Management, Leadership, and Ethics in Environmental Health

A leader is a _______.

person, animal, or other autonomous entity that:

• Guides the development of a shared vision

• Helps build and negotiate consensus

• Identifies opportunities and priorities

• Builds support among higher-level
  decision-makers

How do you define leadership?

incredibly difficult to define but some define it as

1. Leadership is a process, not a property of a person

2. The process involves a particular form of influence calling motivating

3. The nature of the incentives, extrinsic or intrinsic, is not part of the definition

4. The consequence of the influence is collaboration in pursuit of a common goal

5. The “great things” are in the minds of both leader and followers and are not necessarily viewed as desirable by all other parties.

Types of Leadership Styles

• Transformational

• Transactional

• Laissez-Faire

Tranformation Styles

This style is a transformational process where the leadership process includes a transformative outcome. Common example: education

• Idealized influence, attribute

  • Demonstrates qualities that motivate respect and pride from association

• Idealized influence, behavior

  • Communicates values, purpose, and importance of organization’s mission

• Inspirational motivation

  • Exhibits optimism and excitement about goals and future states

• Intellectual stimulation

  • Examines new perspectives for solving problems and completing tasks

• Individualized consideration

  • Focuses on development and mentoring of followers and attends to their individual needs

Qualities of Transformational Leaders

• Visionary

• Team-centric

• Engaging

• Inspiring

• Inclusive

• Emotionally
  Intelligent

• Collaborative

Transactional Style

This style is similar to a “sale” or exchange. Common example: sports and corporate business

• Contingent Reward

  • Provides rewards for satisfactory performance by followers

• Management by exception, active

  • Attends to followers’ mistakes and failures to meet standards as they occur

• Management by exception, passive

  • Waits until problems become severe before attending to them and intervening (gives them opportunity to fix first)

Qualities of Transactional Leaders

• Focused on short-term goals

• Structured policies and procedures

• Rigidity to rules and “by the book”

• Efficient

• “Left-brained” (analytical)

• Inflexible (or tends to be)

• Opposed to change

Laissez-Faire

This style exhibits frequent absence and lack of involvement during critical junctures.

• delegation/subdivision of leadership among followers → followers make decisions

Qualities of Laissez-Faire Leaders

• Strong delegators

• Trusting in staff leadership

• Gives praise and rewards success

• Constructive criticism

• Allows autonomy in staff

• Sets boundaries, but leads in crisis

There are 3 themes of leadership as it pertains to environmental health:

1. Administrative

2. Scientific

3. Political

Administrative Leadership

Understanding how partner agencies work, their particular sensitivities, how to build consensus, and planning tools.

Example NC DEQ: Imagine there is a CAFO (confined animal feeding operation) lagoon that has breached. What do you do?

• Maybe involve air quality, public affairs, water resources, mitigation services, coastal management (if it involves coastal waters), marine fisheries, and water infrastructure divisions.

• Involve and notify EPA

Scientific Leadership

Ability to make the case for addressing particular problems or issues and what policies are likely to have the best health outcomes.

• ex: Chemical Y → current MCL: 5 mg/L; 20 deaths per 100,000 → issue → scientists do research → shows a 50% reduction in MCL decreases mortality by 80% and is economically viable for industry to adopt → proposed rule change: New MCL: 2.5 mg/L; 4 deaths per 100,000

Political Leadership

Possesses authority, credibility, and decision-making capacity.

Current state of Leadership in EH law

• “Our nation suffers from a shortage of strong national leadership in environmental health.”

• “We lack the information, resources, and leadership we need to protect our families, our friends, and our neighbors.”

• Since then, strives have been made to improve this by launching the National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network

• However, leaders are necessary and needed at all levels of government in EH.

CDC maintains a repository of resources ______.

about essential environmental health services.

• They also provide training in specific topics (the big ones – food, water, vectors, emergency response, etc.); and they used to provide a 1-yr program in leadership seminars and workshops, special projects, and individual study.

• It appears that CDC has merged these resources into their current “essentials in EH” and specific trainings. However, it is important to note that there does not seem to be any sessions specific to only leadership. 

• Perhaps this is a gap, or this information is integrated into specific trainings.

Summary of Leadership

• A leader is an individual or other entity that combines visionary ideas, authority, practical skills, and risk management skills to motivate or influence followers into achieving a specific goal, outcome, or change.

• There are 3 major styles of leadership: transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire.

• Successful leaders in EH exhibit strong leadership qualities in administration, science, and politics to achieve their goals.

