This Conversation is the first in a series addressing issues of character education. Since 1996 the Council has been active in advancing school-based, community-supported character education through its Task Force on Character Development, a volunteer group of experienced educators and community leaders that meets regularly to study and discuss character education issues.

In 1998, the Task Force joined with the Ohio Department of Education and fourteen schools and community organizations to form the Ohio Partners in Character Education (OPCE) alliance. With support of a four-year, $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, the local partners are designing and implementing pilot programs in character education in many parts of the state.

The specific responsibilities of the Council’s Task Force are to provide policy leadership and recommendations, opportunities for local partners to share insights and best practices, and events that build awareness and support among educators and citizens for character education.

As part of the project, the Council has organized a number of Management Advisory Groups composed of experienced managers in various employment sectors to discuss the specific qualities of character that are needed for success in their work places. These qualities, and examples of how they affect employment, will be reported to the state-wide OPCE network of schools and educators for use in teaching and counseling the young people of Ohio.

For the February conversation, a panel of public sector managers discussed the specific qualities of character that are especially desirable for success in their workplaces. Moderator Douglas Trail asked two questions: 1) Are character traits such as honesty, selflessness, civility and responsibility as important or more important than specific work skills in a new employee? 2) What happens when an employee lacks a character trait the employer considers key to success? He then asked the panel to comment on these questions and the qualities of character that are especially desirable in newly hired governmental employees.

To set the stage for the discussion by my colleagues of the specific character traits that we have been dealing with during the last couple months, I start by talking about the standards of conduct that we believe are applicable to public officials and employees. We do have government ethics laws that have been in place since 1970. They have become more visible in the last twenty years because of: 1) scrutiny by media and peers, 2) the increasing cost of doing government business, 3) the more aggressive and sophisticated prosecution of public corruption, and 4) greater public awareness of ethical issues.

In most states there is a statutory ethics law that sets standards for all public officials and employees that usually involves an independent public ethics commission to administer and to enforce the ethics law. Personal financial disclosure every April 15th is usually required. It also provides for advisory opinions. Unlike any other field of ethics, you can ask if your conduct is going to be in violation of the law before you engage in the activity. There are no excuses for many of the things we see happening. Enforcement procedures are similar to a grand jury. There are usually specific prohibitions against such things as: 1) conflict of interest, 2) revolving door, i.e., leaving government service and coming back to represent a client, 3) improper interest in a government contract, 4) receipt of gifts, gratuities, 5) influence peddling, and 6) disclosure of confidential information. This is the standard for public officials and employees.

There are also professional codes of conduct. More and more professions are adopting their own codes. Some are voluntary and some are mandatory. These overlay the conduct of public employees.

Most ethics issues are personal. We all face ethical dilemmas every day of our lives. Students have to decide how to proceed when they haven’t done their homework or haven’t studied for a test. I have to decide whether I am going to walk to the office copier or drive to Kinkos to copy my personal materials—I have to decide whether to tell the cashier that she gave me too much change. All of us face these situations.

So the Council for Ethics in Economics convened our group as part of the Task Force to identify what personal characteristics result in the kinds of people we want in public service and that many of you will want in the private sector. In our initial meetings we came up with seven characteristics that we think are critical. They are (in no particular order):

These are the seven pillars of character that we have selected and hope will be taught in the schools.

I would like to talk about honesty. In our organization there appears to be an underpinning of this trait at home that affects the job. Here are a couple of examples. An employee who reported to me falsified some state documents on two occasions and was asked to resign which occurred. During the work tenure of this person I noticed a pattern of manipulation and deceit. As I came to know this employee, I realized that this underpinning of the family and home life re-surfaced. She told me that whenever the family was on vacation, her parents would take towels from motels and nice things from restaurants. So here’s the underpinning message this employee was receiving at home. Another example, my wife is a school teacher in a suburb of Cleveland. She had two eighth graders—one doing the homework of another student and being paid for it. They were both caught, and she talked to the parents of both students. The parents of the student who was paid for doing the homework said they would handle this problem at home. She called the parents of the boy who paid to have his homework done. To her surprise the father said: Oh boy, he is starting early. I didn’t do that until I was in high school. Here are the scenarios of underpinning messages received at home. I would like to ask you who are attending this meeting: How can we get educators involved in character education? I know it is not their sole responsibility. But when youth are not getting this underpinning message in the home, how can we as a society get this message out to youth today so they can be valued employees?

