These are the three questions I think about a lot, with regard to my professional role as a people manager:

1. Am I here to enrich the lives of others (customers, colleagues, owners) or my own?

2. Are my expectations for my team (starting with myself) going to be high or low?

3. When my team doesn’t meet my expectations (which is bound to happen sometime) am I committed to coaching them, or merely shaming them into compliance with my wishes?

Don’t be fooled, these decisions are all moral in nature. Being a manager is not merely transactional, tactical, or even just strategic. Management is moral. Or I should say, depending on how one answers these questions, management might be moral. In my view, it ought to be.

As managers we are the stewards of whether the talent of the people we manage is wasted or not. And we steward tens of thousands of dollars worth of people’s time, if not more. For that reason, I think management ought to be a moral endeavor where we consider its moral implications.

And it starts with the expectations we set for ourselves and, in turn, others.

I persist, management is moral. We should take it that seriously.