Ethical and Communication Skills Analysis
Ethical skills in the formal sector are perhaps the backbone of decision making when issues of right and wrong come into the equation. Professional practice is faced by several decision making processes that require a sober contribution based on right judgment and expectations based on reasonable standards. Appropriate decision making even in professional practice is dependent on the individual’s encounter with judgments calling for ethical conduct. While the training in professional conduct and codes of conduct for a particular profession provide useful guidelines for dealing with ethical dilemmas, personal skills built over the years provide the most important determinant on ethics. In business ethics, professionals are invited to apply ethical skills in the diverse spectrum of judgment alternatives likely to give the right operations in the right way. Various ethical considerations in business such as accountability and honesty among many others cannot be taught through academic interventions alone; personal experiences with ethical judgment makes the appropriate meaning in all decision making procedures. It is therefore important for business ethics students to uphold ethical judgments as a prerequisite for higher professional assignments to be easier.
Communication skills in addition play an important role in the creation of an all-round business professional capable of delivering leadership in clarity and coherence of ideas. Similarly, while training in business communication harmonizes and formalizes the environment in which such communication takes place, the level of conversance with basic communication skills determines the success achieved by such professionals in terms of communication. A perfect professional packaging in a communication intensive field such as business demands that clear manifestation of communication skills forms part of the résumé. Communication in business is a fundamental element that creates the nexus between social and economic scopes of business, which implies that the business society would be inconceivable without it (Business Advocacy Fund, n.d, p3). Professions in business require development and expression of skills such as interpersonal communication, clarity, organization and relevance to the subject matter. These skills are eventually built up as the professional establishes a niche for business as a career, which makes it an important agenda of any business student to apply communication experiences encountered along the way.
Explanation of Skills Choice
The choice of ethical and communication skills for a management environment was as a result of their irreplaceability in the relationship that a professional makes with others. The impression left on the performance of the business due to the conduct of an individual may materially affect the manner in which future relationships are determined. In terms of ethics, the conduct of an individual does not only affect the internal relations of an organization but also external impression. The external impression may not only affect the individual but a potent risk of organizational portrayal exists, which implies that the success of the business is also risked. Communication skills closely follow this element of the individual at the internal level while external level may also implicate both the individual and the entire organization in case of poor performance (Hargie 2006, p5). The potential of the creation of a favorable public image is beneficial in the line of business of any business establishment that relies on the market perceptions about the attributes of the service provision. It is therefore important that reflection on the encounter with these two attributes of a business professional is emphasized in the learning process.
Experience and Theory Relationship
An illustration of a personal experience with these skills could shed some light on the primary importance of early learning before professional encounter. In an ethical scenario, I was controlling a queue where a group of people were receiving allowances after delivery of casual labor. I noticed a few of them conspiring to pick allowances more than once and I had to intervene and stopped them with the assistance of the guards. Honesty at that level entailed sacrificing any popularity from the young men and doing the right thing. It was successful since the organization was spared of scrupulous characters swindling it of important resources, however immaterial it would have been to its accounts. This was inspired by the understanding of the importance of having the responsibility to do the right thing at the moment of conflicting forces (Kolb 1984, p.11).
A communication scenario I was involved in was in the similar setting of a group of manual laborers staging protests against mistreatment by the organization’s administration by use of impolite language. Alternatively, the laborers were protesting against delaying their pay by several hours to days, a trend that they feared would lead to their dismissal following arising inconveniences. With the absence of the manager in the premises, I managed to reach him on the phone and he told me to do anything to mitigate any adverse impact from the protest as he made arrangements to clear the grievances. In the application of my communication skills, firstly I had to be as brief and clear as possible on the phone to the manager due to the difficulty of the time. Secondly, I gathered the protesting laborers and began with allowing them to air their grievances in a calm way making assurances of delivering a message from the manger that would quell the standoff. I was capable of gathering information through listening to them which made it possible for me to prepare a pleasant impromptu speech that highlighted their plight and made emphasis of the fact that protesting was adversely going to affect them as well as the organization. The success of the scenario was that the protests subsided on that day but failure emerged later from the fact that the organization did not timely respond to the grievances.
