Ethical and Unethical Crisis Management

This program is a distillation of more than 40 years of speaker Jim Lukaszewski's crisis management practice, principally in North America and South America and some in Europe. The major insight of this program reflects the fact that there are common patterns of intentional leadership and crisis management errors across all cultures and crisis circumstances.

These errors are predictable and therefore preventable, especially those decisions which are unethical. There is an emerging area of awareness involving very senior leaders and managers. It’s called risk addiction, and like other addictions these are behaviors a leader or manager knows are inappropriate, arbitrary, mistaken, sometimes dangerous and intentionally wrong, yet are ordered anyway.

We see these decision processes in most leadership, business, and institutional cultures, principally among senior authorities, leaders, and managers. They occur in all areas of endeavor. Our speaker refers to these as Pathologies Of Leadership And Senior Management Misbehavior. The program focuses on the ethical issues in crisis management:

• What really makes a crisis an ethical crisis?
• How management defensiveness leads to mistakes and sometime misbehavior,
• How unconscionable behavior can lead to unethical behavior,
• Unbelievable but commonly used excuses,
• The psychology behind unethical leadership misbehavior and flawed decisions.

Session attendees will learn:

• How to behave and communicate ethically, successfully, and intentionally.
• Profiles in failure, the patterns of Leader and senior manager decision. making that lead to failed responses, and more victimization.
• How to avoid bungling apology and empathy that can permanently taint even the perfect response.
• How unethical behavior begins: to detect, deter, expose, and prevent it.
• Recognizing and preventing decisions that reflect Risk Addiction behaviors.
• How to successfully seek forgiveness.
• How to conduct your own daily ethics audit.
• Assess and predict the ethical pitfalls to avoid.

Jim Lukaszewski graduated from Metropolitan State University April 16, 1974 and was among the first 100 graduates. Jim is the first student trustee of the MSU Foundation; first elected student head of the MSU Alumni Association (MSUAA); second graduate to address an MSU commencement (2000); Alumnus of the Year (2009); worked with every president of the University since its founding (1971) and has been a special member of several past presidents’ “kitchen cabinets.”

Lunch and Learn is part of an ongoing monthly series of presentations and discussions hosted by the College of Management. This conversation is open to all educators, administrators, instructional designers, and students of Minnesota State Education System. Meet new faculty, gather with long-time friends from across Minnesota State, and bring questions and ideas (along with your lunch) to these monthly gatherings that will include conversation starters and an opportunity for both large and small group conversations. For information, contact organizers Dr. Minjung Park or Dr. Allen Bellas.