This one day conference was jam-packed with great content…but so jam-packed that I didn’t have a chance to process what I learned there and then. So this is my reflective practice, and I would love to hear from others about what you learned – particularly from sessions that I didn’t attend. Here’s the first session…more to come.
1. Michael Carroll on Ethics
What I learned or re-learned…
- …you have to go outside the organization to see that organization’s actual values. The values that the organization puts into practice are often different from their espoused values, and these are the ones that new comers or outsiders might see better than those who are enacting them.
- …the same goes for us as individuals, and we often over-estimate our ethical stance.
- …moral reasoning does not equal moral action. just because we say we would do something in a hypothetical case study does not mean we would follow through on that in a real situation.
- …ask myself the questions “How can I be faithful to this relationship?”. “What does my intuition and emotion tell me?”
What surprised me…
- …empathy is the basis for ethics, that is making decisions from within the relationship, not from the outside looking in.
- …it’s not just problem-solving. It’s not a step-by-step process. We need to take the relationship into account.
- …as supervisors, we need to be careful about how much responsibility our coach supervisees place on us to solve their ethical dilemmas for them. Our responsibility is actually to enable them to build their capacity to become independent critical thinkers, building their ethical radar and moral action.
- …and yet, the busier you are, the less our ethical antennae are out, so as supervisors, we may sometimes need to tell them what to do, if they have lost their capacity through stress, overwhelm and exhaustion. In other words, tell them to take a break, to recover those faculties.
What I am wondering…
- how easy do we make it for new joiners to get to grips with these actual values, if we don’t necessarily know them ourselves?
- does our ethical decision-making model take relationships and empathy into account?
- how can I create reflective dialogues that facilitate ethical decision-making in group supervision? (thanks Michelle Lucas for your ideas on that)
