Given how much time people spend at work, it's no wonder that workplace romances erupt on a regular basis. The challenge for anyone trying to maintain a relationship with a co-worker, however, is how to do so without letting it interfere with either employee's work.
With the real or perceived fear of sexual-harassment lawsuits, you'd think that most companies would have thought through how to handle workplace relationships. They haven't. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, 72 percent of the companies surveyed in its most recent annual poll on workplace romance had no policy covering such relationships.
At most companies, in short, employees are on their own when it comes to navigating the often-choppy waters of romance with a co-worker.
When a manager dates a subordinate, the situation is even more complicated -- complicated enough that it's reasonable to wonder if it's ever OK to date someone when you have power over that person's job security.
A reader from Manhattan writes to tell me that she is romantically involved with her boss -- who, of course, is the one who praises her to upper management and will be recommending her for promotion.
She's confident that she deserves such praise and support, being "smart, capable, competent, responsible and inherently good at what I do," but she wonders how her relationship with her superior redefines her role in the workplace. Since the relationship began, she says, they are more prone to argument and spend more time together, both at and outside of their workplace.
Her company has no written policy against relationships, but nevertheless she's worried about crossing those ethical boundaries at work.
"How can you ever recover," she asks, "once you've headed down that road?"
Except in unusual circumstances, company executives have no business telling people with whom they should or shouldn't fall in love. But I do believe that they have a responsibility to make sure that romances between employees don't have an adverse affect on the company or on its other employees. If there's a relationship between a manager and a subordinate, it's critical for someone else at the company to be informed of that fact, to make sure that the relationship is consensual and that the manager isn't using his or her position inappropriately.
The right thing to do, in short, is for anyone involved in such a relationship to make it known, at least to some extent. So long as only the participants know of the relationship, the possibility for inappropriate effects is always present.
In this case, the couple should have talked to someone at the company about their relationship before it went very far. Since her manager has power over her career, it was his responsibility to talk to his manager or to someone in human resources. In a perfect world they would have received good advice on how to proceed, and in particular how to keep their private lives separate from the company's business. One possible result, for example, might have been my reader's being reassigned to a different manager.
But this isn't a perfect world. As it happens, the manager also has a live-in girlfriend who doesn't know about the affair. He has no plans to leave his girlfriend -- though he assures my reader that she is the only one with whom he is cheating on his partner -- so, under the circumstances, he's unwilling to disclose their relationship to any third party.
The circumstances make clear that the manager is an unethical manipulator who can't be expected to do the right thing. That leaves it up to my reader, who should see his inability to respond appropriately to this question as a warning flare signaling her to detour off this particular road as quickly as possible.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
SOUND OFF: BOSS'S BONUS MISTAKE
All the readers who responded said that they would let their bosses know if they received a larger bonus than they'd been led to believe they'd be getting.
"The resolution is identical whether the bonus is too big or too small," writes Mary Jan Rosenak of Madison, Wisc. "You thank your boss for the generous bonus, even better than you expected. You thank your boss for the generous bonus, but less than you expected."
Another reader who asked not to be named would e-mail the boss to thank him for the bonus. As a result, she writes, it's much more likely that he'd reply by saying "I'm glad I could reward you even more than originally promised. Keep up the good work."
Without question you should tell your boss what happened, writes Jan Bohren of Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.
"Three things are possible," he continues. "Your boss decided to increase your bonus and neglected to tell you. A mistake has been made. This is a test."
Regardless of the reason, Bohren writes, the right thing is to let the boss know.
Check out other opinions or post your own by clicking on "post a comment" or "comments" below.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business" (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of http://www.jeffreyseglin.com, a Web log focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," New York Times Syndicate, 609 Greenwich St., 6th floor, New York, N.Y. 10014-3610.
"The resolution is identical whether the bonus is too big or too small," writes Mary Jan Rosenak of Madison, Wisc. "You thank your boss for the generous bonus, even better than you expected. You thank your boss for the generous bonus, but less than you expected."
Another reader who asked not to be named would e-mail the boss to thank him for the bonus. As a result, she writes, it's much more likely that he'd reply by saying "I'm glad I could reward you even more than originally promised. Keep up the good work."
Without question you should tell your boss what happened, writes Jan Bohren of Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.
"Three things are possible," he continues. "Your boss decided to increase your bonus and neglected to tell you. A mistake has been made. This is a test."
Regardless of the reason, Bohren writes, the right thing is to let the boss know.
Check out other opinions or post your own by clicking on "post a comment" or "comments" below.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business" (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of http://www.jeffreyseglin.com, a Web log focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," New York Times Syndicate, 609 Greenwich St., 6th floor, New York, N.Y. 10014-3610.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Just Saying No to Gifts From Drug Makers
In August 2002, I wrote a Right Thing column for the Sunday New York Times about doctors taking gifts from drug manufacturers in spite of American Medical Association guidelines (AMA (Gifts to Phys CME) Ethical opinions and guidelines) that prohibited the practice.
In an article released today by The New England Journal of Medicine (Physician–Industry Relationships ), it looks as if things haven't changed all that much. In a national survey of 3,167 physicians, the authors report that 94 percent reported receiving gifts of some kind.
