Does being cautious send message you don’t trust people?

Should you worry if your behavior in a new place sends the wrong message?

Once an avid swimmer, it had been many years since a reader we’re calling Sedna had found a regular place to swim. Not long ago, Sedna toured her local YMCA and found that it not only had a swimming pool, but that it also offered classes that fit nicely into her work schedule. The monthly membership fee was also far more affordable than many of the more expensive private gyms Sedna had once considered.

Just before she was to leave to attend her first swimming class at the Y, Sedna remembered that while the Y provided lockers for each of its members to use, she had to bring her own lock if she wanted to secure her clothing and valuables. Sedna meant to purchase a padlock, but simply had not gotten around it and now it was too late to do so before her first class.

Sedna figured she had two choices. She could leave her belongings in the locker without a lock and trust that no one would bother it. Or she could bring a small backpack with her, jam all her stuff into it, and leave it at the side of the pool so it was within eyesight as she swam. “I particularly didn’t want to leave my wallet with credit cards in it unlocked since I’d recently had someone try to use my credit card without my permission,” Sedna wrote.

But Sedna was concerned that bringing her stuff to the side of the pool rather than leave it in a locker would send the message to instructors and other members that she didn’t trust them. “Is it wrong to be extra cautious even if that might send the wrong message?” asked Sedna.

On a practical level, if it’s her credit cards Sedna is only worried about, she might consider taking them out of her wallet and leaving them home while she is at the gym. She already has paid her membership and unless she’s planning to make credit card purchases on her way to and from the gym she really doesn’t need it. It also makes sense not to wear any jewelry she doesn’t intend to wear while swimming. If she takes off a piece of jewelry while changing to swim and it goes missing, she might not know if the jewelry was stolen from her locker or simply misplaced. Again, aside from trying to look spiffy, there’s no real reason to have to wear expensive jewelry to the gym. In other words, until Sedna remembers to get a lock for her locker, she should do what she can to minimize her worry.

The right thing, however, is for Sedna to do what gives her the most comfort. If the gym allows its members to leave backpacks at the side of the pool and on this first outing doing so would ease Sedna’s mind, she should do that. Trying to guess what message that would send to others is just that, a guessing game. Others are just as likely to give it no thought at all. But Sedna does know that doing so would give her comfort, so she should trust her own sense of comfort. And on the way home she should stop at her local hardware store and pick up a lock.

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.

Should you nudge friends to pay up?

How much of a nudge should you be when trying to get reimbursed for a group gift?

A group of friends who have belonged to a book club for more than a decade were overjoyed to learn that one of the club’s members was expecting her first child. As a surprise, the group decided that it would chip in on a group present for their fellow reader.

After a flurry of emails, the group agreed on a present and one of the book club members, a reader we’re calling Paige, agreed to purchase the gift and then get reimbursed from fellow book club members. The idea was to have the gift in time for their next monthly book club meeting at which they could present it to the soon-to-be mother.

Two of the 10 book club members Venmo-ed Paige their share of the gift’s cost right after it was ordered. Once the gift arrived, Paige emailed everyone except for the expectant mother to let them know. In a reply-to-all on her email, another book club member asked how she would like to be repaid. Paige responded that reimbursing her via the Venmo app as a few others had already done would work fine.

Upon receiving the news, one more of the book club members Venmo-ed her share. That meant Paige and three others had paid their share and six more book club members were yet to pony up.

“How much should I nudge them to pay?” asked Paige, acknowledging that they all agreed to share the cost and know that she outlaid the money.

Paige wanted to know if it would be wrong to send an email to all of those who hadn’t paid to tell them they could pay her now or they could give her cash or a check when they passed around a card to sign at their next book club meeting when they planned to present the gift? “Does that send the message that I don’t trust them to repay?” Paige asked.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with Paige sending a reminder to her book club friends. Partly, this will let them know of her plan to circulate a card for them to sign at their next meeting, but it will also provide a nice reminder.

The one risk of the plan to let those who owe money to pay what they owe when the card is circulated is that it could send the message to them to hold off paying their share until then. If Paige is OK with that, then her plan seems sound.

But the right thing would be to send it to everyone in the group (other than the expectant mother) rather than just those who didn’t pay. By doing so, she’d be including them on her plan and by naming them she would also make clear to others that those three had already paid up.

There’s no reason Paige should worry about being left paying for more than her share of the gift, but whenever someone agrees to foot the cost for a group gift for which others could reimburse their share, there’s always a bit of a risk. If Paige clearly presents options for those who have yet to pay, it will serve as a reminder and might provide her some peace of mind.

