Do too many signature credentials smack of pretension?

Is it wrong or pretentious to list initials for your credentials in the signatures to your letters, emails or texts?

A reader we’re calling Thoth wrote asking if there was anything wrong with listing acronyms for degrees or licenses earned in your correspondence, particularly if the correspondence is not work-related. My sense from his email was that Thoth found it fine to include such credentials in work-related emails, texts or letters, but that including it in personal correspondence was a bit much.

Most businesses don’t have a policy dictating whether an employee should list their credentials in the signature to their correspondence. At any academic institution where I’ve worked, the decision whether to do so or not has been left up to each individual. Some of my colleagues include credentials (often several), while others like me don’t.

Including credentials for professional correspondence can certainly make sense. It can be a way of establishing credibility with the recipient…if the recipient actually knows what the many acronyms for various degrees and certifications mean. A link to a bio on the company website might be a better way to do this, but there’s nothing wrong with listing your credentials as long as they are accurate.

There’s also nothing wrong with not including every degree and credential you’ve earned in your signature. Presumably, there are stronger ways to exhibit credibility with the recipients of your correspondence. While they might want to work with someone who is well-trained, typically they are more likely to be impressed with the actual work you’ve done rather than the initials you’ve earned along the way.

If you check out sites like Quora and Reddit, there are long discussion threads about whether it is ever OK to list honorary doctoral degrees as a credential. Since these degrees are not earned but are offered as an honor to those an institution has deemed to have done something notable, it can be misleading to use “Dr.” before your name if that doctorate was honorary. The one exception is the institution that awarded you the honorary degree. It very likely will address you as “Dr.” to further signify the honor.

The right thing is for each individual to decide how useful or meaningful it is to include credentials in professional correspondence signatures. Even if some recipients might find it pretentious, it’s up to the individual to make the decision what to include as long as what’s included is accurate and doesn’t run afoul of any company policies.

Personal correspondence signatures are a bit different. It seems a bit over the top to include all of your credentials in the signature to an email you write to your book club or an old friend. The challenge for those using their business email for personal correspondence is that there is often a default signature set up that gets created with each email sent. Still, it might be worth editing the excess from those default signatures, or to consider using a personal email account for personal email.

We can’t always control what others will find pretentious. But the right thing is to try to control that any trappings surrounding the messages we send don’t get in the way of the message we would like to be received.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy, emeritus, at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2024 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Can neighbor dispose of trash next door?

Can you put your trash in a trash can on property not your own?

There are times when the desire to get rid of household trash doesn’t match up to when it is picked up in your neighborhood. And the thought of having that trash in a bin in the house or bagged up in the garage isn’t appealing.

A reader we’re calling Lee found himself in just such a situation. Lee was planning to take a vacation two days before the trash was scheduled to be picked up in his neighborhood. He knows that there is a regulation against putting out his barrels before 5 p.m. the night before trash is to be picked up. But after 5 p.m. the night before pickup he will be away with his family, so he won’t be able to put out the trash cans.

Lee also knows that trash is picked up a couple of days earlier on a street a few blocks away from him. He wants to know if it would be wrong for him to put his trash into a bin someone has pulled to the curb a few blocks over for pickup.

 

I am not a lawyer nor am I steeped in the details of trash regulations where Lee or even where I live. But I do know that in many municipalities, it is illegal for anyone to dump their trash into someone else’s trash receptacle without permission.

Do people engage in such behavior anyway? Yes. Is it OK for them to do so? No. Neither is it OK to drive around looking for a construction site that happens to have a dumpster on it and to toss your trash there without permission. Or to dump it in a receptacle up at the local park.

But is it wrong to put trash in a trash can on property not your own? Most regulations hold that it is wrong only if you don’t have permission from the owner of the receiving bins.

Lee has some options. He can ask a resident on the street with earlier pickup if he could place a bag of trash in one of their cans. That might be something Lee doesn’t want to do if he doesn’t know anyone on that street. Or he can ask a neighbor on his own street if they would be OK with him putting his trash in their bin before he leaves. Or he can ask a neighbor if they’d be willing to pull his trash cans to the curb and return his empty cans to their rightful place once they are empty.

