These are my set of six commitments for ethical stakeholder engagement, in the form of a charter.  I invite you to sign it, to share this charter (you can download a copy here), and to encourage colleagues to sign it too.  Please do make your commitment as a comment, below.

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First Commitment: Respect

1. To always respect all of your stakeholders.
2. To seek the insights and knowledge that your stakeholders possess, and to consider it objectively.
3. To assume the best of your stakeholders – in particularly, that they act with positive intentions, even when their choice of behaviours is poor.
4. To allow your stakeholders to make their own decisions, free of any manipulation or coercion.

Second Commitment: Integrity

1. To always act with the utmost integrity.
2. To consider the consequences of your actions and take responsibility for your choices.
3. To be accountable for your actions to your stakeholders.
4. To act in good faith, disdaining to act solely in your own interests and, where they overlap with those of stakeholders, to declare your interests openly.

Third Commitment: Equality

1. To disdain unethical discrimination of all kinds, respecting people for who they are, rather than for the category into which they fall.
2. To offer or withhold no favour that is predicated upon either personal liking or animus.
3. To act in accordance with the basic human rights of each stakeholder.
4. To work towards a fair sharing of gains and losses among stakeholders.

Fourth Commitment: Minimise Harm

1. To always act to safeguard the wider interests of your stakeholder group.
2. To strive to identify unintended consequences of your actions.
3. To balance with care the conflicting interests of different stakeholders, and to be open about the implications of those different interests.
4. To promote informed decision-making and to commit to facilitating the transparent processes and that will support it.

Fifth Commitment: Tell No Lies

1. To always remember that honesty is the only ethical policy.
2. To present the whole truth: bad as well as good, and to tell only the truth.
3. To avoid deliberately exaggerating, diminishing, omitting, or selectively interpreting the evidence.
4. To let your stakeholders know all of the consequences of the choices they might make, including the adverse ones.

Sixth Commitment: Honour the Rules

1. To always act in accordance with laws, regulations and rules that are imposed through due process, whether by nations, states, administrative regions, or the organisations to which you are bound.
2. To respect contractual commitments that you and your stakeholders have made, or that have been made by organisations to which you or your stakeholders are bound.
3. To meet the requirements of all properly appointed people who have been assigned seniority over you by the organisations to which you are bound.
4. To remain mindful that your ethical and moral duties can sometimes transcend points 1, 2 or 3 of the sixth commitment, and that you are, at all times, responsible for your choices.

I freely make these commitments on this day: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . date . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Signed: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .