As a communications major at San Francisco State University, an important learning outcome that we are taught is how to be an ethical communicator. Being ethical is pretty much understanding and practicing your morals and values. From a young age we are taught to make ethical decisions, like not calling people bad names or learning the importance of being honest. To communicate ethically means knowing your right from wrong. In every interaction with humans we are using ethics. We make decisions based on knowing what is the right way to respond.

Furthermore, the NCA Credo for Ethical Communication, has developed some standards in regards to being an ethical communicator. While there are multiple principles of ethical communication that the NCA mentions, there are two that blatantly stand out to me as they will relate to an assignment I did that will be mentioned to come. The first one being, “ We advocate sharing information, opinions, and feelings when facing significant choices while also respecting privacy and confidentiality.” This principle is widely used in our working environment. We typically have close work friends but do not necessarily talk to them outside of work. We tell them our problems and secrets because they don’t know the people to judge us. We trust them in the hopes that they will respect the information we are giving them. It is an unspoken understanding that occurs everyday. The second principle I want to briefly speak on is where NCA states, “We strive to understand and respect other communicators before evaluating and responding to their messages.” This one is so incredibly important that it baffles me how much we actually forget to go through this process. What I mean by that is even though we want to be the best communicators we can be sometimes it is hard when we are in a heated moment and act out on emotion. Ten out of ten times acting out on emotion is not going to get us anyways but three steps backwards. However, we always are practicing this principle when working in customer service. When an angry customer/client comes up to us and complains, we are taught to follow a list of criterias on how to handle the situation. We are looking for the best way possible to make sure the customer feels like they are being heard and have a solution. We do this by acknowledging their complaint, relating or agreeing to their complaint and giving them a list of ways we can solve the issue. That example is a clear understanding of what it means to understand and respect communicators before acting out on how we really feel on the inside. We know it is not rational or just so we have to compromise in order to move on.

Communication ethics is relevant to all contexts of communication. For example, if a friend gets a job they were really hoping for, we are not going to ignore them and dismiss that accomplishment; rather yet we are going to congratulate them and ask for more details. Not to say that all the time we make ethical decisions because sometimes we are just unable to. An example of not being able to was one I encountered the other day, I was in a restaurant and noticed these guys making fun of a special needs kid. It breaks my heart to see people do that and as much as I wanted to say something to the rude guys I felt like I couldn't because I was by myself and did not know what these guys were capable of. It was a risk I wasn’t willing to take although I wish I could have been a voice for the special needs kid. We make these decisions everyday and they aren't always easy but without at least having some morals and values we would be disgusting and ruthless human beings. Knowing how to communicate with ethics is extremely important when it comes to the human connection process.

An example of when I applied ethical communication to my own communication skills was in my class of Conflict Resolution. The specific assignment was my final, and my instructions given were to work with our assigned group and come up with a problem that we are able to go through and demonstrate what it would most likely look like to go to a mediation to solve the made up problem. The main goal for having this as our final is that we would exhibit all that we have learned in our Conflict resolution class. This class was based on a great deal of making ethical decisions. As students we learned an extensive amount on how mediators are supposed to act when it comes to making decisions and suggestions no matter the type of situation at hand. Now, going more into depth about this assignment, all six of us were given a specific role to nail in order to show how to be ethical communicators from different points of view. The conflict we chose was described as so “Husband and Wife, Tom and Karen are fighting a lot at home and it is beginning to affect their daughter, Sofia. Tom had an affair months ago that Karen found out about from a neighbor. Karen also had an affair around the same time. They decide on meeting with a third party to work things out as Sofia has suggested they do. Things at home are getting ugly and it is taking a toll on them as a family unit. The mediation ends in the couple deciding to divorice for the sake of their daughter.” I had the role of being the daughter, this role was a key to making this assignment work because I had to propose difficult questions and concerns that my group would have to have a mediation process choosing ethical values and morals to show exactly what should be done. Another concept we made sure to incorporate was to make sure we had set ground rules, the three mediators came up with these “not speaking over each other, having respect for each other, no name calling and being as honest as you can.” These were important to set in the beginning because those were the basic morals we wanted to keep consistent throughout this performance to our peers. We made sure to call them out if during the performance at any time they were broken. Divorce can be a tough situation in general and many aren’t as lucky to have a mediation with their family to work things out correctly. So it was important for us to make sure we demonstrated a great performance on using ethical communication in hopes that if anyone in that class or ourselves has to go through a similar situation in their lives, they will remember and think back on what we did and how we acted to end up with an outcome that worked for the family.

Concisely, not only does communication ethics mean to just be honest and act the right way but how we listen to others creates a mutual understanding, respecting privacy and endorsing freedom of expression. Referring back to the NCA Credo for Ethical Communication, the first principle mentioned can be seen as going to a place to take part in a mediation to help a family. These mediations are a place for expressing your true feelings and know that it will stay between everyone in that room. The second principle mentioned could be seen as this mediation is a place for everyone to be respected and treated equally. Which is a main concept in being an ethical communicator. We are choosing to make decisions that will benefit them and ourselves in the best way by knowing how to work the human connection process to our advantage. We as communications majors are able to understand and do that because of classes like conflict resolution and knowing what it means to be an ethical communicator.








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