July 2003
Philip Sallee (salleep@isp.state.il.us), a member of the Central Illinois ASPA Chapter, poses a most interesting inquiry:
“I’m working on updating interview questions for individuals seeking employment with my agency. I’d like to add an ethics question. Specifically, I’d like a question without a clear-cut ‘correct’ answer. I don’t want the applicants to think we want a specific answer. The situations presented in your column often don’t have clear-cut answers for public administration professionals, but for an applicant, getting the question from an interviewer, they might appear to. I’m interested in how a potential employee reaches a decision, more so than the decision itself. Can you suggest an appropriate question?”
I shared this request with members of the Ethics Section’s listserv. The responses were most interesting. Here are a few; more will be published in the August column.
Sam Halter (samlh@gte.net), former CAO of Tampa, Florida suggested the following: “Public administrators are frequently confronted with tough ethical issues. Please describe an ethical issue you have had to address in your career and the way you handled it. If confronted with the same issue today, would you handle it in the same way?”
Others recommended that the potential employee be presented with a scenario and then asked how s/he would deal with it. For example, Mary Jane Hirt (mjkh@sgi.net), former city manager of two Pittsburgh communities and currently a member of the faculty at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, suggested this scenario: “You are the assistant manager in a community and have just been informed by a council member that council intended to fire the town manager at the next public meeting. The council member asked whether you are interested in being considered for the manager’s position. What is your response to the council member? Do you warn the manager that s/he is about to be fired?”
More to come . . .