I would like to talk about employers and employees, how they get together and then how they work together. When an employer has had a bad experience with an employee, how does the employer better this experience when a new person is to be hired? Generally the recruitment process includes an interview. This hiring technique is very much like the dating game. When we date, we get together socially and try to impress each other! We try to make a good match. In employment the employer tries to determine who is best suited for a position. As with the dating game, the interview is not always honest. This brings me to the character trait I think is the most important to becoming a top government employee and that is honesty. If the employer is dishonest in the interview process, the agency will end up with employees who may be dishonest too.

The public and private sectors first assess applicants for minimum qualifications which include skills and education. Usually there are several people who fit the criteria for each position. State government sometimes has less stated qualifications than is needed to do the job successfully. With minimal qualifications, almost every applicant is given the opportunity to compete for a position. Applicants have a lot of "rights" in the public sector. We give people the opportunity to succeed. Therefore minimum qualifications rarely require advanced education.

The state of Ohio has instituted structured interviews for job applicants which are very similar to the private sector approach. This process attempts to measure behavior. The questions are actual situations which include specific elements of the job. The applicant is asked: How would you react in this situation? If it is a customer service job, the best applicant will use customer friendly terms to describe their actions. The structured interview is about the only assessment tool used to determine behavior and character traits. Generally speaking, the person who exhibits appropriate skills and traits from these two processes will be hired for the job.

Reference checking is another key factor in determining behavior and character traits of potential employees. In government there are a lot of people who do not believe in checking references. Many hiring managers feel the applicant has "rights" to a position and should be given opportunities. Government is a forgiving employer. I think the entitlement attitude is the difference between public and private sector hiring. You can see that we do not always take the opportunity to assess character traits and behavior needed for a specific job.

Civil service law dictates the hiring process. After passing a test, an applicant is placed on a list of qualified applicants who are the only ones with a "right" to be interviewed for the position. The employer must hire listed applicants whether or not they have the desired character traits. The private sector employer may evaluate an applicant more on character traits. Although the public sector hiring authority may desire character traits such as honesty, there is no formal way to evaluate these traits at this time.

From the applicant’s standpoint, they want to make a good impression in an interview. They may not be honest in this situation for fear of failure. Applicants may say they can do things that they can’t do. An applicant may eloquently resolve a situation during an interview that they are unable to implement on the job. The pressure of the interview may cause a person to exaggerate. This is very difficult to decipher. What character traits are needed for a job and how do you evaluate positive and negative traits?

In today’s economy, I think there may be less pressure to lie during interviews because there are many other job opportunities. Under these circumstances, applicants may be more honest to an employer and to themselves. In addition, hiring techniques are changing. Automated screening devices to assess people are being used today. I recently previewed an automated interviewing telephone system which has prompts to an applicant. A question is asked and the applicant responds. One company reported about half a percent of the applicants admitted to being a felon during a face-to-face interview. When the same company converted to the automated system, five percent of the applicants interviewed admitted being a felon. It was easier to be honest to a machine than to a person. So there are new techniques being used to assess job applicants. The goal of every employer is not to have an employee terminated.

In looking at 91 terminations from state jobs during 1998, I found only one person being terminated for a skill-based reason. This person had not maintained a license to keep the position. Everyone else was terminated for reasons such as absenteeism, client abuse, failure to show up, failure to follow orders, inappropriate or unauthorized relationships—all behavioral difficulties. These people probably had the skills to do their jobs, but not the personal traits needed to be successful. We have to develop assessment tools to assist us to make better hiring decisions.

It is the employee’s behavior on the job that becomes the primary termination issue—not the person’s skills. I have more questions than answers about the interview process and how it can determine honesty. How can we assess character issues and still follow the law? Do good character traits overcome lack of skills? You see people on jobs who are not as skilled as others, however, their good character traits make them successful. These employees come to work every day and are good to work with. Their traits may cause the employer to look at them more favorably than those with more skills. We still have many questions to be answered.

