Municipal Ethics News and Views

Developing A Culture of Ethics & Values: Do You Have A Workable Plan?

I speak all the time with local government managers and council members who tell me about their wish to develop a culture of ethics and values and the depth of their frustration in trying to create that culture. Far too many tell me that it just never seems to work for them. Although generalizations are always a slippery slope, here is what I find to be true in the overwhelming number of those cases - they actually have no real plan! They certainly don't have a viable one.

Developing a culture of ethics, whether in the public sector or private, is exactly like any other plan - it needs to be formal, strategic, written and supported. You wouldn't, I hope, try to improve leadership or management or customer service in your local  government simply by hoping that it will get better. Again, it takes a formal and fully supported plan.

As a place to start in developing a plan, here are four of the essentials that I see missing most frequently where a plan actually exists:

1. Values haven't been articulated in such a way that they are absolutely clear to every official and employee or in such a way that everyone knows precisely how to bring those values to life in everything they do every day.
2. Ethics have somehow been confused with compliance. Your officials and employees know all the rules, maybe, but they don't reliably know what to do when there isn't a rule for something. (Besides, simply following the rules not only still allows for unethical behavior but it sets the bar incredibly low for management, leadership, and customer service. If you're looking for exemplary service, simply following the rules isn't going to get you there.)
3. A formal, written, fully-supported plan hasn't been created that clarifies the intended goals, intended actions to fulfill those goals, and steps to monitor and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of those efforts. (You are presumably doing this for every other essential part of your local government's functions, why not for ethics and values?)
4.   Someone has succumbed to the fantasy that a one-time training session on ethics and values is all you'll need. (You/they may have also succumbed to the fantasy that an annual fifteen minute review of the ethics code online is going to magically allow everyone to really understand how to recognize and appropriately respond to often ignored or overlooked ethical challenges around them.) Are those kinds of training activities better than nothing? Absolutely - as long as you are realistic about their limitations and don't use them to create a false sense of security about the level of skills in the areas of ethics and values. Training and reinforcement needs to be on-going, live - at least in part - and focused on real-world, immediately applicable ideas and tools. Training also needs to be responsive to hearing what officials and employees feel the barriers are to putting their training into use. Without giving them the tools they need to overcome those barriers, how could the ultimate outcome possibly be maximally effective?

If we were talking about any other type of training or culture-change initiative, each of these ideas would likely seem eye-rollingly obvious and you would already have a plan of action dealing with each of them. Yet, these lapses and oversights are seen in failed ethics and values initiatives all day long.

So, what's your plan? If you can use help in developing one, I hope you'll let me know.

(This post was adapted from an earlier post on my Ethics Nexus blog.)

Are Your Claims of Ethicality Either Ethical or Legal?

An extremely interesting post on the Conflict of Interest Blog caught my eye this morning. In it, a case is described in which Goldman Sachs, the mega-investment firm defended their inappropriate actions, in part, by claiming that their promises of ethical behavior were merely "puffey" and not really intended to be a promise of ethical behavior. Therefore, as the logic goes, they shouldn't be held legally liable for breaching their promise of ethical behavior. Besides perhaps setting a new low water mark for indefensible defenses, it also got me thinking about the hollowness of so many promises of ethics in both the public and private sectors.

For example, how many of you have an ethics code which, among other things, simply states that ethical behavior will be expected. In essence, the ethics code simply promises ethical behavior. Besides the awkward circularity of that logic, how can you possibly assure - or, really, even adequately support - ethical behavior if you don't provide specific guidance regarding what that ethical behavior actually involves. Without such guidance, might not your claims and promises of ethical behavior be just as likely to be viewed a "puffery" as were Goldman Sachs'? After all, an empty promise is largely what puffery is all about, yes?

The court has now held that false promises of ethicality are not a legal shelter and I suspect we can all agree that any type of false promise is a defacto ethical violation. So, are you prepared to show that your local government's ethics code represents a genuine, concerted, persistent, effective effort to develop and maintain a culture of ethics? Remember, you need to be able to demonstrate all four of those qualities; the need to be able to do so has always been an ethical mandate. Now it seems as if it might be a legal mandate for your government as well.

Does Montana Have Better Municipal Ethics Training Than It Realizes?

I just ran across this brief article from the Bozeman, Montana Daily Chronicle in which the author rightfully is shocked that a recent study found only 7% of Montana's cities appear to have provided any kind of ethics training to their employees. Is that a horrible problem? Absolutely! The article goes on to describe a variety of employee ethical issues noted recently.

