-area schools subsequently invited McKay and Lankford to give the workshop.

Now they have packaged the idea in a curriculum guide that enables others to duplicate the workshop. A session for as many as 200 students costs about $475, mainly for printing and mailing costs. The professionals who lead the groups generally receive no honoraria, and lunch typically is paid for by a sponsoring organization.

The workshop has drawn praise from business leaders who favor adding ethical decision making to the high-school curriculum. "We have failed our young people if we do not give them the right foundation to make tough decisions," says William Kanaga, chairman of the advisory board of Arthur Young & Co., a leading accounting and consulting firm, and the immediate past chairman of the board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

"If they _McKay and Lankford' can set up a model program, then replicate it across the country, I applaud them," Kanaga says. "This is an area that has been neglected too long."