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abstract Klaus af Ursin

Learning Professional Ethics as a Part of Personal Mastery
Case of Management Consulting

Klaus af Ursin
Management consultant

Professional growth consists of different elements. The purpose of professional ideology is to support individuals in this growth. Professional ideology determines the basic assumptions regarding the profession, i.a. the relations between its members and clients. Important roles in this ideology are played by the stated demands of personal responsibility that are often declared in professional codes of conduct. Every profession monopolises the essential information used and needed in client contacts. This is why professional ethics always deals among others with confidential information.

Personal professional mastery develops by learning throughout one’s career. Ethics creates an important learning subject that tends to come up yet only every now and then, in dilemmatic situations and crises. Part of these situations can be solved, by making a choice between alternative acts (ethical conflict), whereas in many situations one does not find a satisfying act (ethical dilemma). In these cases the ethical solution takes a form of discoursive episode in a respective arena rather than a choice between alternative acts. This is why professional ethics is quite difficult to be learned by general principles; one needs cases, stories, examples, and – above all – personal experience. As far as ethics is concerned, particular cases are always more relevant than general principles (Aristotle).

A human being makes a choice between good and bad. This is called moral phenomenon, or moral life. Because moral as such is a deep and unique personal phenomenon, learning ethics is always a subjective journey (or “crusade”) towards better fulfilment of self. Talking about learning, this makes a difference between ethics and other relevant professional subjects. A reflective professional practitioner needs to be sensitive for learning ethics. This is done via 1) studying and paying attention to professional ideology by following professional discussion, 2) being conscious of the respective professional problem-solving process and it’s contingencies, 3) recognising the explicit demands in the relevant professional arenas, and 4) living deliberately a “professional moral life” that gives a brave, personal, and historically oriented basis for making ethical choices or innovations in a particular dilemmatic situation. This kind of inner life is particularly important for the members of the “free professions”, where the individual discretion is wide. In other professions there are more limitations to the individual freedom. In management consulting, these limitations are typically connected to the conditions of each commission. Hence, in this profession, agreement between a client and a consultant plays always a constitutive role in ethically consistent professional practice.