You can read The New England Journal of Medicine article at Physician–Industry Relationships .
You can purchase my August 2002 article from The New York Times archives at THE RIGHT THING; Just Saying No to Gifts From Drug Makers. (If you are a college student or professor with an .edu address, you should be able to access this as well as other Times-Select articles for free.)
Joe Fahy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote about the NEJM findings this morning at Most doctors still take gifts from drug, device firms. And Denise Gellene wrote about it in the Los Angeles Times at Doctor freebies common, study says.
In an article released today by The New England Journal of Medicine (Physician–Industry Relationships ), it looks as if things haven't changed all that much. In a national survey of 3,167 physicians, the authors report that 94 percent reported receiving gifts of some kind.
- 83% received food in the workplace
- 78% received drug samples
- 35% received reimbursement for costs associated with professional meetings or continuing medical education
- 28% received payments for consulting, giving lectures, or enrolling patients in trials
- 7% received tickets to cultural or sporting events
You can read The New England Journal of Medicine article at Physician–Industry Relationships .
You can purchase my August 2002 article from The New York Times archives at THE RIGHT THING; Just Saying No to Gifts From Drug Makers. (If you are a college student or professor with an .edu address, you should be able to access this as well as other Times-Select articles for free.)
Joe Fahy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote about the NEJM findings this morning at Most doctors still take gifts from drug, device firms. And Denise Gellene wrote about it in the Los Angeles Times at Doctor freebies common, study says.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Ethics in America II
In the late 1980s, PBS aired a series called Ethics in America that was developed by Fred Friendly (www.fredfriendly.org). It is a 10-part series that looked at ethics in the media, government, medicine, law, business, military, and other aspects of life. It drew together distinguished panelists who were asked to respond to hypothetical cases posed to them throughout the series. After Fred Friendly's death in 1998, his company, Fred Friendly Seminars continued to produce programming.
Last year, Fred Friendly Seminars began production of an Ethics in America II series. The series is complete and will air later this year on PBS. In the meantime, you can view the various segments for free at http://www.learner.org/series/ethics2. That site also has links to pdfs of discussion guides and an online source reader.
The business ethics show, “Risk, Reward, and Responsibility: Ethics in Business,” is at http://www.learner.org/series/ethics2/risk_reward/.
Last year, Fred Friendly Seminars began production of an Ethics in America II series. The series is complete and will air later this year on PBS. In the meantime, you can view the various segments for free at http://www.learner.org/series/ethics2. That site also has links to pdfs of discussion guides and an online source reader.
The business ethics show, “Risk, Reward, and Responsibility: Ethics in Business,” is at http://www.learner.org/series/ethics2/risk_reward/.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
SOUND OFF: A SLICE OF LIFE
I've received several comments about a television commercial for Pizza Hut that offers three pizzas for $5 each. Here's how it goes: A delivery boy comes to a door to deliver the pizza, and a young man answers.
"That's only 5 bucks each, right?" he asks.
"Yes sir," the delivery boy answers.
The man runs inside and shouts. "Oh yeah! Honey, the Pizza Hut kid made the same mistake again! I got three medium Pizza Hut pizzas for the same price as those other guys!"
A reader in Laguna, Calif., writes that it makes her blood boil every time she sees this ad.
"He is so happy about the `mistake,"' she writes, "and is perfectly willing to let the pizza deliverer make up any difference."
My reader wants to know if she's being too picky. Is it OK that the man rejoices at the expense of the delivery boy? Is it OK for the advertiser to send the message that taking advantage of low-paid delivery boys should be celebrated? Or is it nothing more than a funny ad?
Send your thoughts to rightthing@nytimes.com or post them here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, your hometown as well as where you read the Sound Off question. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column.
You can watch the commercial at Pizza Hut Commercial "Mistake" 3 for $5 with Erich Bergen.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business" (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of http://www.jeffreyseglin.com, a Web log focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," New York Times Syndicate, 609 Greenwich St., 6th floor, New York, N.Y. 10014-3610.
"That's only 5 bucks each, right?" he asks.
"Yes sir," the delivery boy answers.
The man runs inside and shouts. "Oh yeah! Honey, the Pizza Hut kid made the same mistake again! I got three medium Pizza Hut pizzas for the same price as those other guys!"
A reader in Laguna, Calif., writes that it makes her blood boil every time she sees this ad.
"He is so happy about the `mistake,"' she writes, "and is perfectly willing to let the pizza deliverer make up any difference."
My reader wants to know if she's being too picky. Is it OK that the man rejoices at the expense of the delivery boy? Is it OK for the advertiser to send the message that taking advantage of low-paid delivery boys should be celebrated? Or is it nothing more than a funny ad?
Send your thoughts to rightthing@nytimes.com or post them here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, your hometown as well as where you read the Sound Off question. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column.
You can watch the commercial at Pizza Hut Commercial "Mistake" 3 for $5 with Erich Bergen.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business" (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of http://www.jeffreyseglin.com, a Web log focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," New York Times Syndicate, 609 Greenwich St., 6th floor, New York, N.Y. 10014-3610.