 

If Lee doesn’t want to talk to his neighbors and ask permission or seek their help, then the right thing is to let his trash sit until he returns from vacation. A quick search of government websites around the country suggests that the fines for dumping your trash in someone else’s bins without permission can prove steep enough that an odorous garage is far preferable.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy, emeritus, at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2024 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

 

 

Can ChatGPT get me a job?

Is it wrong to use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to try to land a job?

There is much hand-wringing over how to manage the use of generative AI tools as they become more widely available, often free, and able to do tasks ranging from writing a resume to debugging computer code to completing work and trying to pass it off as something you did on your own without any assistance.

In academic settings, it falls on institutions and instructors to be clear with students what is an acceptable use of AI in the classroom. Instructors would also be wise to give serious thought to how best to use AI as an effective teaching or class management tool. (Good guides are beginning to appear on the latter, with one written by a colleague, Dan Levy, and his co-author, Ángela Pérez Albertos: Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT: A Practical Guide to Creating Better Learning Experiences for Your Students in Less Time.)

While the hand-wringing has intensified, basic generative AI tools have been around for a while. Grammarly, for example, began in 2009, and has helped many writers correct grammar and usage in their writing. Especially when tools like Grammarly explain why it is they are suggesting certain corrections, they can help writers learn to write better.

It was only when you could start telling generative AI tools like ChatGPT to write a whole paper or take on another assignment that the wringing heated up. The resulting paper or assignment may read like a soulless, often error-plagued and clunky mash of words that needs a human touch to make it good, but more often than not it will oblige your request.

It's also true that AI tools can be useful to create or strengthen a resume or a cover letter when in search of a job. But your success at finding a job is lessened if you give over the writing of these solely to the AI tool and don’t spend time making sure the resume is accurate and that the cover letter reflects whatever passion and desire you want to use to convince someone to hire you. An AI tool is not yet capable of capturing the beliefs, knowledge or passion you carry in your head. Even if you do use AI as a starting point, it’s essential to take the time to make sure whatever you plan to send off truly reflects whatever you want to present about yourself in the strongest way possible.

Remember, even if your resume and cover letter help you get an interview for a job, it is you and not a generative AI tool who will be in the room answering the questions during the interview. You cannot and should not expect AI to answer interview questions for you. The right thing is to work on your own resume, write your own cover letter, research as much about the company interviewing you as possible, find out as much as possible about the specific job, and be the most brilliant version of yourself you can be. It wouldn’t hurt to remember to turn your phone off before the interview begins.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy, emeritus, at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2024 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Humor can be a funny thing

What message are companies sending by heralding customers for bad behavior?

Earlier this year, a national mattress company began running television advertisements that featured bad behavior in public being questioned with “How do you sleep at night?” The answer each time by the provocateur is that they sleep just fine on a specific type of mattress they just bought at the national chain of mattress stores.

One mattress ad features a grandson and his Nana as she regales him with stories of how she posts a photo of a much younger woman wearing a bathing suit as her photo on dating apps, claiming that she even has received gift cards from potential suitors in response.

Another mattress ad features a heavily muscled man working out at a gym getting up from the workout bench and offering the sweat-laden bench to a waiting woman without making an effort to towel off the bench.

Still another mattress ad shows a man in an aisle seat taking off his shoes and socks on an airplane and then putting his feet up on the armrest of the woman seated in front of him.

Two sporting game mascots in yet another mattress ad taunt one another at a sporting event but one proceeds to get overly physical and continues to push the other mascot until he falls and his mascot head falls off.

There are more. One involves a woman heckling a grade school basketball player much to the horror of others sitting in the gymnasium stands. She looks particularly happy at her efforts.

Presumably, the advertisements are meant to be amusing. But what’s the joke here? That the mattress chain applauds antisocial behavior as long as the miscreants are loyal customers? Or is the message that sleeping on one of the firm’s mattresses results in being comfortable acting like a jerk in public?

We’ve seen (and called out) companies in the past that have tried to use humor by pointing out customers thinking they are stealing rather than getting a good buy or belittling a family member at a fast-food joint for not being the favorite. But here in these mattress store ads, the humor seems to reside in applauding bad behavior.