Response: These are gray issues. Generally the only thing available is good ethics or good common sense. There are a lot of things that are wrong that aren’t illegal and a lot of things that aren’t legal but are not prosecutable. Beyond these truisms these issues usually range on a continuum from what is absolutely right to what is absolutely wrong. Ninety-nine percent of the things are somewhere in the middle, and all have implications that go far beyond the simple ethical issues.

Response: I think we should. All the values we are talking about are all things needed in the workplace, and we’ve all been taught that you can not get into family values and issues in the workplace. Those questions are illegal in an interview. It’s a very gray area.

Response: No one wants to tell the boss or anyone else the bad news. It has been my experience in the last twenty-four years that honesty is the best policy, particularly in the public sector and particularly when you are dealing with other government agencies internally and with the press. There is no reason to sugarcoat something or spin it. It is better to tell the truth. If it is a bad story, it will usually be a bad story for one day and then you go on.

Response: I think we have to recognize sometimes that there are conflicts in our priorities to these character traits. Loyalty, for instance, has to give way to truthfulness and honesty, but I don’t know how you could give a ranking to these things.

In the employment process, I tell people that if it is going to affect performance on the job, you need to share it. But many times people want to be too honest, to tell about a great aunt in California who may die next week. They really don’t need to say all that. I tell them if you need a filter to determine whether you need to talk about that—say to yourself: Is this going to affect me on the job? Am I going to miss work? Will I be less productive? If so, then you need to share it. If not, you don’t need to share everything. We don’t need to have our whole life out on the table.

This is against what books have said over the years that advise not to tell the truth in interviews because, if you are hired, the employer will take it better from you. Fifteen years ago we told applicants with criminal records not to tell nor put it down on their applications and then work six weeks or whatever the probation period is. After that, go in and share it with the employer because if they know you and like you as a person, they wouldn’t discriminate against what you had done in the past. That is very risky today. I wouldn’t tell anyone to do that. This is how we have evolved.

Comment: In this gray area my benchmark is my conscience on a daily basis. I do things that feel good for me and that I have worked through an ethical thought process. To be hired in the Secret Service, I went through a four and a half hour lie detector test where they asked everything imaginable. Afterward my conscience was clear about what I told them. I made it a point as a youth that what I do has to make me feel good and what I am doing is the right thing. Our parents told us as young children: Let your conscience be your guide and in most instances that will be a pretty ethical way to handle something.

Comment: We have told our children that the most important thing you do is to tell the truth. The worst thing is to tell a lie. We grounded our son for two weeks for not telling us the whole truth about where he was. Yes, you may use bad judgment, make mistakes, not be polite. But in the scheme of things, telling the truth is the most important value.

Comment: In my law enforcement career, conscience level is different with everyone. The criminals I have arrested have a con-science in most instances, but it doesn’t bother them. You can’t reach everyone, but there are still people on the fringe that you can reach out to and change their conscience level.

Response: This is an example of how the economy is changing. What people need to express is they want to do the job and learn and grow for as long as it is possible, but they don’t expect permanency. That puts a lot of pressure on an employer who says: I don’t know whether we are going to be here for him to grow and develop over ten years. But I can certainly give him an opportunity to be here two or three years. He can learn and we can grow together. So the encouragement is that you do the very best during the time you are there and you are honest during that period of time but not to expect permanency.

Response: You expect that person to be loyal day-by-day.

Comment: But that means the employer has loyalty to the employee only as long as it is convenient.

Response: Probably that is true. I do think that is the way the world is going. Because it is moving so rapidly, you may not get loyalty day-by-day and that’s where we have some real critical issues.

Comment: We have treated loyalty almost entirely as the employer relationship—the disloyal company and the disloyal employee. But I have noticed loyalty to one’s profession as distinct from one’s employer. In academe that has existed for a long, long time and it is increasingly so in the business world—certainly in the high technology areas. It has been used by both sides. I want people who are up there—avant garde. People who are moving from company to company have learned more for us. The person doesn’t go to Hewlett Packard because he wants to spend his life there. He wants one more niche of professional experience. So the person is loyal but not to the same structure we had in vertical industry and the steel/automotive businesses. That’s become, in lots of professions, loyalty to the profession.