THE BOTTOMLESS LIST
You work for the training-and-development department of a midsized company in the Midwest. You're not crazy about a particular vendor's software product that you use to help manage your company's training procedures.
Then one day you get an e-mail from a survey company, asking you to complete a confidential online satisfaction survey about your vendor's software product. You're told that customers of your vendor's competitors are being surveyed as well, and that a list of customer-satisfaction rankings will be published.
Bingo! Payback time! Now you can let your honest reactions surge forth. Your bosses will see how poorly your current vendor's product stacks up against the other software on the market and, quicker than you can say "flush my cache," they'll be dumping the old vendor.
That's exactly what happened to my reader C.P. The trouble was, her bosses never got to see how poorly their current software vendor did because, when the results were published a few months later, that vendor didn't show up in the rankings.
C.P. called the survey company to find out what was going on. The company told her that the vendor in question had chosen not to participate after seeing the survey results -- in other words, C.P. surmises, her vendor didn't want to see its name at the bottom of the published list.
"How valid is a survey if those ranked at the bottom can choose to bail out?" C.P. asks. "How fair is it to the vendor's customers, who took the time to respond, to not see the final results?"
Part of C.P.'s anger stems from righteous indignation at being misled into seeing this survey as an opportunity to prove to others -- and particularly to her bosses -- that her company's current software vendor isn't cutting it. And of course the survey company isn't in business to give C.P. and, presumably, other dissatisfied customers ammunition for their dissatisfaction, and is under no legal obligation to publish the full results.
Nonetheless, I understand C.P.'s resentment. Allowing poorly ranked companies to remove themselves from the published list may not affect the validity of the results that are published, since the companies who fared better did so by pleasing customers who responded to the survey. But dropping the names of companies that didn't perform well suggests that this survey will never be exhaustive enough to be truly useful for customers looking to compare software vendors. If the survey company allows drop-outs, after all, why would any company that didn't finish at the top in the rankings allow itself to appear in print?
Such limited surveys may well be useful to some companies, such as those that end up at the top of the list and want to use those findings to promote themselves. However, it's not fair for the survey company to give respondents the impression that they're participating in one type of survey when in fact they're participating in another. People put their time into responding out of certain expectations, and might not want to participate if their expectations were different.
The right thing for the survey company to do, in order to be fair to all involved, is to prominently place clear and detailed information about who is paying for the survey, whether and when companies have the ability to opt out, and exactly what information the survey taker will be able to see.
But that's not what happened. C.P. was misled into believing that, if she took the time to fill out the survey, the results would be tabulated and her vendor would be ranked against its competitors. Her assumption was a reasonable one, and it was up to the survey company to make clear what was actually going on.
The fault here does not lie in the published list of rankings, though its usefulness is at best suspect. So long as the numbers presented are correct, the list as a whole is incomplete but not unrepresentative.
The fault lies in the survey company's having taken advantage of C.P. and her dissatisfaction with her vendor to involve her in a survey which, as matters turned out, was useless for her purposes. She's right to be annoyed.
Then one day you get an e-mail from a survey company, asking you to complete a confidential online satisfaction survey about your vendor's software product. You're told that customers of your vendor's competitors are being surveyed as well, and that a list of customer-satisfaction rankings will be published.
Bingo! Payback time! Now you can let your honest reactions surge forth. Your bosses will see how poorly your current vendor's product stacks up against the other software on the market and, quicker than you can say "flush my cache," they'll be dumping the old vendor.
That's exactly what happened to my reader C.P. The trouble was, her bosses never got to see how poorly their current software vendor did because, when the results were published a few months later, that vendor didn't show up in the rankings.
C.P. called the survey company to find out what was going on. The company told her that the vendor in question had chosen not to participate after seeing the survey results -- in other words, C.P. surmises, her vendor didn't want to see its name at the bottom of the published list.
"How valid is a survey if those ranked at the bottom can choose to bail out?" C.P. asks. "How fair is it to the vendor's customers, who took the time to respond, to not see the final results?"
Part of C.P.'s anger stems from righteous indignation at being misled into seeing this survey as an opportunity to prove to others -- and particularly to her bosses -- that her company's current software vendor isn't cutting it. And of course the survey company isn't in business to give C.P. and, presumably, other dissatisfied customers ammunition for their dissatisfaction, and is under no legal obligation to publish the full results.
Nonetheless, I understand C.P.'s resentment. Allowing poorly ranked companies to remove themselves from the published list may not affect the validity of the results that are published, since the companies who fared better did so by pleasing customers who responded to the survey. But dropping the names of companies that didn't perform well suggests that this survey will never be exhaustive enough to be truly useful for customers looking to compare software vendors. If the survey company allows drop-outs, after all, why would any company that didn't finish at the top in the rankings allow itself to appear in print?
Such limited surveys may well be useful to some companies, such as those that end up at the top of the list and want to use those findings to promote themselves. However, it's not fair for the survey company to give respondents the impression that they're participating in one type of survey when in fact they're participating in another. People put their time into responding out of certain expectations, and might not want to participate if their expectations were different.