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.

How smart do you need to sound?

How smart do you need to sound to get what you want?

Almost 15 years ago, I was invited by Bethany College, one of my alma maters, to give a talk in Bethany, West Virginia, to high school students who were finalists for a leadership scholarship. The handful of students had been invited to campus for interviews with faculty to determine who among them would get one of the sizable boosts to their financial aid package.

As the talk was winding down, students asked various questions, most of which were smart but polite. I then asked them if they wanted to know the answers to the questions they would be asked in their interviews. The students and their parents laughed and there was a collective, “yes” and “that would be great” in response. I went on to advise them that in my experience faculty liked to hear themselves talk, so they should do their best to get the faculty talking as much as possible during the interview. The end result if they could get the faculty talking, I told them, was that the faculty would come away thinking the student was very smart because the only thing they heard was themselves talking.

In spite of shifting to emeritus status this past July at the university where I taught for the past 12 years, I still occasionally teach there and elsewhere. At some point in each course, I find the need to reassure students that they do not need to prove to me or anyone else in the course that they are smart by trying to say smart things that may or may not have to do directly with whatever we happen to be covering in class. “Just do good work,” I regularly cajole them. That’s all the proof I or others need about their ability and dedication.

I bring this all up now as some high school students are in the throes of hearing from colleges to which they’ve applied or going through similar interviews that those prospective Bethany College students experienced 15 years ago. Worrying about what acceptance or rejection says about you and your abilities can be harrowing. But these things do not define someone nor their abilities or intelligence.

While it would be nice to believe college acceptances or scholarship decisions were an exact science, they are not. Sure, they are based on academic performance, extracurricular activities, leadership potential and determination of whether a prospective student would be a good fit for what the college offers. But often such decisions come down to how competitive the field of applications is in any given year since there are a limited number of seats available. Trying to sound smarter than you are to get in or get an award rarely is as good an idea as simply presenting yourself and your work as best you can.

Ultimately, the right thing is to just do good work. If a college admissions or a scholarship committee recognizes that, that’s great. If they don’t, it’s as much a reflection on them as it is on the applicant who can then go on to try to do good work someplace else.

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.

 

Should reader worry about spouse snooping?

Is it OK to look at more than you’re asked to when a partner asks for your help?

A few weeks ago, a reader we’re calling Vera was asked to do a favor by her younger sister. Vera’s sister lived across the country and had been experiencing some medical issues. She had received a letter from her physician, which she found confusing. So she asked for Vera’s help interpreting, since Vera, while not a physician, worked in the medical field.

Vera quickly agreed to take a look at the letter to see if she might be able to help. So her sister took a photo of the letter with her cell phone and emailed it as an attachment to Vera. After Vera received the letter, she opened the attachment and then found it difficult to read the letter since the image was blurry.

On past occasions when Vera had a technology challenge, she turned to her spouse for help since he, while not a technology professional, was fairly adept at figuring things out. After trying to enlarge, shrink, crop and do whatever she could think to do with her sister’s letter to make it more readable, she told her spouse about her challenge and asked if he thought he could help make the letter more readable.

He agreed and Vera logged onto her email so he could access the email with the letter attached. In doing so, Vera realized that her spouse could see all of her other emails along with their subject lines in her inbox.

“Should I have asked him not to read the other emails or subjects in my inbox while he was helping me out?” Vera asked. “Or is it safe to assume that everyone knows they shouldn’t do that?”

No, of course, it’s not safe to assume that people won’t snoop around if you give them the opportunity to and ask them not to. Then again, even if you ask them only to look at that one email, it’s still not a given they will limit themselves to doing that.

Would it be nice to believe that you can trust people to only do what you ask them to do without snooping around for more information when it’s right at their fingertips? Yes, but that wasn’t Vera’s question.

If Vera didn’t trust that her spouse would limit himself, then she had options. She could have asked her sister to email a clearer copy of the letter. Or she could have asked her to read her the letter over the phone or share a copy over Zoom or a similar platform.

This doesn’t mean that Vera’s spouse was a snoop. Whether he was depends a lot on the trust the two of them have in one another to do the right thing. If Vera regularly had let her spouse read her email, then he might have no reason to believe he shouldn’t this time. If Vera was concerned that he focus only on her sister’s email, then the right thing would have been to ask him to do so. And once he agreed to try to help, the right thing was for her spouse to honor that request, which, according to Vera, he did.

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.