“How to Get Away With Murder” and the ethics-friendly organization

Leadership Lessons in Popular Culture

“How to Get Away With Murder” and the ethics-friendly organization

As a manager you want to be thinking about how you will set up an ethics-friendly library. I wave my hands at this show as a great example of pretty much everything you do NOT want to do! If you have not yet heard of it, at least the title should give you some ideas about the ethics going on here. Yes, murdering people is one of the ethics problems that happened in this organization. (Not just once!)

The main character, Annalise Keating, is a significant position of power over a group of interns as both their professor for a required class in their first year, and as their boss at work. She has two other employees, who also assist in supervising the students. Together, these people work to make this an amazing ethics-unfriendly place to work, even discounting the murders that they keep committing.

Okay, yes – that’s a lot to discount. But let’s assume that your library does not have that problem with staff. (If that is not the case, then “call the police” is step one in making your library ethics-friendly!)

A few other ethics problems that come up are potentially more common or likely in a library:

·         Sexual relationship between a supervisor and a student

·         Violation of professional code of ethics (repeatedly, nearly constantly)

·         Violations of the law, not including murder (drugging witnesses, lying about evidence, colluding with other attorneys – really we could be here all day just on this)

·         And yes, murdering people. It is hard to get past that one.

Yes, it’s a TV show and hopefully your library is not as bad. Run, don’t walk, for the door if it is! But every library and archive has the potential to either focus on ethics, or to let them slide. You want to lead in a place where ethics are a part of your daily activity, so let’s lay out some ideas for making your library ethics friendly. Being a librarian is not just a job, it’s a profession; and we need to follow our ethics codes to share in the larger world of the profession.

• ·         Talk about your code of ethics. We all are under the ALA or the SAA, but you may have other codes from your parent organization, or other professional work that you do that puts you under other codes. Know this, and be sure to share it with all your staff
• ·         Have regular training sessions. Hopefully your degreed professionals had some ethics training while getting their MILS; but the rest of your staff did not. Talk about not only what our ethics are, but how they should be applied in different situations
• ·         Distribute codes to everyone. Have them in employee handbooks, on the website so patrons can see them, framed on the Reference desk – anywhere. You want ethics to be part of what people do every day, so have them around for easy viewing.
• ·         Bring in someone else to talk about them! Do you have someone from HR, or from the Provost office, or your system office, or a consultant who can come over and chat? That would be a great thing to do for a staff in-service day session, or even to have someone else come in to talk about ethics across the profession. Getting a big picture can help to emphasize that it is not just you talking about these things – we all talk about them.
• ·         Establish a procedure for people to report ethics violations. Maybe you want them to talk to you, but what if you are the problem? Hopefully not, but have someone else for staff or patrons to go to with problems. Usually this will be an HR office, but tailor that to your own organization and community.

Part of being a good leader is setting the tone for good ethics across the board. You need to talk the ethics talk, and walk the ethics walk. Otherwise, you end up shot by an employee and constantly under threat of being disbarred or going to jail or losing really important cases! Take notes on this show – and resolve to run your library so much more ethically!!