The purpose of the Tribal Leaders Institute is to develop and validate a suite of research-based training courses/workshops designed to reduce ethical violations that cost tribal organizations hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
Thus far, two on-line courses have been designed, developed, and piloted. They are titled, Introduction to Ethical Issues on Indian Reservations and Managers and Traditional Native American Values, a course on ethical and effective management. Numerous training materials have been developed including course assignments, Powerpoint presentations, a Tribal Leaders wiki, and podcasts. A community bulletin board has been developed. A listserv receives a monthly newsletter begun in January. Weekly "updates" were begun in August. A project twitter account was begun in July. Two blogs are updated at least weekly. Several activities were identified by participants as having produced desirable outcomes including: blogs, forum posts, class discussions, and the monthly emailed newsletter.
One problem encountered was some users had greater difficulty in navigating the website than others. There was significant diversity in familiarity with instructional technology, with some users having no experience using web browsers. Following laboratory testing with a pilot group, web pages were redesigned to maximize ease of navigation for novice computer users, while being still appropriate for those who are computer proficient.
Both on-line and computer-integrated training have been offered for the introductory course. Computer-integrated training has been offered for the managers' course. Across all sessions, retention has exceeded 95% for the two computer-integrated courses. Retention has not been as high for the online option, approximately 40%, reflecting the experience of other organizations, which show a higher attrition rate in online offerings. Increasing this retention rate will be a focus in year two.
During sessions of the introduction to ethics course, 107 participants completed the assignment, "Name the biggest ethical issues on the reservation today." Respondents, who could give up to five issues, provided a total of 229 responses. Only two of the participants did not answer this question.
<!--[endif]-->
The success stories to date include commercial sales while the product is still in the pilot stage, and significant contracts and endorsements including a Bureau of Indian Affairs line officer, a Head Start program director, a tribal judge, and the numerous individual cases where tribal members' work ethics were changed for the better.
I (Dr. Longie) traveled to Fort Berthold where I did a brief presentation explaining, not only the content of the introductory course, but all the features of my company's website that are used for the course: blogs, forums, library, filing cabinet, and wiki. After the presentation, one Head Start employee approached me and complimented me on my presentation. She was particularly impressed by my solution to stem office gossip. The solution I presented came from my ancestors, the Dakotas.
The Dakotas believed all creatures are equal. Of all these creatures, the Creator gave the power of speech only to us humans. Therefore, we should not commit a sacrilege to this gift the Creator has given us by gossiping about other people.
In contrast, the Head Start employee recalled an earlier training she attended where the presenter told the audience to put a rubber band around their wrist and when they wanted to gossip about someone to use that rubber band to snap themselves. "As if ...," the employee said scornfully, when she finished telling the story.
Dr. DeMars and I are part-time workers on this project. Dr. DeMars holds a teaching position at the University of Southern California. Working on this project has had a profound impact on both of us. I always start my presentations off with this announcement: "We all could learn more about ethical workplace behavior, including me. Every time I present this course, I learn something new about myself. Ethics in the workplace is an ongoing issue. Every day we are faced with decisions that challenge us ethically."
As a result of this project, Dr. DeMars and I have become more outspoken in our immediate communities on the issues of ethical workplace behavior. The evidence of this is in our blogs. Our blogs express our efforts, our frustrations, and our wishes on how to bring more ethical practices into the workplace. The project has met with early commercial success in terms of mandated training for reservation personnel and sales of on-line training while still at the pilot stage. Data collected in the first year has been extremely useful in refinement and further development of our design for the second half of the project.
