The Decency Code

The essential guide to creating an honest, ethical workplace culture in any industry


In The Manager’s Book of Decencies, Stephen Harrison showed how even the smallest gestures can produce big results and change the culture of an entire workforce. Now the author of that prescient bestseller has teamed up with Jim Lukaszewski, America’s Crisis Guru® to write the definitive guide to transforming or restoring your workplace into a showplace of honest, ethical behavior.


Accountability, civility, compassion, empathy, honesty, humility, and principle: these are the seven characteristics embodied by every truly decent leader. The best organizations develop and maintain a civil culture, valuing ethical behavior, honesty, and integrity as much, or even more, than profitability.


The Decency Code provides you with practical pathways to creating or restoring that type of culture. These strategies address the evolving workplace: flexible, fast-moving, delayered, virtual, unstable, out-of-balance, ambiguous, global, diverse, and ruthlessly competitive. Here are actionable tools and strategies to help you build your workplace on a new standard of honest, ethical behavior, along with informative case studies that examine the behavior of both ethical and unethical companies.


Today’s climate of corporate cultural disorder needs a new type of leader, men and women who replace confusion with order, opaqueness with clarity, complexity with simplicity, hopelessness with confidence, greed with selflessness, and suspicion with trust. The common-sense prescriptions offered in The Decency Code can help you become the type of leader you wish to be-and effect the change you wish to see. This book is required reading for ethically conscious managers everywhere.