Comment: That’s true. Loyalty is changing in society and the workplace. I want our people to be loyal on a day-to-day basis to their employer and to themselves for their own self-development. I believe it is one of my jobs as a manager to reach performance in the goals we have. If I can help my staff members get to the next level for whatever that is, coordinating with their being loyal to the company and to themselves in their own professional self development, then I have done my job as a manager. But the new role of business people now is to move on.

Comment: Loyalty and self respect go hand in hand. We are losing something in our society if we think only about tomorrow and discard people who have been loyal when there are shifts in the economy. Of course you shouldn’t hire someone and feel you are married for life. This is often the case in public employment. It is very difficult to get rid of people so you want to be extra careful. I do think there is something to having a relationship between an employer and an employee that transcends the one day at a time concept.

Comment: In the legal profession where you have a partnership, you worry about your partner who may take his business down the street and earn a few dollars more or a partner whose area has lessened in importance and you want a way to ease him out. There just isn’t the loyalty that there was twenty-five years ago.

Comment: I think that loyalty has taken a bad rap because of blind loyalty. People now see it as having to do anything a company says even if it is dishonest and against my values, but I still have to be loyal. That’s why we need to develop a new word for loyalty in regard to family values. This word in particular denotes to young people that they must do something they don’t believe in just to get ahead. They must be loyal and do dishonest or illegal things just because their boss has told them to. It is blind loyalty instead of loyalty as we know it.

Response: I think they increase tremendously. Here’s an example in Workers’ Compensation of empowering staff to help make decisions. Once we were a little lower in meeting our performance goals than we wanted to be. Instead of deciding on my own, I brought it to a team and asked for their ideas for an action plan to reach these goals. They came up with a lot of good ideas. Because it was a coordination of their ideas and mine, they made the plan work.

Comment: There has to be a trust level where employees really believe that you want their ideas and are going to trust what they say and will act on them. In government that is sometimes difficult because they know there will be a change in four years. So they ask: You can say this will be used but what if the next person comes in and says something else? Trust level is very hard to achieve particularly with long term employees. The team idea is great if you can get past the trust situation.

Response: I am very concerned about the public perception of public service, that people in this sector are inherently bad or dishonest. When John Glenn, former astronaut and former senator, was in Columbus, he talked about the need for good people being willing to serve in important capacities in the government. Yes, there has been an erosion of general honesty and personal conduct in public service. I think money is part of it. The cost of running for an election has gone out of sight and out of sync with the value of the services. In the state senate race recently, $400,000 was spent for a job that pays $40,000 a year. What does that tell you? The pressure to raise money has caused people to not always tell the truth. So we have a general distrust for government and public service.

Comment: When I was in high school and college, I had an opportunity to go to Germany and study. I remember people there referring to someone they know as one who works for the government, or who is a bureaucrat. And this was a good thing! Just think of what kind of character traits this means to a German: efficiency, loyalty, probably legitimate authority. Think of the contrast to our phrase: "good enough for government work," meaning just enough to get by but not the attention to quality that would be expected in the private sector. Does this raise another kind of agenda: a blend of character and skills? In some of the other task force groups, they say there is a need for loyalty but also attentiveness, conscientiousness, etc. When I ask what attentiveness has to do with character traits, they come back with examples that cover a lot of day to day functioning. Do these characteristics count? Are they measurable? Do we need to stress their importance?

Comment: I understand the concern that some of you on the panel have expressed about the school taking the lead to turn the situation around about building character. I think you have to be aware that school people throw that issue right back at us. They say: We can’t do it. They have a lot of reasons to say that and most of them are well founded. Now I think they are willing and able to work along side the rest of us but we will be misled and deeply disappointed if we think they can carry the load alone. You (the task force) and the government sector have to realize that the rest of us have hopes that you will carry a big share of the load. Listening today, I realize how big a load and struggle that is to turn around current practices.

Comment: In support of this comment, kids are in school 9+ percent the first eighteen years of their lives and 11+ percent of the years between kindergarten and high school graduation, so you are asking schools to cover the gaps that occur 90+ percent of their lives. That is a rather difficult job to accomplish. This is just a statistical support to the size of the task we have been discussing.

