Issue43

43."To be an effective leader, a public official must maintain the highest ethical and moral standards."
(455 words)
The debate about what kinds of quality should an effective leader has has lasted for thousands of years. When it comes to the level of ethical and moral standards, there are always a host of different opinions held by different individuals from different areas. Shouldn't, you may wonder, a public official must maintain ethical and moral standards to some sort of extent? Admittedly, most people wound agree. The key question that need us to talk over is what is the degree? Must it be the highest one? My answer is: yes, absolutely.Obviously, people nowadays are more concerned about a publice official's ethical and moral standards. The most effective leaders are those who maximize the public's interests and fulfil the promise, the ones that has been given out to the people from whom he gets his power and receive his fee. Moreover, the prevailing view of an effecive leader in both east or west of the world is to be honest to the public, to tell them what you did and what will you do completely as it concerns with the official business, especially when you are in trouble. As one of the famous philosophers ever writes, "Truth heals." As a public official, no matter how high or how low his position is, no matter how large or how small his responsibility is, an effective leader will always tell his citizens the truth.In the political realm, an official without high ethical and moral standards is doomed to fail to lead the public effectively. The former president of the United States, John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address that: " You can fool some of the people all the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all the time." Those guys who try to hinder something from public, in the worse case, he spells disaster for public and nation. Definitions of successful political leadership and of ethical or moral leadership are tied up in the means a leader uses to wield his power and obtain that power in the first place. Another former president of the United States, Richard Nixon was forced to hand over the complete set of White House tapes, and resigned from office after he was fully aware that the evidence on the tapes implicated him in the cover-up, before the House of Representatives could meet to vote on impeachment.Above all, though an effective public leader takes much more than mere ethics and morality, yet it is impossible to take a leader who lies to the public as "effective". As a result, it is the priority to maintain the highest ethical and moral standards to be an effective leader.