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Fear and Silence

First of all, many of the ethical violations Jennings writes about in her book are not something it requires a lot of education and training to spot. As one example, she cites an officer of a corporation who spent $6,000 on a shower curtain for his new apartment, and charged it to the company. Jennings says,

“This behavior is not exactly the stuff of the so-called gray area. .. not the kind of story that causes us to ponder, “Wow, that was really a subtle ethical issues. I never would have seen that.”

While our concern is Indian Country, flagrant violators of ethical concerns are not limited to tribal organizations.

Jennings, on pages 53- 55 of the same book, writes,
“Keep a salesperson around who does well but violates the code of ethics and employees dismiss the ethics code and company officers and managers as hypocrites. Credibility is a key component of an ethical culture, and hypocrisy is its death knell. At one company where I was working on the ethical culture, there was a provision in the code of ethics that prohibited employees from accepting gifts of excessive value. The employees held themselves to a $25 maximum. Imagine the employees’ outrage when they learned that executives at the company took golf packages to Ireland (estimated value of about $15,000 per person) as gifts. Rules without consistent enforcement lead to more violations, dismissal of the rules, and ethical collapse ...In organizations with ethical collapse, everyone sees the issues, but they are afraid to speak up because those who have authority over them and their livelihoods have made their desired outcome, at any cost, known.”

What can one person do?
Ask yourself: Have you, as a tribal council, a Project Director, enforced policies on travel expenses, payroll advances? Have you over-ruled decisions of managers who have upheld policies? We see this in tribal organizations where an employee who has a powerful relative is never laid off or fired despite coming to work hours late each day and missing many days of work. Are you part of the problem?

In an article in Indian Country Today it was mentioned that Navajo Head Start was closed after it was revealed that the program had failed to carry out background checks on staff and a number of felons were employed. Assuming the statements in this article by Beyal and Shirley are true (and we have no reason to doubt them), the problems with Head Start must have been known for years, yet no one made successful efforts to fix these problems. What happened?

''For many years there were indications that the Head Start program was in trouble. Why did it take so long for anything to be done?'' Beyal asked.

Shirley, former tribal councilman representing Chinle and Apache County supervisor, said his administration inherited the longstanding problems of Head Start and the important point is to make sure the problems are not repeated. "