Applying Regression to Research and Evaluation

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“Ethics and the Law” Program Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NARRATOR: In this program, Matthew Joseph describe some ethical issues encountered by nonprofit organizations and explains how managers and leaders might address them.

MATTHEW JOSEPH: Advocates for Children and Youth is an independent organization. We don't take public funds so that we can be completely independent of government, and we can say what we think is important for children. And so we're very, very careful not to, in any way, have a situation where we are constrained. And the price we pay is having to raise money for the private sector every year for our funds.

So in terms of board members and staff, we have a strict conflict of interest issue so that we would never be in a situation that we can't say this because a board member is representing someone involved in our issue. So if that ever happens, what it means is that the board member has to step down, and they are so committed to the mission that they would want to step down.

Because the reason why they think Advocates for Children and Youth should exist is so that we can be free of those kind of constraints. And these are volunteers, and they often times have very high powered jobs. They're very involved in representing companies or issues as an lawyer, as an accountant. Just a variety of different ways.

And so we have to be really open with them about the issues that we're involved in and how they might be conflicting with one of the needs and one of their clients. And that, unfortunately, does happen where we will find out that we're involved in an issue where it turns out that a client of a board member has a contrary position.

And that just means that that board member has to take leave of absence during that period of time, and hopefully it's just a temporary time, and then they can come back on. As you might imagine, Advocates for Children and Youth has a lot of people who are interested in politics and policy that oftentimes means that they're interested in specific candidates.

They may be interested in certain parties, but we are a 501(c)(3). We can be very, very aggressive as advocates. We can be pushing the decision makers as much as we want, but we cannot be partisan. We cannot say we favor Democrats or Republicans. We cannot be involved in any elections of a particular candidate for or against a candidate.

And that means that, as individuals within the office, they need to be clear that they cannot in any way have us exposed. So, for example, if someone liked a particular candidate, they could not have a sign for that candidate on their window that looks out to the public, because to the public that might seem like Advocates for Children and Youth is promoting that candidate.

And we could lose our tax exempt status for that. So people, as soon as they understand that and as soon as they understand what's at stake, they know that that just means they can put it on their bumper sticker and they can do what they want to do in their private time. But when it comes to their time as employees of Advocates for Children and Youth, they need to be really clear that we are not supporting specific candidates, we're not opposed to any candidates, and we're not affiliated with any particular political party.

NARRATOR: Next, David Osborne discusses some ethical and legal issues related to public organizations, and explains how managers and leaders might address each.

DAVID OSBORNE: There are all the traditional ethical issues about fraud and abuse in the public sector, and those haven't changed. It's very important for public sector managers to have systems in place that measure where the money's going, that follow the money, that can detect fraud, because it still occurs.

Human beings being who they are, a very small percentage of them will cheat and steal, and you need to be able to catch that. But there's a whole new dimension to it that stems from this shift from bureaucracy to post bureaucratic government, because in bureaucracy, you're supposed to follow the rules. There are all kinds of rules, and you're supposed to follow them.

Your budgets have all these line items and the ethical thing is to spend every penny of every line item. And if you don't, somebody will slap your wrist and consider it an ethical violation. In today's world, we need to produce results. And if the money's in the wrong line items, what's an ethical manager supposed to do?

Let's say you've got a very important result to produce having to do with getting people off welfare and into jobs through training and job placement, but you discover that the budget allocations are-- you don't have enough money for training, you don't have enough money to support people once they get jobs because it turns out that they need support for the first six months.

They need help if they never had a job. They need help in how to keep that job, how to act on the job, how to dress on the job. So you're really doing your job, you've figured out what produces results, and you don't have the budget to fund

what produces results. What's the ethical thing to do? Is it to spend according to the line items in the budget? No, it's to produce the result.

So you can go ask permission to change the money from one account to another, one line item to another, but typically, when you do, the answer is, you go to the budget office and they say, oh, we're glad to hear you don't need all the money in this account, because we have a shortage elsewhere, so we're going to take it. But we can't afford to give it to you in the other account.

So it usually doesn't work. It's very risky. So, good managers today engage in something that beat some people call creative insubordination. They start moving the money to get the result. And what we need are systems that give them the authority to do that. But if you haven't got those systems in place, if they don't have the authority, then they have an ethical dilemma.

They can follow the rules or they can produce the results, but they can't do both. And that is a dilemma that is very common in the public sector now. A lot of innovators who are really trying to do what's best and who deeply care about the results get in trouble because they have to bend rules to produce the results.

And we need to reorient our definition of what ethics is all about. Ethics should be about producing the best value for the citizens, for the dollar spent. Value for money, return on investment. Sure, some things will always be prohibited. You can't let people steal, you can't let people discriminate based on race, or gender, or sexual orientation.

But a lot of the rules and restrictions need to go away so that we can empower our managers and our employees to actually go achieve those results. And we're kind of halfway there. We're in the midst of a change, and that, therefore, creates a lot of ethical dilemmas.

So public managers need to help educate their employees about this and develop methods those employees can use to decide what is the ethical path here, including consultation with their managers and including a set of values, organizational values, that they can kind of use as a checklist. And results ought to be one of those big values in today's world.

The culture in most bureaucracies is one of the status quo. You just do what you did last year. You don't make waves, you don't take risks, you lay low and go slow. So for many managers and employees, doing the bare minimum is acceptable and ethical. It's the norm. That's not good enough in today's world. That should be an ethical issue.

We need to create organizations in which we measure results and we hold people accountable for achieving them. And the ethical thing is to do almost whatever it takes to achieve the result. Not quite, because there are certain rules

we've got to keep in place, certain behaviors that are absolutely unacceptable. And managers need to make clear to their employees what those behaviors are. That's very important.

But within that, there should be a lot of scope for the employees to use creative, what some call creative subordination, to bend this rule and bend that rule to deliver the result to the customer. Preserving the status quo should not be considered the most ethical behavior in the public sector. Delivering the results that are important to citizens at a price they're willing to pay. That's ethical behavior.