Professional vs Personal Ethics
According to Baase S., “Professional ethics includes relationships with and responsibilities toward customers, clients, coworkers, employees, employers, people who use one’s products and services, and others whom one’s products affect” (Baase S., 2013). If I were to separate my personal and professional ethics, this in my opinion, is a reasonable definition. However, as I’m in the final third of my career, I have a deep sense of who I am and what I’m capable of. The person I am at work is the same person as the husband, son, grandson, soldier, and uncle roles I play in life. Authenticity and honesty are core aspects of my nature that define my moral code. So my moral code is guided by one word, integrity.
Integrity isn’t to be confused with morality. Integrity is doing what I say I’m going to do, when I say I will do it, the way it was intended to be done. My definition of integrity is one of the hardest challenges I’ve taken on in the last ten years. Over the years I’ve found pursuing a life of integrity isn’t the hard part. The hard part is how I handle acting without integrity. People fall out of integrity for a whole host of reasons. Typically, it’s a violation of one of the three aspects I defined above. However, knowing how to get back into integrity is a skill all its own. It’s simple but incredibly hard to do as a human being. You have to recommit to what you said you would do. Most people will appreciate it and work with you.
References
Baase, S. 2013. Chapter 9: Professional ethics and responsibilities
In A gift of fire: Social, legal, and ethical issues for computing and the internet (4th ed., pp. 403-436). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
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