Here is what's far more disturbing to me, though. In many states, that level of ethics training - especially if it is, in fact, well-conceived and delivered - would be a huge step forward. There are many states where ethics training isn't provided to nearly that many folks or, in the alternative, is provided but is so minimal that the likely impact isn't much greater than if no training had been offered at all.

So, readers, please do catch me up. How much ethics training is happening for officials and employees where you live? If there's hard evidence of the amount, please let me know. If it's just your impression, that's fine too - just let me know so I know that there may not be specific data to back your comments up.

Please State The Obvious

I'll be the first to admit that I'm prone to stating the obvious. Sometimes I apologize for it and sometimes I don't. Many times I don't even realize I've done it until thinking back on a comment later. Most of us have been told all of our lives that it's pretty poor form to speak the obvious. My goal is simply to stop apologizing for it. Here's why...

Some of you may have seen the recent article about the woman in Seattle who used a city car, on city time, to drive to a casino - yes, indeed - en route to an ethics training program. It's pretty easy to laugh (or, perhaps, cry) and simply file this under "Bad idea - DUH!" since no one would ever presumably think about doing such a thing. The fact is, though, that she did. Here's the other fact; the papers are filled daily with reports of folks who have engaged in extremely serious ethical and legal lapses that are every bit as obviously inappropriate to anyone with even half a brain. Most of them, however, actually have a fully-functioning brain and yet they do these things anyhow.

So what's my point here... If your training or your supervision or your counseling don't allow plenty of opportunity to state the obvious for folks - to remind them of things they admittedly probably ought to already know - you are missing opportunity after opportunity to drive home the full range of considerations employees need to be making about their behavioral choices all day, every day. Don't talk down to them - that's simply rude. Rather, in the same tone as you review the rationale for more complex ethical and legal guidelines and mandates, spend some time on what you believe to be the obvious stuff as well. You might well be doing far more good than you imagine.

So, is what I'm saying here pretty obvious? Maybe so. But I'm going to do my best not to apologize for it.

Why Public Sector Ethics Training Is (Usually) Irrelevant

As many of you have heard me speak about, there has - to my mind - been an alarming trend in recent years to narrow "public sector ethics" down to a small repetitive list of topics including undue influence, sunshine laws, recusal, and conflict of interest. Of course each of these is terribly important.

However:

1.) These are, for the most part, really a matter of rules that can easily be read and reviewed by any official and employee at any time. So, why would you spend all of your training time and money on them?

2.) To the extent that you do choose to spend training time and money on these topics - and you absolutely need to be spending some -  shouldn't the focus be less on beating the rules into folks' heads and more on helpful discussions and problem-solving around the areas where employees and officials see barriers or loopholes that could lead to problems in strictly following those rules?

3.) Please, please, please remember that despite stereotypes and assumptions to the contrary, the overwhelming majority of legal and ethical problems encountered by local government officials and employees are exactly the same as those seen in the private sector. Hostile work environment issues, subtle - or sometimes not-so-subtle - discrimination actions, coercive relationships. misuse of funds, etc. If your ethics training doesn't cover these areas, and cover them well, you are setting your local government up for trouble.

Given all of the above, it will be important to remember to focus your ethics and values training far more broadly than is currently typically done.

So, are public sector ethics irrelevant? Absolutely not!  However "public sector ethics training" often is. The ways in which those ethics have usually been defined - and the ways in which they have usually been trained on - all-too-often make them dramatically less relevant than they need to be.

For Whom Bell City Tolls

The scandal in Bell City, California has plenty of folks up in arms as it should. Yet I have been struck by the odd distribution of reactions. Primary has seemed to be the understandable citizen outrage in and near Bell City. Next has been the political outcry near there. The next two strongest reactions have seemed to come from citizens and politicians in an ever-diminishing degree as one move progressively further away geographically from Bell City.

Now, all of the above makes perfectly reasonable sense and is essentially what one would expect. Here is what I didn't expect, though... Almost nowhere have I seen either loud or persistent responses calling for efforts to build stronger ethics in local governments as a reaction to what happened in Bell City. For the most part, the closest I have seen is a rabid rush to examine previously unseen city salaries and expenses to root out any remaining pockets of fiscal abuse. That's fine and such witch hunts can be helpful if, in fact, any witches are actually found and the innocent are truly, fully protected in the process. However, simply applying this narrow lens to local government ethics misses several essential ingrediants of building better ethics in those governments.

What is needed? It's a long list but hovering near the top are:

• a proactive rather than reactive approach to local government ethics. Let's finally get focused on preventing ethics problems rather than simply cleaning up after them!