The right thing for the survey company to do, in order to be fair to all involved, is to prominently place clear and detailed information about who is paying for the survey, whether and when companies have the ability to opt out, and exactly what information the survey taker will be able to see.
But that's not what happened. C.P. was misled into believing that, if she took the time to fill out the survey, the results would be tabulated and her vendor would be ranked against its competitors. Her assumption was a reasonable one, and it was up to the survey company to make clear what was actually going on.
The fault here does not lie in the published list of rankings, though its usefulness is at best suspect. So long as the numbers presented are correct, the list as a whole is incomplete but not unrepresentative.
The fault lies in the survey company's having taken advantage of C.P. and her dissatisfaction with her vendor to involve her in a survey which, as matters turned out, was useless for her purposes. She's right to be annoyed.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
TWO FOR THE PRICE OF TWO?
Sometimes a single ill-considered decision can turn a minor problem into a major one.
B.M., a reader from Columbus, Ohio, learned that fact firsthand after she bought a modestly priced MP3 player as a Christmas gift for her daughter. A month or so later, the device stopped working. B.M. contacted both the store and the manufacturer, and was told that the player would be replaced if she brought it in with the original receipt.
Problem: "Try as I did," she writes, "I was unable to locate the original receipt."
Here's where things began to get complicated. Since she couldn't find the receipt for her MP3 player, which she had purchased with a bank debit card, B.M. decided to purchase a new MP3 player from the same store. She then returned the broken player with the new receipt, and received a working replacement. She now has two working MP3 players, both of which she has paid for, so she thought the outcome was a fair one.
B.M.'s 16-year-old daughter is not so sure that her mother's strategy was ethical, however.
"Because I am trying very hard to raise my children with a sense of ethics," B.M. writes, "I would appreciate your opinion, since I have begun to doubt my own judgment in this matter."
B.M. may have been motivated by a sense of justice, but using the receipt for one piece of merchandise to return another was dishonest. It's not unreasonable for the store to require a receipt for anything that's returned, and it's not the store's fault that B.M. ended up without her receipt. To lie to the store in an effort to make up for her own error is wrong, even if the final numbers worked out fairly.
In this particular case, the right thing for B.M. to do would have been to take what documentation she had -- such as the debit-card statement from her bank, which presumably showed the date, the name of the retailer and the amount of the purchase -- and bring it to the retailer and explain the situation. Then the retailer should have done the right thing by replacing the defective merchandise.
Likely the store would have done so. If retailers want to keep our business, they don't go out of their way to make it hard to return defective stuff. But it's not the store's fault that B.M. lost her original receipt, and they're entitled to stick to the letter of their policy if they choose -- though it would hardly be good customer relations to do so.
Having acted as she did, the right thing for B.M. to do is to call the store, explain the situation and see what the manager says. Granted that the store got an extra MP3-player sale out of the deal, and in light of her willingness to set things right, chances are that the store management would either leave matters as they stand or perhaps even give her a refund for the extra player.
I suggest making the initial approach by telephone, however, because this advice isn't without risk. It's conceivable that the management might take a hard line and prosecute her for the misrepresentation by which she obtained the third player. If that's the case, I wouldn't advise her to go back in person, since I'm not convinced that so severe a punishment would be a fair resolution for this wrong.
Should that be the case, she should consider her lingering sense of guilt -- and the cost of that second, unnecessary MP3 player -- a relatively small price to pay for a useful lesson: Doing the right thing may take more effort in the short term, but in the long term it's always preferable. Especially if you're trying to set an example for your kid.
B.M., a reader from Columbus, Ohio, learned that fact firsthand after she bought a modestly priced MP3 player as a Christmas gift for her daughter. A month or so later, the device stopped working. B.M. contacted both the store and the manufacturer, and was told that the player would be replaced if she brought it in with the original receipt.
Problem: "Try as I did," she writes, "I was unable to locate the original receipt."
Here's where things began to get complicated. Since she couldn't find the receipt for her MP3 player, which she had purchased with a bank debit card, B.M. decided to purchase a new MP3 player from the same store. She then returned the broken player with the new receipt, and received a working replacement. She now has two working MP3 players, both of which she has paid for, so she thought the outcome was a fair one.
B.M.'s 16-year-old daughter is not so sure that her mother's strategy was ethical, however.
"Because I am trying very hard to raise my children with a sense of ethics," B.M. writes, "I would appreciate your opinion, since I have begun to doubt my own judgment in this matter."
B.M. may have been motivated by a sense of justice, but using the receipt for one piece of merchandise to return another was dishonest. It's not unreasonable for the store to require a receipt for anything that's returned, and it's not the store's fault that B.M. ended up without her receipt. To lie to the store in an effort to make up for her own error is wrong, even if the final numbers worked out fairly.
In this particular case, the right thing for B.M. to do would have been to take what documentation she had -- such as the debit-card statement from her bank, which presumably showed the date, the name of the retailer and the amount of the purchase -- and bring it to the retailer and explain the situation. Then the retailer should have done the right thing by replacing the defective merchandise.
