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variety of views. Joining the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)
and the state’s association of HR managers; reading journals, books, newspapers,
and magazines; volunteering at a shelter for men who were homeless – these were
just a few of the ways I made sure that I wasn’t confined by listening only to my
staff. I also encouraged my staff to identify all of the implications of decisions,
sometimes assigning them to make the best possible argument they could against
something we were planning to do.
Part of a regular practice of reflection requires considering others’ perspectives,
which is much easier to do if one actually listens to others’ perspectives. For exam-
ple, in the early 1980s when I was a Personnel Director, I established a policy
requiring all employees who were not reporting to work to call and speak directly to
their supervisor within half hour of the start of the work day. I was a 20-something
single woman with no children and a good salary; I tended to discount excuses
offered by our minimum wage employees who were charged with excessive absen-
teeism. One day, responding to a disciplinary action for failing to talk to a supervisor
when she called in sick, an employee said to me, “You have to understand, I was
sick. I don’t have a phone or a car. I couldn’t take my kids to day care. So I dressed
them, dressed myself, and walked to the convenience store down the road. I called,
and the person who answered the phone said my supervisor had gone to the snack
bar and would be back in 20 min. I had a fever. One of my kids was coming down
with it. I couldn’t stand around in the store to call back in 20 min. I had to go home
before I collapsed.” I realized that I was making policy from my own perspective. In
the days of landline-only, corded phones, I could roll over in bed in the morning and
pick up my bedside phone to call in, and if the supervisor wasn’t there, easily call
back later. From this experience, though, I learned I needed to work harder to con-
sider the perspectives of others. One can take time each day or week to read or listen
to others’ perspectives on a wide variety of issues, enabling quick decision-making
under pressure. This may mean seeking out night-shift employees, outside sales-
people, telecommuters, or others who are on the margins and finding ways to listen
to them.
Similarly, considering the unintended consequences of an action is important to
ensuring ethical decisions. HR managers sometimes have tunnel vision, focusing in
on the expected outcome, not the unanticipated consequences. When I was rela-
tively new to the job of an HR manager, there was high unemployment and we were
swamped with applications for every single position. My tunnel vision was focused
on finding the best applicants efficiently, and I developed the solution of making it
difficult to apply for a job, reasoning that this would help us screen out people who
were not hard workers. You may be able to think of the unintended consequence to
this decision; I certainly discovered it over time. We were quite successful in screen-
ing out lazy people, but we were equally successful in screening out people who
were so good that they had lots of options. People who would have been great
employees didn’t bother to apply, because the application process was difficult and
onerous.
Reading and reflection are important to ethical decision making, but it’s impos-
sible to do an adequate job of decision-making without education. Critical thinking
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