In terms of the relationship with theory on ethics and communication, application of amassed experience and relevant skills in decision making is important in professional interpretation of scenarios. Reflection of personal experiences in the professional learning of business ethics and communication is perhaps an important approach in the assimilation of academic interventions on various decision making encounters. According to Boud (1985, p92), professional training on various management interventions becomes more practical and complete if the students can translate their experiences into the broader picture involving the learning and decision making. In the illustrations given above where communication skills as well as ethical skills learnt before without the context of professional management training enabled me to contribute towards appropriate decision making. Without the application of the skills highlighted, it would have been difficult to avoid possible adverse impacts of the conflicts.
Reflective learning theories explain that the integration of the experiences in the learning process facilitates acknowledgment of underlying principles intended in the theory better than without them. It is important to invoke the environment and reaction of past experiences in making decisions based on the likely right outcomes. Courtney, Holtham and Nygaard (2009, p165) reckon that the most important acknowledgment in such a learning environment is the repetitive nature of managerial options and the apparent creation of a database of appropriate experienced interventions underscores the accuracy of retrieval of past right actions. The authors refer to this learning and reflective basis of decision making as action inquiry which can be likened to retrieval of useful intervention information in similar or related scenarios.
Perfection
In order to make such encounters with decision making appropriate in marketing environment and perhaps in every other business related decision, certain changes will need to be incorporated. While the most ethical considerations may appear to be conflicting with popular feelings, it would be appropriate to accord decision making sufficient time to implore on different alternatives likely to protect the dignity of the intention as well as that of the affected people having a conflicting opinion. This would perhaps invite decision makers to analyze the decision on a cost and benefit basis. As observed in the ethical experience illustration above, the decision to indulge the guards to apprehend the offenders in the queue can be said to have been conducted in a hasty manner since there were several options of maintaining discrete interventions in isolation and avoid humiliation in front of those observing (Pribbenow 2011, para.25). It could not necessarily have to be less brutal but summoning the worker with the evidence of misrepresentation at the time of allowance collection forming sufficient verdict. It is perhaps important to consider the actual circumstances of every case and conduct decision making in a humane way.
In conclusion, the relevance of the image projected by the decisions made at the managerial level is important in generation of perceptions about the manager as well as the organization. In the creation of a pleasant and marketable brand for the individual as well as the organization, communication skills exhibited in various interaction platforms sends heavy messages that impact on the marketability of the brand image (Business Advocacy Fund, n.d, p2). In a similar way, marketing in the more skeptical public eye than before is heavily based on the portrayal of ethical conduct by anyone associated with the brand. This implies that ethical skills generated over the years must be applied to present the organization in the best way possible. In reflective learning, past experiences with important skills needed in decision making process become paramount in making meaning out of theoretical concepts. In line with this observation, ethical and communication skills displayed by a marketing professional are partly influenced by the ability to make meaning of experiences and partly by the training undergone.
References
Boud, D. (1985) Reflection: turning experience into learning. New York, NY: Nichols Publishing Company
Business Advocacy Fund (n.d) Communication Skills, [Online] Available from <http://www.businessadvocacy.org/dloads/fsCommunicationSkills.pdf> [Accessed 10 December 2011]
Courtney, N., Holtham, C. & Nygaard, C. (2009) Improving students’ learning outcomes. Copenhagen , Denmark: Copenhagen Business School Press DK.
Hargie, O. (2006) The handbook of communication skills. New York, NY: Routledge
Kolb, D. A. (1984) Experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall
Pribbenow, P. C. (2011) Growing Your Ethical Skills, [Online] Available from <http://www.philanthropyjournal.org/resources/fundraisinggiving/growing-our-ethical-skills> [Accessed 10 December 2011]
