Facets of the code of governance conduct

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THE code of governance conduct for all individuals working in an enterprise would naturally give due importance and emphasis to the delivery of performance and transformative outcomes at work. This has to be highlighted. Governance, after all, is about transformation; it is therefore mainly about the delivery of transformative outcomes, and individuals are clearly expected to add value and contribute to the delivery of such outcomes in the workplace.

However, because integrity — the cornerstone of governance discipline, its principles and best practices — asks for inner consistency between all the different facets of life, and indeed for unity of life, the code of governance conduct also covers those facets of life outside the immediate purview of work duties and responsibilities within the enterprise. What are these facets? Those that relate to an individual’s duties towards one own self; and these include: Physical fitness, educational and cultural broadening, and continuing professional training. Individuals need to be physically fit. They also have to continuously broaden their educational and cultural horizon. Moreover, they have to “keep up with the Joneses” in the sense that they have to keep professionally upgrading themselves through life-long training.

Those that relate to an individual’s duties towards others; and these include those of one’s own family (in a pre-eminent sense); those who are friends (possibly team mates) within the work place; and those who are friends outside of the work place. These different “social circles” demand time, attention, and care; and duties towards them need to be judiciously juggled into one’s personal schedule and set of daily(or at least weekly) priorities.

Those that relate to an individual’s duties towards the outside environment; and these include the economicfinancial facet (and one’s need to manage one’s personal finances as a member of an economic community); the facet of the natural environment (and one’s need to care for and conserve natural resources for future generations); and the facet of the supernatural environment (and one’s duties towards God and the supernatural, moral order).

From the above, it is abundantly clear that an individual’s personal life has multiple dimensions. It has many facets. And the challenge of personal governance, one that is anchored on integrity as its cornerstone, is to make all these different facets to support one another. They need to be unified. They need to be made consistent with one another.

This challenge is far from easy to live up to and meet. There are bound to be conflicts; and over the short term, the game may look as though it were a zero-sum one: Conflicts arise; different duties compete against each another; in some instances, they directly clash against each other.

The challenge — arising from integrity and the discipline of good governance as well as the realities and limits of day-to-day life — has to be met frontally. And here governance provides a useful framework in that it focuses on the longer term. What may appear to be an irreconcilable conflict over the short term may in the end turn out to be mutually reinforcing over the long term: and governance warriors, with a governance character embedded into their personal life, should precisely have the benefit of a code of governance conduct; they should have easy access to guidelines on how such short-term conflicts can be resolved in a manner that over the longer term they become mutually consistent and supportive instead.