Yes, I get it. They are trying to do a play on the well-worn question we ask someone who engages in questionable behavior: “How do you sleep at night?” Is the company trying to suggest that others who engage in bad behavior might toss and turn at night unless they sleep on its mattresses?

There’s long been a simplistic test for ethical behavior that suggests if you can’t sleep at night because of some action you took, that’s an indication you behaved unethically. Variations of this are the mirror test or the front-page-of-the-newspaper test where you ask yourself how you’d feel about looking at each after doing something questionable. These tests are no guarantee of behaving ethically since it’s quite likely that despots and tyrants toss and turn while altruistic philanthropists have the occasional rough night’s sleep.

If the company wanted to send the message that people sleep well at night on mattresses bought from it, then the right thing might be to do that in a way that doesn’t promote acting like a jerk. If the company wants to be funny about it, then perhaps it should hire better writers. Humor can be a funny thing.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy, emeritus, at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2024 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Thank your IT department in advance

Do we owe it to service providers to thank them when they try to help us in the midst of a crisis?

My students sometime rib me about responding to their emails shortly after they arrive, even if their emails arrive in the middle of the night. I joke that my goal is to try to take any excuses away that students might have to not do their work, but the reality is that I respond swiftly so I don’t forget to do so and because I often work quite late at night or obscenely early in the morning.

On July 18, around 3:30 a.m., I was working on slides to use in a talk I was scheduled to give to the members of an incoming class of students in their required summer program. I walked away from the screen for a moment to go downstairs and make a pot of coffee. When I returned, I was greeted by the dreaded BSOD (blue screen of death). I tried rebooting my computer several times with no luck, so I used my phone to send an email to my school’s IT department asking if I could bring the laptop in for a technician to look at after they opened at 7:30 a.m.

With no way to continue working on my presentation and fearing that I may have lost some material I was in the midst of creating, I turned on the television news and discovered that airports throughout the world were facing the same BSOD. It took a while to learn that the problem wasn’t unique to my relatively new computer, but had resulted from a patch that a security software company had introduced and that affected many PCs (not Macs) throughout the country.

Around 7:30 a.m., I received an email from Alex in the IT department letting me know that there wasn’t anything they could do yet, but that they were working to find a fix. Frustration ensued.

Shortly after 11 a.m., Alex emailed me to tell me they had come up with a fix if I could bring in my laptop. When I arrived to the IT help desk Alex saw me, waved me in, pulled a chair up next to his desk, and spent the next three minutes applying the fix. He had me call up some of the files I’d been working on and we discovered that nothing had been lost.

I’d lost about seven hours of time I could have been working, and I had to make an unexpected trip into the office, but when I arrived I was greeted with patience and understanding even though Alex and his team had spent the morning responding to hundreds of people facing the same issue.

Too often, the only time we deal with departments like IT is when we have a problem. Too often, our frustration spills over into impatience with them. It’s rare for us to take a moment to thank them for all they do even when we are not in crisis. I know. It’s their job do so. But it seems the right thing to extend a preemptive thanks from time to time. So this is a thanks to Alex and others in IT who seemingly invisibly keep our stuff operating so we can do our jobs. Perhaps you have an Alex worthy of thanks as well.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy, emeritus, at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2024 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

File bad nail salon experience under lesson learned

Are you responsible if your recommendation to a friend didn’t pan out as you’d hoped?

A reader we’re calling Margarita had a friend and her 8-month-old child visiting for the weekend. The friend commented to Margarita that among other things she really looked forward to indulging herself and getting a pedicure at some point, but that she really didn’t think it was appropriate to bring her child along.

Margarita volunteered to mind her friend’s child while she got a pedicure. It was a summer holiday weekend, so finding an appointment was uncertain, but Margarita called the place she regularly goes to and likes and asked if they could fit her friend in at 11 a.m. on Saturday. The receptionist told her they were fully booked but could try to fit her in at noon. “How about 11:30?” Margarita remembered asking and the receptionist agreed they’d try to fit her friend in.