Ethics

This is an area of enquiry within “philosophy”, which studies general and fundamental problems, including reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language (Grayling, 1999; Teichmann and Evans, 1999). 

• Philosophy originates from the Ancient Greek φιλοσοφια (philosophia) 🡪 “love of wisdom”

Ethics can be broken down into:

descriptive and normative ethics

Descriptive ethics

Focus on moral views that people have (e.g., the feeling that we ought to protect the environment)

Normative ethics can be _______.

further broken into: value theory, normative theory, and metaethics

Value Theory

• Addresses questions about what is valuable or good (type of normative ethics)

• What is ultimately good or intrinsically good (in it of itself)?

  • Not something that is instrumentally good.

• Let’s explore deeper…

  • Is money good?

  • Not in it of itself, but you can do “good” with it

  • You might buy yourself food with it, but is food good in itself?

  • Some argue not. It is good in that it is giving you something: sating hunger. Is not being hungry good?

  • Perhaps the good is preventing starvation, or other malnutrition diseases (e.g., Kwashiorkor). Thus, food contributes to your health, but is being healthy good?

  • Perhaps, even health is only instrumentally good. Good health may provide you pleasure and that being unhealthy results in suffering. Is pleasure good in itself?

  • Pleasure might well be good in itself; just as suffering might be bad in itself.

  • The ultimate goods are a controversial matter and there is no consensus about whether several of them exist or just one.

Normative Theory

Tells us what is “morally right” or “morally wrong” and why. These are coherent and unified “codes” or “accounts of moral rightness” and they are applied in particular situations to govern actions (type of normative ethics)

• Can be applied in simpler terms (e.g., fishing, golfing, libraries, etc.)

• Ex: Utilitarianism is a classic moral theory that states welfare is the sole ultimate good, which means that we ought to act in ways to maximize welfare. Any action that maximizes welfare is morally right and all other actions are morally wrong.Ex: every tree is good for paper or for homes

• Applied ethics (some examples listed above) but can also be applied to normative reasoning in various fields. For example: how we ought to deal with animals? How we ought to interact with the environment?

Environmental ethics

• Is a branch of applied ethics that studies the relationship of human beings and the environment and how ethics play a role in this.

• An “environmentally ethical” person would probably argue that humans belong within “the environment” and are a part of a society of other living creatures, including plants and animals

Metaethics

• Inquires about the status of moral claims and the possibility of moral knowledge (type of normative ethics)

• It does not recommend ways to act and feel – that would be normative theory

• For example:

  • Do you think that stealing is wrong?

  • If so, metaethics posits questions that encourage you to think “what do I mean by saying that stealing is wrong?”

Ethics at work

• Values and standards are used to guide behavior

• Ethical dilemmas are minimized when workplace policies are clear; however, no workplace is immune.

Characteristics of a Good Code of Ethics

The individual: 

• Complies with agency policies and government law and/or regulations

• Follows organizational and personal values

Examples of Environmental Health Codes of Ethics

• North Carolina State Board of Environmental Health Specialist Examiners regulate REHS in NC and have their own code of ethics.

• National Association of Environmental Professionals also have published a code of ethics.

Example of Ethical Issues in EH Practice

• Consider this: you’re working as a REHS and there is a household with lead concentrations in a private drinking water well above the MCL. There are children living in the household. The parents lack the resources to remediate the lead hazards in the household. However, you as a REHS must enforce child lead poisoning prevention laws. What do you do?

• You should report to your immediate supervisor or the Health Department Program Director, who may work with the ethics advisory committee for advice moving forward.

  • This board consists of management/staff, academic ethicist, pastor, public health lawyer, retired elected official, and a local business person.

Why consider law in ethics training?

These two fields are often related – laws can govern personal ethics (e.g., fear of punishment leading to development of ethical code); or vice versa, ethics can lead to development of laws (e.g., poor environmental conditions leading to creation of the numerous environmental laws discussed this semester)

• Laws may be a useful starting point for consideration of public health action

• Laws may rely on common ethical principles

• Laws and legal advice may provide the framework for decision-making

• Health officials frequently turn to lawyers for advice when an ethical issue arises

Summary

• Ethics is a broad philosophical field of study that includes value theory, normative theory, and metaethics.

• Environmental ethics is an example of applied ethics (a subset of normative ethics) that focuses on the moral relationship of humans to the environment and the nonhuman contents.

• Environmental professionals and REHS follow their own codes of ethics built from environmental ethics.

• Often law and ethics overlap both in theory and in practice and may require consultation of lawyers and other professionals to fulfill day-to-day duties in your careers.