Ethics as a competence: the ongoing challenge of the Project Manager.

Peter, that is a great question, thank you. Please allow me to refelct on that.
A PM can choose to be ethical or not to be ethical. He/she needs to define the values to make choices about behaviors. The Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct defines those values and also defines the aspirational behaviors that will make those values visible to others. So the road map can be pictured as per the following process.
1. Become aware and decide: the sooner you become aware about the importance of Ethics the sooner you start collecting trust and credibility. There is sufficient information, facts, literature, lessons learned and other sources of information that shows the importance of Ethics in Business and personal life. During the last decades, several companies went out of market because of unethical behaviors. Become aware of the need to develop leadership skills and competence, which are sustained upon trust and credibility. And as said above, trust and credibility are gained when you show honesty, responsibility, respect and fairness. Become aware that without leadership you will not be able to create and sustain high performance teams and your possibilities to achieve project success will be threatened.
2. Become passionate about Ethics: the best way to continue is to become passionate about Ethics. Create an internal desire to understand what Ethics is really about and the “Why” and the WIIFM-What is in it for me”. That desire should bring a sense of passion for Ethics into all your decisions. In other words, you must want to develop ethical behaviors.
3. Learn about Ethics: once you make a decision and you are passionate about Ethics, you will be ready to start learning. There are several ways to learn about Ethics. PMI offers a very handy set of tools to obtain the knowledge and you can read, discuss, expose, learn and experience as much as possible. Share with colleagues the new knowledge and learn form their experiences and lessons learned.
4. Practice-practice-practice: the only way to increase your expertise on a new set of behaviors, is to practice and experience the use of the new tools to gain trust, credibility and leadership. It might be useful to use the Demin cycle (Plan – Do – Act - Evaluate) to move yourself into a continuous improvement path, learning from errors and reinforcing the behaviors that help you to create positive results. Practicing and validating with others their perception will help you increase the expertise to show the new behaviors.

Hence the firts thing is to make the decission to adquire the values and then to show the behaviors aligned with the values (walk the talk). You can even build an Individual Development Plan !!!

Hers's the rub. Values are subjective. What carries the day - your values as established by careful consideration? Your boss's values based on his/her personal considerations? Corporate values based on compromise and consensus? Or, society values based on historical evolution, political expedience, religious leanings, propaganda?

Are you "ethical" if you behave in compliance with your values that differ from others? If society supports slavery, as it did in the Americas not that long ago, is it ethical to own slaves? If society accepts abortion is it ethical to participate?

Some will argue that "values" need a consensus, others that "values" are very personal.

We have had issues here in Canada with failures of corporations to meet "Canadian values" (ethical lapses) while operating in foreign lands - specifically related to bribery. However these actions (bribery) is a common practice in these foreign lands (not outside their value envelop). Is it appropriate to enforce ones values on another or is that in itself "unethical"?

All I'm saying is that "values" and "ethics" is not a simple issue. As the mas says - its complicated!

Ethical behavior can be defined as "doing the right thing without a requirement to do so". That is "doing the right thing because its the right thing to do".

When you start putting written Code of Ethics into place, especially with penalties or punishment, compliance is no longer ethical behavior but an avoidance of consequences.

A Code of Ethics is a recognition that people cannot be trusted to do the right thing for ethical reasons - possible because they don't know what's right or they do not chose to do what's right.

I do not believe we should equate ethical behavior with Codes of Ethics.

So well put Enrique! There are many integrated elements of performing ethically.