Likely the store would have done so. If retailers want to keep our business, they don't go out of their way to make it hard to return defective stuff. But it's not the store's fault that B.M. lost her original receipt, and they're entitled to stick to the letter of their policy if they choose -- though it would hardly be good customer relations to do so.
Having acted as she did, the right thing for B.M. to do is to call the store, explain the situation and see what the manager says. Granted that the store got an extra MP3-player sale out of the deal, and in light of her willingness to set things right, chances are that the store management would either leave matters as they stand or perhaps even give her a refund for the extra player.
I suggest making the initial approach by telephone, however, because this advice isn't without risk. It's conceivable that the management might take a hard line and prosecute her for the misrepresentation by which she obtained the third player. If that's the case, I wouldn't advise her to go back in person, since I'm not convinced that so severe a punishment would be a fair resolution for this wrong.
Should that be the case, she should consider her lingering sense of guilt -- and the cost of that second, unnecessary MP3 player -- a relatively small price to pay for a useful lesson: Doing the right thing may take more effort in the short term, but in the long term it's always preferable. Especially if you're trying to set an example for your kid.
SOUND OFF: MAKING AMENDS II
On March 15 William Beebe was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to one count of aggravated sexual battery against Liz Seccuro, a woman he had attacked 20 years earlier when both were students at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Beebe, a recovering alcoholic, had written to Seccuro to apologize for the decades-old assault. She contacted the authorities, saying that she had forgiven Beebe but still desired justice.
I asked readers whether Beebe was right to contact Seccuro and whether Seccuro was right to press charges.
"He was right to contact her and try to make amends," writes Kaye Jones of Groves, Texas, "but he was wrong if he thought that this would make it all go away in a second. Choices have consequences."
Pat H. of Ontario sees the apology itself as a second assault.
"His need to atone actually came at the expense of the victim, who was, in effect, retraumatized via his e-mail," Pat H. writes. "It was a dramatic and selfish gesture on his part, and every bit as antagonistic as the original violation."
Finally Liz Seccuro herself checked in.
"Obviously, for me, as the victim, there is only one solution," she writes, "and that was to step forward as a citizen and, based on the laws of this nation, report the crime, even though it had been reported to no avail to university brass."
Check out other opinions at SOUND OFF: MAKING AMENDS or post your own by clicking on "post a comment" or "comments" below. Please indicate who you are and where you're from.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.
I asked readers whether Beebe was right to contact Seccuro and whether Seccuro was right to press charges.
"He was right to contact her and try to make amends," writes Kaye Jones of Groves, Texas, "but he was wrong if he thought that this would make it all go away in a second. Choices have consequences."
Pat H. of Ontario sees the apology itself as a second assault.
"His need to atone actually came at the expense of the victim, who was, in effect, retraumatized via his e-mail," Pat H. writes. "It was a dramatic and selfish gesture on his part, and every bit as antagonistic as the original violation."
Finally Liz Seccuro herself checked in.
"Obviously, for me, as the victim, there is only one solution," she writes, "and that was to step forward as a citizen and, based on the laws of this nation, report the crime, even though it had been reported to no avail to university brass."
Check out other opinions at SOUND OFF: MAKING AMENDS or post your own by clicking on "post a comment" or "comments" below. Please indicate who you are and where you're from.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.
Sunday, April 08, 2007
SOUND OFF: FALSE CREDENTIALS
In a routine check of resumes at your business, you discover that one of your employees has listed on his resume a degree that he has not really earned. He attended the college in question, but left while still a few credits short of receiving the degree. He is a star employee who regularly outperforms his colleagues, and the degree itself is not needed for the job he's doing at the company.
Do you give him a chance to correct the mistake on his resume? Do you insist that he complete the credits he needs to complete the degree? Do you fire him immediately for falsifying information on the resume he used to get the job at your company? Or do you take some other action?
Send your thoughts to rightthing@nytimes.com or post them here by clicking on "post a comment" or "comments" below. Please include your name, your hometown and where you read this column. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming "The Right Thing" newspaper column.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business" (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of http://www.jeffreyseglin.com, a Web log focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," New York Times Syndicate, 609 Greenwich St., 6th floor, New York, N.Y. 10014-3610.
Do you give him a chance to correct the mistake on his resume? Do you insist that he complete the credits he needs to complete the degree? Do you fire him immediately for falsifying information on the resume he used to get the job at your company? Or do you take some other action?
Send your thoughts to rightthing@nytimes.com or post them here by clicking on "post a comment" or "comments" below. Please include your name, your hometown and where you read this column. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming "The Right Thing" newspaper column.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business" (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of http://www.jeffreyseglin.com, a Web log focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," New York Times Syndicate, 609 Greenwich St., 6th floor, New York, N.Y. 10014-3610.
AFTER THE LOVE HAS GONE
Let's say that you have this friend. You and she used to spend a great deal of time together, but then she met this guy, a smart guy. He got into medical school. They got engaged. They moved in together. She started pulling double shifts at work to help pay the household bills, so you didn't see as much of your old friend as you'd used to. For the six years her fiance went to medical school and fulfilled his internship and residency requirements, the time your friend had to spend with you or anyone else dwindled to practically nothing.
