Wednesday’s Smart Shibboleths #7: The Platinum Rule: Provide the Help Others Need to Achieve Their Goals and Aspirations

The Platinum Rule is a big step beyond the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule gives you a better today. The Platinum Rule helps you move someone else into their tomorrow. The Ethical and Practical principles I follow support both rules. Share your own version of this approach with others who work with you and people you’d like to work with. Find ways to discuss these ideas, explain them, and ask and answer questions about them. Everyone you care about or those who care about you should be aware of ideas like these. Help them live and learn from their own principles.

The Ethical and Practical Principles That Guide Jim’s Practice

1. Act ethically, promptly, and urgently.

a. Ask better questions than anyone else.
b. Be 15 minutes early.
c. Consistently challenge the standard assumptions and practices of our profession, build its importance, and enhance the ability of all practitioners to better serve others from their perspective. Raise your hand.

2. Do the doable; know the knowable; get the getable; arrange the arrangeable.

a. Expect to be helpful and useful.
b. Focus on what really matters. Apply your ethics audit analysis.
c. Go beyond what those you work with already know or believe.
d. Intend to make a constructive ethical difference every day.

3. Intentionally look at every situation and circumstance from different helpful perspectives

a. Look out for the real victims.
b. Remember, it’s your boss’s “bus.” They get to drive it wherever they want. If you don’t like it, or can’t deal with it, hop off and go to somebody else’s bus, or drive your own.
c. Clarification: Your role on “the bus” is to help the driver drive better. Taking the wheel is out of the question. If you want to take the wheel, get your own bus.

4. Remember that every issue, question, concern or problem is a management or leadership issue, question, concern, or problem before it is any other kind of issue, question, concern or problem. Always start where management and leadership are. Starting somewhere else only leads to trouble, confusion, and failure.

Let’s talk about it. I’m always interested in helping colleagues develop their own personal principles. Reach out to me at 203-948-7029 or jel@e911.com