Leadership and Obstacles to Ethics Reform
I recommend <a href="http://www.icma.org/pm/9009/public/pmplus1.cfm?" target="”_blank”">an
essay by Donald Menzel</a> 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 <i>Ethics
Management for Public Administrators: Building Organizations of
Integrity</span></i>, and
</span>co-editor
of <span>Teaching Ethics and Values:
Innovations, Strategies, and Issues in Public Administration Programs.<br>
<br>
<span></span></span>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.<br>
<br>
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 <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/mc/full" target="”_blank”">City Ethics Model Code Project</a>).<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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 href="http://www.venicegov.com/Files/Employee_Corner/Employee_Corner/Internal…; target="”_blank”">a
code</a> 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 <a href="http://www.venicegov.com/Files/City_Manager/PA_times.pdf" target="”_blank”">Bonnie
Beth Greenball's essay</a> in <span>PA
Times.<br>
<br>
<span></span></span>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).<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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).<br>
<br>
Robert Wechsler<br>
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics<br>
<br>
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