• the development of effective ethics committees and commissions at a local level. These need to not be either unduly or inappropriately aggressive but absolutely not rubber-stampers. In other words, they need to be more than token appointments, well trained, and given the authority to fully carry out their duties.

• the development and implementation of effective ethics and values training for all local government officials and employees so that there are fewer chances for inappropriate behavior to go unnoticed or without an appropriate response.

So, how has the Bell City situation 'tolled' for you and your local government? Did it simply anger you or will you use it as both personal and organizational leverage for putting an effective ethics and values training initiative for your local government into appropriately high gear?

 

Which Ethics & Values Training Topics Do Your City or Professional Association Need To Hear About?

I'm getting ready to put together some new ethics and values programs and would love your input on what I need to be talking about these days. (If you don't know what my current keynotes and seminars cover, you can find overviews of them here.)

What I'm looking for is simply this... What are the problems currently facing your municipality or local government professional association members that need to be addressed? I'll make it my job to see if/how my expertise could be used to address those problems. Any input will be appreciated. (Feel free to reply via email to me at chris (at) bauerethicsseminars.com.) Thanks!

I'm getting ready to put together some new ethics and values programs and would love your input on what I need to be talking about these days. (If you don't know what my current keynotes and seminars cover, you can find overviews of them here.)

What I'm looking for is simply this... What are the problems currently facing your municipality or local government professional association members that need to be addressed? I'll make it my job to see if/how my expertise could be used to address those problems. Any input will be appreciated. (Feel free to reply via email to me at chris (at) bauerethicsseminars.com.) Thanks!

Massachusetts Ethics Training Update: Some Well-Intentioned But Unfortunate Changes

If you follow this blog, you have already seen my prior comments regarding the uproar over the recently-instituted Massachusetts required ethics training. Yesterday, the Massachusetts Municipal League announced a summary of changes now made to that ethics testing requirement and the Massachusetts state ethics commission's own overview of the changes can be found here. (Of course, to clarify, what has been called the state "ethics testing requirement" really only pertains to a set of mandated reviews of their conflict of interest policies. As I have previously suggested, this mandated review falls squarely under the heading of 'necessary but not sufficient'...)

Given the persistent statewide uproar over the required policy reviews and testing, the commission has softened their stance on who must review the policy and be tested. As the policy in its original form seemed to be somewhat unwieldy and expensive for local municipalities, there's certainly no faulting the commission for making an effort to attend to local governments' concerns. In fact, such efforts should be commended. Unfortunately, the ways in which they have chosen to amend the policy seem to have taken an already-dubiously weak policy and now weakened it yet further.

Perhaps obviously, my biggest concern remains that this training continues to only attend to conflict of interest issues which, as important as they are, are but one drop in a very large bucket of ethics issues about which government officials and employees need to be trained. What's my beef with the training aside from the fact that it is overly-narrow in scope? A Power-Point review every two years and signing off on receipt of the policy is simply inadequate to assure that officials and employees really 'get' what is expected. They might or might not understand the rules after the mandated review but will this equip them to recognize and appropriately respond to less obvious ethical challenges on the job? I hardly think so.

The new weaknesses? According to the MMA story: "The new procedures also provide exemptions for employees who cannot comply with requirements because of limited English fluency or reading comprehension, special needs, and leaves of absence. Also exempted are vendors and contractors who provide one day or less of services per year."

1.) Limited English fluency, reading problems, special needs, and leaves of absence are hardly reasons for an employee to be excused from this already-minimal level of policy review! They are faced with exactly the same conflict of interest issues (as well as other ethical challenges) as every other official and employee. They certainly require some kind of accommodation to get the training done. However, it seems ludicrous to imagine that their circumstances somehow magically make them immune to the kinds of problems this training is presumably intended to reduce.

2.) I am unaware that vendors and contractors lose their ability to create a conflict of interest if given less than a full business day to do so. Perhaps having a dollars-of-business threshold might make more sense. Or, simply assure that every vendor and contractor sign off on their awareness and understanding of the policies. (That would still be extremely uncomfortably minimal but would, I hope, be better than nothing.)

I am also concerned that: "all municipal employees who are exempted from the online training requirements are also exempted from the requirement that they be provided with summaries of the conflict-of-interest law." If they are employees of any stripe, they need to know about the conflict of interest policies and their rationale. Consequently, if they are exempted from the online training, I would think that they would be exactly the ones to whom one would want to give a copy of the policies. Training it ain't but it would at least assure that they have some level of awareness of these essential rules.

