Ethical decision making was introduced during my time as a STEP student as we discussed what is meant to be a college student and navigating what was ethically wrong or right, and how to navigate different ethical situations within the diverse Mason community. As a student within the Leadership and Community Engagement Living Learning Community I was able to develop and hone what I understood as ethical leadership and what it meant for me, and what is meant within the different realms of leadership. Both these previous experiences helped build the stepping stones of my understanding of ethics.
What is ethics to me now?
Ethics within leadership is effective, continual negotiation of personal ethical boundaries and the ethical boundaries of another person. What is right to me will not always be right to others, and through dialogue and negotiation of personal values of ethics, we are able to learn from one another. It isn’t always about who is right and who is wrong. To me, there is a spectrum of outcomes ethical negotiation can produce. That makes this important is that through dialogues of ethics, especially around controversial topics such as institutional racism or dilemmas across cultures, leaders are able to increase their competencies and understanding of the world around them. Through my position as an LC, I have put those different types of understanding into practice. I quickly learned that there is no cookie cutter way to ethics and different communities I was a part of shared different values of what ethical leadership meant. Within realms of social justice, ethics was intertwined with challenging systems of oppression and calling out systemic errors within our communities. That standard of ethics wasn’t always the same in other communities and I struggled with internal conflicts of what is meant to have to move with these different standards of ethics. Through my time as a facilitator for LEAD and ODIME and I have empowered myself in navigating different standards of ethics within different communities but also staying true to my standards of what was ethically right or wrong helped me understand that I could create dialogue when differences in ethics ensued.
One of the most notable events of me navigating different standards of ethics was during the Right, Wrong, or Different Ethics Dinner LEAD hosted on substance abuse. After the presentation of what substance abuse meant, I noticed that a lot of assertions around substance abuse where centered around the United States. The dilemma I had was that these standards within the US were different for me, being an immigrant of color, and understanding that substance abuse takes a different role in the country that I come from as well as neighboring states. Even within this country, understanding that there is an ethical dilemma over what is deemed acceptable in terms of legislation and incarceration. Had I not had the experiences with LEAD before this dinner, it could have easily turned to me calling things out very bluntly, but thankfully I was able to create dialogue and discussion over issues within this country as well as issues across cultures.
The example of the Ethics Dinner really helped put into context how my time as an LC has shaped my experiences as a leader hoping to make ethically sound decisions in the different spaces I am a part of.