Imagine yourself in your new job. You’ve used your credit card to buy a new wardrobe and moved to a brand-new apartment, pushing the limits of your budget because it’s so perfect for you. Then your boss asks—or worse, tells—you to do something that violates your sense of right and wrong. Or you find yourself making a choice at work that makes sense at the time, but that somehow you wouldn’t want your family or friends to know about.

For society and our communities to function effectively, we depend on the idea that people should play by the...

You are all ready to go to work. You have filled out all the paper-work, found a place to live, figured out your transportation, gotten a haircut, and bought an extra alarm clock. You feel good to go. But wait: your success will depend not just on what you know, but on things like how you act, what you say, how you say it, and how you treat others. In the face of pressures and temptations, you will encounter situations you have not been taught about and that few people have contemplated—at least before running into them for the...

Developing a professional persona—your public, work-related self—is not something to leave to chance. How you respond to stress, how you manage your time, the priorities you live by, and your reliability, relationships, and commitment (or not) to learning and growth will all get factored into how others view you. Your reputation will be formed by your actions large and small, including your reactions to life’s tribulations and setbacks.

Do you want to be respected as a professional? Watch and take cues from those around you about how the most respected people behave. Your reputation requires maintaining appropriate, civil...

Few people start out consciously planning the wrong act that ultimately brings them down, or expect to get caught and suffer consequences. In my experience, most people, most of the time, want to do a good job. They want their families and colleagues to be proud of them and they want to be proud of themselves. At the same time, I’ve spent many years investigating situations of professionals accused of various violations, which has taught me that things go wrong in predictable patterns, even for good people. Those patterns hold the key to avoiding serious problems and, even more, to...

You don’t just want to ensure that things don’t go wrong. That’s pretty dismal. Both your happiness and success depend on making them go right. Mastering a structured approach to decision making, constructing personal scripts, and using a powerful technique called the And Stance gives you three tools you can rely on for getting things right. If you learn, practice, and make habits of them, you will be able to avert or troubleshoot problem situations, both the predictable ones and the other more troublesome ones.

Have you ever had a great teacher who asked such good questions that you could...

Let’s say you’ve started learning to recognize the signals, thought long and hard about your values and the lessons of misconduct, learned the rules of your organization and profession for ethical practices, considered your professional persona, practiced the And Stance, and developed some great personal scripts. Still, you find yourself facing a problem at work. It happens. Don’t panic. Remember that while you don’t get to change the other people in a situation, you always control what you do, and that how you approach problems will shape their outcomes.

Even more, there’s a systematic procedure—a set of practical rules—...

Traveling the high road means playing a long game, looking at your life over a longer arc than just the part you’re currently inhabiting. It means that you understand that what goes around, comes around (even though it often takes longer than feels just). When you choose the high road, you consider your actions in terms of how each one will accumulate and contribute to or detract from the reputation you hope to hold at the end of your career.

You try to live life consistently according to your values, not just when it’s easy or convenient. You choose people...