Are there some positives? Absolutely. A provision for group training, for starters, is great. In fact, I hadn't even realized that this wasn't previously an option. Elaborating on who will be considered a "key employee" is also a welcome idea though I'll reserve some of my judgment on that until I see how, in fact, they will be defined.

The state should certainly be applauded for making an effort to create a more user-friendly and less costly ethics training mandate. My applause pretty much stops there, though. No matter how positive their intentions, it appears that the commission has taken an already all-too-weak training initiative and simply watered it down a whole lot further.

What Does The Massachusetts Ethics Requirement Need To Do Differently?

Since my post last month about whether the new Massachusetts ethics testing requirement is overreaching or under-reaching, and I still think it's waaaaay under-reaching, the nasty comments have continued to roll into the papers and radio shows there claiming quite the opposite. Everything I'm reading and hearing speaks to a both strong and persistent negative response to the new ethics testing mandate.

As I mentioned in my prior post on this topic, I can certainly understand that the state might want to find ways to make the new requirement less burdensome for municipalities to enforce. However, that a quick review of the conflict of interest laws is all that's required by the new mandate continues to feel to me like a very small drop in an extremely large bucket.

What I haven't heard is how is the actual implementation is going. The press cites complaint after complaint about how costly and time-consuming this requirement will be but no one that I've read has any data to actually back up what the negative impact will be in terms of either the cost or the time. (And, I'm certainly hoping that the state has made provisions to measure the positive impact of this new requirement on conflict of interest actions across the state. Presumably it will cut down on those incidents and their considerable costs to local governments. If so, it will obviously be helpful to be able to show cities and counties the actual cost/benefit ratio for the program once it's known.)

I know that there are a lot of you in Massachusetts reading this blog as well as plenty of you elsewhere who are following this issue from afar. Who can give me/us some facts, figures and impressions of the actual cost - both literally and figuratively - of this new requirement? Whether by email to me or through the comments section here on the Municipal Ethics News and Views blog, please let me know how things are shaping up 'on the front lines'. What, in your view, does the Massachusetts ethics requirement need to be doing differently?

Who's The Real Face of the Municipal Boogeyman?

The press over the actions of former Baltimore mayor Sheila Dixon have made her into the latest incarnation of the municipal boogeyman. (If there there is actually a "boogeywoman" in the dictionary, I apologize...) Her actions were certainly inexcusable and some would reasonably say that her ability to keep her estimated $83,000/year pension is criminal in itself. Ultimately, though, she was unthroned due to misusing approximately $600 in gift cards and found guilty on one count of perjury. No doubt there is more to what actually went on behind the scenes but, as far as the official record goes, that's what the court action ended up involving.

Is there any excuse for Sheila Dixon's behavior? Absolutely not. However, both the extent and nature of the hullabaloo got me thinking that maybe we have come to look to the big cities as the source for our boogeyman images when, in fact, they are as frequently lurking in places much further from the spotlight.

In particular, the Baltimore case got me thinking about the issue of scale. For example, which city official do you think ultimately inflicted more damage on their municipality? Was it Sheila Dixon or was it Lou Ann Allred, a city clerk who embezzled $150,000 from Callao, Missouri (pop 290) or Donald Hewitt, a town treasurer who embezzled $382,357 from little Ira, Vermont? Now math certainly isn't my strongpoint, but my money says that Allred and Hewitt's respective takes were each a waaaaaaay larger percentage of their towns' budget than was Dixon's. If we're looking for the real face of the municipal boogeyman (and woman), we need to look at every municipality and not just to where the national press leads us.

Is it true that larger city governments, because of their size alone, can create more opportunities for wrongdoing? Surely so. However, they also create more opportunities for oversight so I'm not sure that the threat from increased city government size holds too much significance. One can as easily argue that smaller governments create a greater risk because of their reduced likelihood of having multiple oversight levels. 

So, what does your city's boogeyman look like? Beats me. But once you start assuming that he or she looks like Sheila Dixon, or even Allred or Hewitt, you've missed the point. Like it or not, the potential for ethical and legal problems lies everywhere and once we start looking for a certain 'type' to be the cause, we've lost our ability to to more easily  spot wrong-doing in all of its many possible perpetrators. 

Lest it need to be said, the goal of all this isn't that paranoia somehow needs to be institutionalized into your municipality's government. Rather, it is to reinforce the idea that no municipality, regardless of size, can say "that can't happen here" or "we simply don't have those kinds of people working for us", etc. Ethics - and, consequently, ethics training - needs to be a part of every municipality's routine, whether you think the boogeyman may be in residence there or not.