Then, barely one year into his life as a practicing doctor, her fiance left your friend for another woman. He has no plans to repay any of the support she gave to him while he was going through medical school.
That's the story reported to me by L.H., a reader from Boston whose friend went through exactly this experience.
"Since he never married my friend, there was no legal obligation to supply alimony," L.H. writes. "But what of the ethical obligations?"
It's clear to me that L.H. believes that her friend has been wronged, and feels that she's entitled to some restitution for the sacrifices she made during the six years that she and her fiance were together. The response she's hoping to get from me, I imagine, goes something like this: "Not only does your friend deserve financial restitution, but her former fiance should be forced to wear a sandwich board with the message `I am a cad. Ask me how."'
I hate to disappoint a reader, and -- though of course I don't know the details of their breakup -- I'll concede that the ex-fiance may very well be a cad, but even so I'm not convinced that restitution is in order.
Clearly L.H.'s friend and her fiance had discussed marriage, but they weren't married. For six years they simply lived together, sharing none of the obligations that come with being married. L.H.'s friend footed the yeoman's share of the household bills while her fiance was in school, yes, but she was well aware that there was no legal framework in place to make her a partner in his future, even if she was to a considerable extent paying for that future.
It's no surprise that they had no verbal or written agreement that, in the event of their breaking up, her fiance would repay L.H.'s friend for the expenses she was incurring while he went through medical school. Most couples who fall in love don't spend time making plans or framing agreements about what will happen should they fall out of love. It's the rare unmarried, heterosexual couple, even one in which the role of provider is unequally shared, that anticipates something going wrong and wants to be covered -- just in case.
If she wanted the financial protection that marriage might have given her, the right thing for L.H.'s friend to do would have been to discuss that with her fiance sooner. After the fact, she doubtless wishes she had -- but that wish doesn't create any retroactive ethical obligation for her former fiance. Would it be a generous and thoughtful thing for him to repay some of the money his former fiancee laid out on his behalf? Absolutely. Is he under any obligation, legal, ethical or otherwise, to make such a repayment? No.
After she had worked so hard to help support him while he was in medical school, it may have been a callous thing for L.H.'s fiance to leave her for another woman. But he certainly was under no obligation to stay in the relationship -- that's the whole point of the distinction between married and unmarried -- and has no ethical obligation to repay L.H.'s friend for the sacrifices that, after all, she chose to make.
Given that they weren't married, her ex-fiance presumably took with him all the debt that he took on during medical school. L.H.'s friend is left with the cold comfort that it would have been even worse if they'd married and then he'd left her for another woman, and with the useful lesson that there is no guarantee that sacrifices made today for love will have a payoff tomorrow.
Then, barely one year into his life as a practicing doctor, her fiance left your friend for another woman. He has no plans to repay any of the support she gave to him while he was going through medical school.
That's the story reported to me by L.H., a reader from Boston whose friend went through exactly this experience.
"Since he never married my friend, there was no legal obligation to supply alimony," L.H. writes. "But what of the ethical obligations?"
It's clear to me that L.H. believes that her friend has been wronged, and feels that she's entitled to some restitution for the sacrifices she made during the six years that she and her fiance were together. The response she's hoping to get from me, I imagine, goes something like this: "Not only does your friend deserve financial restitution, but her former fiance should be forced to wear a sandwich board with the message `I am a cad. Ask me how."'
I hate to disappoint a reader, and -- though of course I don't know the details of their breakup -- I'll concede that the ex-fiance may very well be a cad, but even so I'm not convinced that restitution is in order.
Clearly L.H.'s friend and her fiance had discussed marriage, but they weren't married. For six years they simply lived together, sharing none of the obligations that come with being married. L.H.'s friend footed the yeoman's share of the household bills while her fiance was in school, yes, but she was well aware that there was no legal framework in place to make her a partner in his future, even if she was to a considerable extent paying for that future.
It's no surprise that they had no verbal or written agreement that, in the event of their breaking up, her fiance would repay L.H.'s friend for the expenses she was incurring while he went through medical school. Most couples who fall in love don't spend time making plans or framing agreements about what will happen should they fall out of love. It's the rare unmarried, heterosexual couple, even one in which the role of provider is unequally shared, that anticipates something going wrong and wants to be covered -- just in case.
If she wanted the financial protection that marriage might have given her, the right thing for L.H.'s friend to do would have been to discuss that with her fiance sooner. After the fact, she doubtless wishes she had -- but that wish doesn't create any retroactive ethical obligation for her former fiance. Would it be a generous and thoughtful thing for him to repay some of the money his former fiancee laid out on his behalf? Absolutely. Is he under any obligation, legal, ethical or otherwise, to make such a repayment? No.
After she had worked so hard to help support him while he was in medical school, it may have been a callous thing for L.H.'s fiance to leave her for another woman. But he certainly was under no obligation to stay in the relationship -- that's the whole point of the distinction between married and unmarried -- and has no ethical obligation to repay L.H.'s friend for the sacrifices that, after all, she chose to make.