I would like to bring up the question of fairness. When I talk with a lot of high school students, fairness is always a big thing on their minds in terms of—this is not fair. And yet the adult response is that sometimes life is not fair. I am wondering how that might tie into some of the seven critical personal characteristics? How do we reach students on their level in looking at these types of characteristics and building some of this back in so they see some of these values flowing back such as fairness? Then how do we get at core values versus surface values? Some people become very adept at looking as if they have all these traits but they can be the ones you have to be most wary of. I once assumed treasury responsibilities after a treasurer embezzled money. That person was a model individual who was very well respected.

Response: On the fairness issue, with the tight economy employees are almost in control. An employer will think: Well, he doesn’t come to work on time or he does this or that but I need someone there to do the job. So you put up with this behavior. In high unemployment times you would have that person out the door and would get someone else. This results in a mediocre employee staying there because he is getting what he wants to do. You are not being fair to the good employee who is going to leave saying: I can’t take this anymore. I come on time and work hard and this other person gets the same kind of money I do. In government this is a big problem where the mediocre person is doing the same work and receiving the same pay. This is a real concern because we are going to lose quality people when we push them too far with this kind of unfairness. There are other jobs out there for the good employee to go to. Young people in particular are very concerned about this.

Comment: Are we really trying to help people in the process of matching jobs and people or do we stop too soon, leaving them with a sense of unfairness? I interviewed a woman who did not have the qualifications for our work. By my taking a little more time to suggest other places to apply, she found a position that fit her capabilities.

Response: That’s the difficulty we have with measurements—especially in government. If we don’t have a measurement that gives us 1, 2, 3, 4, answers, then we know that someone will file a grievance and they are protected by civil service and by the union. We have to be able to prove that we have followed the 1, 2, 3, 4 activity for many years for many people. This is one thing we are working on. What are the measurements that will assess the good person and the one that’s not so good? How do you make that prediction? For structured interviews what we are doing right now is having the hiring manager comes up with the expected answer they would like to get. If there are four elements, they would like to see the person touch on, it doesn’t matter how they say it as long as they just hit on those four elements. There is no predictive device available now that would give us that information.

Comment: These task force groups need to think about how to take these concepts that are adult concepts at this point and make them meaningful—ones that are totally, rhetorically or any other way—to ten year old youth. That is one of the difficult things that we need to encourage. We need to have some teachers present during some of these sessions so there is an interchange with this reality of teaching these children. A lot of these habits start very early so we are not talking about high school students—they would be late in the game. Most of these characteristics develop early in situations outside the school. To get them back into a school environment where they are dealing with their peer groups who are eight or nine years old, we have to come up with something that makes sense in their environment, their classroom, their peer group relationships. If we don’t do that, we are laying a load on teachers that would say: Here’s what we need when students reach eighteen or twenty, now do something when they are nine years old to cure this. We must do more than say something like that.

Stephan W. Stover was appointed Administrative Director of the Supreme Court of Ohio in January 1987 and is the chief administrative officer of the court. Prior to this he was the Executive Director of the Ohio Ethics Commission. He received a Juris Doctor from Washington University, St. Louis, a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in Education Administration (Higher Education) from The Ohio State University. Stover serves as an ex-officio member of the Upper Arlington Education Foundation and is active in many other organizations.

Tim Kachmarik serves as Supervisor of Special Investigations for the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation. He supervises the investigative teams in Akron, Canton and Mansfield Service Offices. Before joining the Bureau, Kachmarik worked for Bank One as a bank protection manager investigating financial crime. Previously he served four years as a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service. In addition he has five years experience as an accounting professional in the Cleveland, Ohio area. His college degree is in Business Administration with a major in accounting

from Cleveland State University.

Penny Purviance is currently a Human Resources Administrator with the Ohio Department of Administrative Services and is responsible for the Centralized Recruitment Office. Prior to this position she was an executive recruiter with private recruitment firms consulting with over 100 companies regarding the recruitment and retention of employees. She managed recruitment for Bank One and Warner Cable. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Ohio University and has taken courses in business administration and psychology from Capital University and The Ohio State University.

Highlights is one of the benefits of membership in the Council for Ethics in Economics. The Council thanks Celianna Taylor for assembling and editing this and future editions of Highlights.

We acknowledge with gratitude the special support of

Leadership Circle members

Ashland Inc. • Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue • Merrill Lynch

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