Is Required Massachusetts Ethics Testing Overreaching or Under-reaching?

I've been hearing and reading quite a bit recently about the new Massachusetts law requiring requiring municipal employees to take an ethics test. According to the state ethics commission website, "this law sets a minimum standard of ethical conduct for all state employees and officials.”

Local officials have been up in arms and articles like this seem to be popping up regularly in the local press around the state. The primary complaint? That the state is wildly overreaching in requiring local municipal employees to take the ethics test. Not only is it seen as inconvenient, but as unwieldy and inappropriately costly. There are also many complaints that it is entirely irrelevant to many of the types of employees required to take the test. 

Is it inconvenient, unwieldy, and inappropriately costly? It certainly seems that it may be. Is it overreaching? That, I find to be a mind-numbingly strange idea. Here's the deal; the required "ethics test" is simply a basic review of the state's conflict of interest policies and no more. Come on now! Conflict of interest is a hugely important issue - and, yes, every municipal employee does need to know those rules and concepts inside out and sideways. But is that all they really need to know? Certainly not... It is hardly reasonable to train municipal officials and employees in a single area of ethics, no matter how important that one area is, and then somehow assume that all will magically be well. 

I get the impression from the state ethics commission site that there are plans afoot to broaden this training and I certainly hope that I'm interpreting that correctly. After all, if the goal is really to assure that all municipal officials and employees get training and a regular review in at least a "minimum standard of ethical conduct", they are going to need to learn about a whole lot more than conflict of interest.

 

Will an expanded ethics training program be more costly still? Yes, no doubt - perhaps even significantly more. However, the state can certainly set its sights on developing more cost-effective methods of providing (or requiring) more comprehensive training. That, however, is only a part of the issue.

 

To justify the additional expense, expanded training will need to be far more than a feel-good exercise; it will need to help officials and employees prevent the kinds of ethical missteps that can be deadly costly to their municipalities. To cover that ground, it will need to provide them with a variety of truly practical ideas and tools that they can use to make more ethically-attuned decisions in the course of their entire range of job duties and relationships. They will need to not only be able to do the right thing but also to more easily spot and appropriately respond to the wrong things they see (fraud and financial abuse, coercive business relationships, harassment concerns, etc.). That, obviously, involves a whole lot more than conflict of interest. So, is the new law overreaching? Hardly. It may need some serious work but, from my perspective, it is actually under-reaching in the extreme.

When Is Municipal Ethics Training Not Really Ethics Training?

When is ethics training for municipal officials and employees not really ethics training? All the time, it seems...

It is amazes me how often municipal ethics training programs are trotted out only to find that they fall into one (or more) of three barely-even-marginal categories:

• Programs that only review the rules. There are obviously lots of rules and every municipal official and employee needs to know them. However, reviewing the rules, in itself, is hardly ethics training. Folks need to know how to put the rules into practice, how to easily spot problems and potential problems in themselves and others, and what to do when they see those problems and potential problems. Simply knowing the rules doesn't help them learn those essential skills and yet it's exactly a lack of those skills that causes far more ethics problems than does a lack of knowing the rules. 

• Programs that don't discuss the values and principles the rules are there to reinforce. If employees don't understand the values and principles on which the rules are based, then how are they going to know how best to apply the rules? More importantly - and my audiences sometimes get tired of my repeating this - if you're going to expect people to act ethically, they better have a pretty good idea of what to do when there isn't a rule for something! Frankly, I have no idea how to make that happen without talking at least as much about values as the rules.

• Programs, regardless of what they cover, that simply provide a written or PowerPoint-driven review followed by a canned test. Might that be a useful approach to giving folks a basic overview or reminder of a few simple things? Sure. But let's not fool ourselves - that type of 'training' is really better at meeting risk management oversight objectives than anything else (i.e. "It's not our fault! That employee was required to review that material and pass a ten point test on it every single year!"). Please... If you want officials and employees to really 'get' ethics, you'd better use a training program that allows them to actively discuss the real-world issues they face and to problem-solve around any barriers they see to making good on their ethical and legal mandates.

In my experience, far too many city and state governments are entrenched in using these three substantially sub-par approaches. In fact, they are so used to them that they actually ask for them when presented with an alternative. When I say that I do programs that are largely interactive and that I do far more than just review the rules, these types often look puzzled or annoyed. To them, doing more than the bare minimum feels either unnecessary or somehow inefficient. The fallout from those attitudes shows up in the countless needless and costly municipal ethics problems we read about every single day. In time, far more municipalities need to understand that not only is ethics training necessary but that it needs to actually be ethics training in more than just name alone.