Given that they weren't married, her ex-fiance presumably took with him all the debt that he took on during medical school. L.H.'s friend is left with the cold comfort that it would have been even worse if they'd married and then he'd left her for another woman, and with the useful lesson that there is no guarantee that sacrifices made today for love will have a payoff tomorrow.
Sunday, April 01, 2007
MAKING THE FINAL CHOICES
Somewhere a family is mourning.
For years their 95-year-old mother had been taking multiple daily doses of more than a dozen different prescription medications. Some helped keep her alive, while others mitigated the substantial pain caused by her various ailments. She finally grew tired of waiting to die. After discussing her options with her children, she decided that she would deliberately take an overdose of pain medication.
She let her children know when she planned to take the overdose, to ensure that she would be alone for a number of hours before her death. That way, she figured, no member of her family would be suspected of involvement in ending her life.
Her children accepted her decision. They saw it as her choice. There was no argument.
As their mother had planned, when the EMTs found her and when the coroner examined her, they all came to the same conclusion: She had died in her sleep, which was no surprise, given her age and how many medications she took on a regular basis.
One of the children confided in a friend, however, and that friend subsequently wrote to me. She was, by her own account, struggling to come to terms with the situation and what, if anything, she herself ought to do if she found herself similarly situated.
"I would have no qualms notifying the authorities if someone close to me was suicidal in a situation in which there was no imminence of death," she writes. "What would my ethical obligation be if a family member was contemplating the same decision under the same circumstances?"
In most locations where my column runs, including the place where this incident occurred, suicide is against the law and assisted suicide is legally a form of murder. My reader knows the legalities, however, and that's not what she's asking. She wants to know what would be the ethical thing, the right thing to do.
Frankly, this is a question I cannot answer. It's a question that most of us will never face, but if we do face it we have to answer it for ourselves, drawing on our own ethical and religious backgrounds, and any two people may well come up with different answers. What my reader's answer would be is beyond my capacity to predict, let alone to advise.
In most religions the subject of suicide is fraught with issues, and obviously that would come into play for many people facing this sort of crisis. For the woman in question, and for her family, religious conviction apparently posed no insuperable obstacle, but that wouldn't necessarily be the case for my reader.
What I can tell her is that this family, this mother and her children, made a choice that was not ill-considered.
Once the mother decided that she no longer wanted to live the way she had been living, she had several choices. One would have been simply to stop taking her medication altogether, for example. That decision would surely have brought about her death, but most likely would have resulted in a longer and much more excruciating end than the one she experienced.
Even after she had decided to overdose on pain medication, she might easily -- and, indeed, more surely -- have done so without telling her children of her plans, without letting them know why she planned to do this and without giving them a chance to say goodbye. Such a decision would have prevented any possibility of their interference, but it also might have left her children always wondering what had happened, tormented by the thought that her death had been an accident that could have been avoided if only they had been more attentive. At the very least, it would have left them without the chance for one last conversation with the mother they loved.
But she loved them too -- loved them enough to not want them to be left with any lingering doubt that they might somehow have been responsible for her death. And they in turn loved her enough to honor her wishes.
I don't know if I would have had the strength to do the same thing if I had been in the place of this mother or these children. And, even if I had had the strength, I'm not certain that I would have chosen the same path.
For this family, however, choosing to allow their mother to end a life wracked by pain that showed no sign of easing was clearly the right thing to do.
For years their 95-year-old mother had been taking multiple daily doses of more than a dozen different prescription medications. Some helped keep her alive, while others mitigated the substantial pain caused by her various ailments. She finally grew tired of waiting to die. After discussing her options with her children, she decided that she would deliberately take an overdose of pain medication.
She let her children know when she planned to take the overdose, to ensure that she would be alone for a number of hours before her death. That way, she figured, no member of her family would be suspected of involvement in ending her life.
Her children accepted her decision. They saw it as her choice. There was no argument.
As their mother had planned, when the EMTs found her and when the coroner examined her, they all came to the same conclusion: She had died in her sleep, which was no surprise, given her age and how many medications she took on a regular basis.
One of the children confided in a friend, however, and that friend subsequently wrote to me. She was, by her own account, struggling to come to terms with the situation and what, if anything, she herself ought to do if she found herself similarly situated.
"I would have no qualms notifying the authorities if someone close to me was suicidal in a situation in which there was no imminence of death," she writes. "What would my ethical obligation be if a family member was contemplating the same decision under the same circumstances?"
In most locations where my column runs, including the place where this incident occurred, suicide is against the law and assisted suicide is legally a form of murder. My reader knows the legalities, however, and that's not what she's asking. She wants to know what would be the ethical thing, the right thing to do.
Frankly, this is a question I cannot answer. It's a question that most of us will never face, but if we do face it we have to answer it for ourselves, drawing on our own ethical and religious backgrounds, and any two people may well come up with different answers. What my reader's answer would be is beyond my capacity to predict, let alone to advise.
In most religions the subject of suicide is fraught with issues, and obviously that would come into play for many people facing this sort of crisis. For the woman in question, and for her family, religious conviction apparently posed no insuperable obstacle, but that wouldn't necessarily be the case for my reader.
