Should reader accept credit for something she didn't do?

If offered credit for something you could have done, might have wanted to do, and would have benefited from, but that you didn’t do, should you take the credit? Does it matter that no one is likely to find out if you actually deserved that credit or not?

A reader we’re calling Minerva had taken an online course recently to keep up with the continuing education credits she needed to retain her professional license. Aside from learning what she was there to learn, one of the perks of taking the course was an offer from the course organizers of free attendance at an upcoming online course on a similar topic.

Minerva already had a commitment at the time the free course was to be offered, so she knew she would not be able to avail herself of the offer. Nevertheless, shortly after the free online course occurred, Minerva received an email confirming her attendance and informing her that as soon as she completed the evaluation for the course she would receive a certificate of completion and continuing education credits for the course.

“I could use the credits,” wrote Minerva. “But this doesn’t seem right.”

Minerva is correct. It is not OK to take credit for something you didn’t do. If the goal of the courses she takes are to add to her professional acumen, claiming credit could also result in misrepresenting herself to her clients or employers.

That no one would find out makes no difference. Fear of potentially having the course offerer later figure out the mistake that was made shouldn’t be the reason not to accept the unearned credit. It’s wrong to claim credit you didn’t earn regardless of who knows and whether or not you might be found out.

If Minerva did decide to accept the credit, she’d be compounding the lie by filling out an evaluation for a course she never took in order to get the credits. More lies told to protect the initial lie of claiming credit. But then it’s often the case the first lie is not the most challenging one to uphold. Instead it’s the subsequent lies told to cover for the initial lie, which might have seemed easy enough to commit at the time. When it comes to doing the right thing when faced with a circumstance like Minerva faced, a good rule of thumb is: Just don’t lie.

In this case, however, I would urge Minerva to go further than simply not accepting the credit for a course not taken. I’d encourage her to respond to the email by informing the course offerer of the mistake. If it was a one-off and Minerva was the only non-attendee made such an offer, there’s no harm if she refuses the credit. If the offer went out to many more non-attendees, the course offerer has the responsibility to correct its mistake and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

I suspect Minerva knew the right thing to do before writing me and was simply looking for confirmation. If her question can help others to veer toward doing the right thing and course offerer to fixing whatever went awry, all the better.

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 and director of the communications program 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) 2023 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

If I don't like my boss, should I flee?

If I don’t like my boss, is it wrong not to quit?

In the wake of a record number of people quitting their jobs in 2022, it seems a reasonable questionable to ask. Could the roughly 50.5 million people who left their jobs in 2022, surpassing the previous record of 47.8 million people who left their jobs in 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, be partly accounted for by those who had simply had it with working for a jerk?

With the unemployment rate hovering around 3.4%, the lowest in more than 50 years, perhaps employees are quitting because they are confident in finding a new job. It is conceivable that some employees who were willing to put up with an annoying boss when there were few other options available are now more willing to seek opportunities elsewhere than they would have been in January 2009, when the unemployment rate clocked in at 7.8%, more than double the current rate.

But these statistics don’t answer the question of whether it’s wrong to stay in a job where you are working for a boss you don’t like.

To answer that question, you’d have to determine just how much disliking your boss gets in the way of liking your job. It also depends on why you don’t like your boss.

Simply not liking your boss doesn’t strike me as reason enough to bolt, particularly if your able to do good work you enjoy doing. Because many people spend more of their week in the workplace than anyone else, it would be nice and perhaps more productive to be surrounded by people they like.

But there are times when each of us works for or with people who do something we simply don’t like. The boss may, for example, not offer enough praise to make an employee feel as valued as they want to feel. Even that guy in the shipping room who doesn’t always alert us about a package arrival as promptly as we’d like might regularly annoy us. Is it wrong to stay in the job because we find these and other behaviors annoying? No.

Of course, no one should have to work for a boss who is abusive and makes unreasonable demands of his, her or their employees. If the boss’ behavior gets in the way of being able to do your job that too seems a good reason to leave if options are available.

But it’s hard to make the case that we have an ethical responsibility to leave a job because we simply don’t like the boss. That’s particularly true if we respect certain aspects of the way the boss runs the company and treats employees and don’t like those one or two things they do that makes us believe how nice it would be if the boss would just disappear.

Ultimately, the right thing to do if you don’t like your boss is not to flee the premises in search of new opportunities – although that’s sometimes an option – but instead to ask ourselves just how much whatever we don’t like about the boss affects whether we can do the work we’d like to do on this job.

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 and director of the communications program 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) 2023 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Gratitude after a terrible week

 “I had a terrible week,” an associate wrote me late last week explaining why some commitment would take a little longer to deliver. While my initial impulse may have been to respond by describing my own week, I simply expressed sympathy for whatever she had faced and asked if the commitment was still possible and if so by what revised date.

Rarely do we know what others are going through — what challenges they face, what mishaps they encounter, what hardships they endure, what tragedies fall in their paths. But I’ve long ago come to the realization that it’s not a competition. One person’s “terrible” is not diminished by another person’s worst week ever.

But I will share some of my week with you. There was the frozen cold water pipe leading to the kitchen sink during subzero temperatures in Boston that resulted in a half-hour perched in the basement on top of a plastic garden tool case so I can reach the pipe and heat it up with an electric heat gun trying very hard not to burn the house down. There was the moment when I check the Nest thermostat app on my phone to see if heat was still on in the house and getting a message that left me wondering if the heat was off or if Wi-Fi was out. (It was the Wi-Fi. The heat was fine.) There was the navigation system in the car turning off with the message that the temperature was too cold for it to operate, leaving me to wonder if I had the same option.

And there were the moments I worried as much as I’ve ever been worried about anything whether my son would survive the heart attack he suffered and come off the ventilator he’d been on for a day-and-a-half that felt more like weeks. Because of the heroic efforts of my daughter-in-law closely following the 911 operator’s instructions about chest compressions, my youngest granddaughter directing the ambulance driver to the correct house, speedy work by the EMTs, the wisdom of the cardiologists, the kindness and attention of ICU nurses, and the throngs of support from friends and family, my son is now home and on the mend.

For all that, I along with many others whose lives he continues to touch, I am grateful. Gratitude strikes me as the right thing to hold in this moment.

He has no memory of this, but when he first regained consciousness after coming off the ventilator, I mentioned to him that I had given his youngest daughter some of his favorite poems to read to him as he recovered, including Seamus Heaney’s “Digging.” Almost before I got the title out, he said, “Between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests; snug as a gun,” the first lines of the poem. My eyes welled up.

In Oliver Sacks' 2015 book “Gratitude,” which was released shortly after his death and that he had written knowing he was dying, he writes: “I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.”

I had a terrible week last week. Yours may have had moments of terribleness as well. But especially given how things turned out, my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.

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 and director of the communications program 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) 2023 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.