imagesWhen I started blogging, I made up a list of attributes of leadership that has come to be 84 items long. You may have noticed that I’m working through the list, tackling a different subject every week (plus other stuff from time to time.)

Well I was wanting to comment today on the current political scene in Toronto and checked my list to see if the purpose of my post was going to come up as a future item and lo and behold, much to my surprise, it didn’t.

And what was it I wanted to talk about today? Ethics. I happened to notice that right now, if you live inToronto, you can’t help be inundated by the news about political scandals. In fact for the first time in my memory anyway, there is a major scandal at every level of Government.

The Ford boys are mired in the hash/crack ‘I don’t/didn’t do it’ scandal. The provincial Liberals are trying to extricate themselves from a $1 billion decision to close a few gas plants. And the Federal conservatives are just padding their expense accounts. (I mean, talk about boring. The Conservatives can’t even bother to have a good scandal with sex, drugs, and billions.)

So I wanted to talk this week about ethics and went to my list of topics and found, much to my surprise that ethics wasn’t even on my list of potential leadership qualities. Perhaps this says something about my ethically-challenged self but since I compiled the list from stuff I found on the web it can’t only be my fault.

But this led me to the question. Do you need to be ethical to be a good leader or does it get in the way? Given all the scandals we are seeing nowadays one must wonder whether politics attracts people who aren’t ethical or is it that people lose their ethics by being involved in politics.

Do candidates start out ethical and lose it over time or were they always unethical and it just takes us a while to figure it out?

Does ethics even matter in leadership?