Margarita wrote that she enjoyed spending time with her friend’s baby and was thrilled she could help her friend do something relaxing for herself. She had always found the people at the nail salon to be patient, thorough and friendly. After the friend returned, however, it became clear that her friend’s experience wasn’t great.

“She said she felt rushed,” wrote Margarita and that overall the experience “wasn’t great.”

Margarita wrote that she felt terrible and responsible for her friend’s bad experience at a place she had recommended. She also wondered if she should say something to the owners of the salon about her friend’s experience.

It’s not Margarita’s fault that her friend’s experience didn’t match Margarita’s expectations. Margarita’s kindness in trying to provide her friend with a relaxing moment isn’t any less kind because the salon didn’t deliver. The kindness stands.

After the receptionist told Margarita they were fully booked but that they would try to fit her friend in, maybe she should have reconsidered. She also might not have pushed to have the appointment a half-hour earlier than when the salon said they could fit the friend in. But the responsibility to do a good job and to let Margarita know if they were so busy they couldn’t accommodate her friend fell on the salon’s managers, not on Margarita. If they knew they couldn’t fit the friend in without rushing her through, the right thing would have been to say no.

While Margarita shouldn’t feel obligated to say something to the salon operator on her next visit about her friend’s experience, there would be nothing wrong with doing so. But it’s unclear what she hopes to accomplish by doing so. Her friend, of course, can leave an online review if she wants to.

The main lesson from the experience for Margarita may be never to recommend trying to make a last-minute appointment during a holiday weekend at the nail salon. But again, the main lesson for the salon operator is not to agree to fit in a customer – even if it’s a friend of one of its regulars – if they can’t deliver on the same quality of service that caused the regular to recommend the salon in the first place.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy, emeritus, at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2024 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Is it OK to pay someone less for parts of the same job?

How consistent should you be in paying someone for help?

A reader from Ohio we’re calling Lira wrote that she and husband sometimes hire teenagers or adults to help them with different projects at their home, which sits on 10 acres. They pay by the hour for an agreed-upon price for projects including weeding, raking, clearing brush, or helping to split and stack wood. Since they heat their home with wood, they are often cutting up fallen trees and using the split and stacked wood during the winter.

Recently, a tornado passed near their town, knocking down several trees on their property, causing them to look for help clearing up the branches and logs. “My husband was really just looking for some local teenager to come help with the grunt work of gathering up the branches and moving them,” wrote Lira. But they spoke with one gentleman who wanted $20 an hour which was more than their budget would allow for gathering branches and logs. They were looking to pay $15 an hour. “Not a big difference, but enough for our budget concerns.”

But the man also told Lira and her husband that he had experience using a chainsaw to cut the downed trees into logs and then splitting them. For splitting and cutting wood, Lira typically budgets $20 an hour because it involves more dangerous work and needs someone with experience who knows how to be careful.

Lira would like to hire the gentleman but wonders if it would be wrong to offer to pay him $15 an hour for the job that requires less experience and knowledge, but then pay that same person $20 an hour for the other job. “This question has been bugging me for a while now,” wrote Lira, who asked for advice.

It seems perfectly reasonable for the gentleman to ask for $20 an hour to do the work. But there would be nothing wrong if Lira asked him if he was willing to do the gathering of branches and logs for $15 an hour with the understanding that he would be paid $20 an hour for chainsaw and splitting work.

Lira needs to be prepared for him to say no to anything less than $20 an hour for any of the work. She then has the option of hiring a second person at a lower rate to do the work requiring less experience and to offer to hire the $20 an hour guy for the more experienced work.

He may or may not agree to the smaller job. If he doesn’t, Lira and her husband will be left trying to find someone else to do everything. As long as Lira is prepared that her offer may be rejected, there is nothing wrong with her presenting it as a possibility.

It's not unreasonable to expect that different kinds of work might be paid at a different rate even if it’s the same person doing it. It’s up to the prospective hire to agree or disagree.

The right thing is for Lira and her husband to be clear with whomever they attempt to hire from the outset about the scope of the work and what they are willing to pay. There is absolutely nothing wrong with asking.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy, emeritus, at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

 (c) 2024 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.