Jim’s Wisdom #37: Your Pocket Decency Manifesto

Starting Back Up The Path To Decency: a Manifesto

Why a manifesto?

Seven big reasons:

  1. To anticipate an answer to the most important questions for those interested in building a decency-based workplace culture, before they are asked.
  2. To trigger and answer in advance the crucial questions you need to see, hear, and resolve. They will be about developing decency, civility, and integrity in your workplace.
  3. To anticipate and answer in advance the questions that bother you most about what’s happening in our culture; the decency denial and deficit in America’s workplaces and in your workplace.
  4. To help you bring your personal views of decency, civility, and integrity from your personal life, family community, and home into your working life.
  5. To reveal the many pathways available to decency, civility, integrity, and trust.
  6. Learn to recognize and prevent the victimization indecency and incivility cause.
  7. Recognize and prevent leadership and management misbehaviors that trigger the incivility, and unconscionable behaviors that contaminate decent and civil culture.

The Pocket Decency Manifesto is your daily to-do list to inspire, to motivate, and to stimulate your energy and efforts in building a decency driven workplace. There are critical ingredients here designed to help you protect, defend, and preserve what you and others achieve along the path to a decency driven workplace.

Good luck.

1. The Nine Pillars Of A Decency Driven Workplace 

Candor: truth with an attitude delivered right now.  
Civility: patience, empathy, curiosity, tolerance. Small decencies. 
Ethics: seek ideal conduct, go the right way first, reject all alternatives and wrong ways. 
Humility: being humble; maintain modest opinion of one’s own importance or rank. 
Integrity: honest consideration and inclusion of other points of view. 
Openness: seeking and promptly addressing the concerns of others. 
Responsiveness: do it now, change it now, fix it now, stop it now, start it now. 
Reticence: resist the corrosiveness of negativity, criticism, and arrogance.  
Trust: Seek the absence of fear because fear is the absence of trust. 

2. The Three Most Powerful Civilities 

Listening: the greatest civility we can show another human being. 
Positivity: the only path to a successful future. All other routes lead only to trouble. 
Small Decencies: the principal ingredients of trust, respect, humility, acceptance, and greatness. 

3. The Most Crucial Ingredients Of A Decency Driven Workplace 

Obsession with civility, decency, humility, integrity, modesty, truth, and trust. 
Walk the talk: in every assembly, communication, conversation, document, event, meeting, proposal, and pitch.  
Immerse every idea, suggestion, attitude, and behavior in decency. 
Interpret everything in the context of civility, decency, integrity, trust, and truthfulness. 
Aggressively block, expose, and eliminate all barriers, interference, reluctance, and disparagement of decency, civility, and humility initiatives.  
Shun those who: belittle, demean, deny, denigrate, disparage, or espouse opposition to decency, civility, and truth. Your destiny is up to you to protect, defend, and preserve. 

James E. Lukaszewski

ABC, Fellow IABC, APR, Fellow PRSA, BEPS Emeritus (2015) 

James E. Lukaszewski is a well-known writer, author, teacher, scholar, and lecturer in American Public Relations. 
Mainstreet Village, 7601 Lyndale Ave S, STE 32, Richfield MN 
jel@e911.com 
203-948-7029