What I can tell her is that this family, this mother and her children, made a choice that was not ill-considered.
Once the mother decided that she no longer wanted to live the way she had been living, she had several choices. One would have been simply to stop taking her medication altogether, for example. That decision would surely have brought about her death, but most likely would have resulted in a longer and much more excruciating end than the one she experienced.
Even after she had decided to overdose on pain medication, she might easily -- and, indeed, more surely -- have done so without telling her children of her plans, without letting them know why she planned to do this and without giving them a chance to say goodbye. Such a decision would have prevented any possibility of their interference, but it also might have left her children always wondering what had happened, tormented by the thought that her death had been an accident that could have been avoided if only they had been more attentive. At the very least, it would have left them without the chance for one last conversation with the mother they loved.
But she loved them too -- loved them enough to not want them to be left with any lingering doubt that they might somehow have been responsible for her death. And they in turn loved her enough to honor her wishes.
I don't know if I would have had the strength to do the same thing if I had been in the place of this mother or these children. And, even if I had had the strength, I'm not certain that I would have chosen the same path.
For this family, however, choosing to allow their mother to end a life wracked by pain that showed no sign of easing was clearly the right thing to do.
SOUND OFF: PAPER TRAIL
Most of my readers say that, if they found that their boss had inadvertently left a list of staff salaries in the office copy machine, they would return the list.
Bert Hoogendam of Sarnia, Ontario, Phil Clutts of Harrisburg, N.C., and Jan Bohren of Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., each voted for placing the list in an envelope and returning it to the boss in person.
"No copies, nothing cute," Bohren writes, "just return it to the original sender, telling him/her where you found it."
Kristine Savona would anonymously slip the item into the boss's office in an envelope, however.
"That might ease the boss's mind as well, seeing that someone cared enough to take some discretion in returning the item," Savona writes.
But M. Mason of Windsor, Ontario, writes that the any boss who would leave such a list in a copier for all to see is incompetent.
"Inform no one," Mason advises. "Take the salary list home. Use the salary list for future salary negotiations."
Check out other opinions at http://jeffreyseglin.blogspot.com/2007/02/sound-off-shock-of-find.html or post your own by clicking on "post a comment" or "comments" below.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business" (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of http://www.jeffreyseglin.com, a Web log focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," New York Times Syndicate, 609 Greenwich St., 6th floor, New York, N.Y. 10014-3610.
Bert Hoogendam of Sarnia, Ontario, Phil Clutts of Harrisburg, N.C., and Jan Bohren of Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., each voted for placing the list in an envelope and returning it to the boss in person.
"No copies, nothing cute," Bohren writes, "just return it to the original sender, telling him/her where you found it."
Kristine Savona would anonymously slip the item into the boss's office in an envelope, however.
"That might ease the boss's mind as well, seeing that someone cared enough to take some discretion in returning the item," Savona writes.
But M. Mason of Windsor, Ontario, writes that the any boss who would leave such a list in a copier for all to see is incompetent.
"Inform no one," Mason advises. "Take the salary list home. Use the salary list for future salary negotiations."
Check out other opinions at http://jeffreyseglin.blogspot.com/2007/02/sound-off-shock-of-find.html or post your own by clicking on "post a comment" or "comments" below.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business" (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of http://www.jeffreyseglin.com, a Web log focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," New York Times Syndicate, 609 Greenwich St., 6th floor, New York, N.Y. 10014-3610.
Friday, March 30, 2007
HABITAT FOR HUMANITY'S EFFORT TO TRANSFORM A BOSTON NEIGHBORHOOD
Steve Bailey's column in this morning’s Boston Globe (Urban terrorists) in part mentions the work that Habitat for Humanity (www.habitatboston.org) is doing in the heart of the city where an alarming rate of violence is occurring, due partly to the increasing economic divide among rich and poor communities. Bailey mentions that Habitat has already raised about $2 million to build 22 condominiums and retail space on Blue Hill Avenue on Intervale Street, writing that the project “is exactly what a neighborhood like this needs.”
But the Habitat project on Blue Hill Avenue, which is about half-finished, is still about $2 million short of the money it needs to complete the project. “Any good corporate citizen looking for a way to make a difference need look no further,” writes Bailey.
This afternoon I spoke with Bruce Percelay, the Chairman of the Board of Directors for Greater Boston’s Habitat for Humanity. He told me that the half a city block that Habitat purchased to build on from the City of Boston is the same one that burned down the night that Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot in 1968. It has been vacant ever since, until Habitat came in to build.
Percelay says that the model that Habitat for Humanity traditionally uses in more rural areas of building individual homes for families in need wasn’t going to work economically on Blue Hill Avenue…and it certainly wouldn’t be enough to turn around the area.
“You can’t rescue a neighborhood with a two-family house,” says Percelay, “but you can with a 22-family house.”
The Blue Hill Avenue project still needs $2 million to complete its ambitious project. Individuals or corporations who would like to make major contributions can contact Percelay directly at bpercelay@mvernon.com. Other opportunities to contribute money, automobiles, trucks, land, real estate rebates, building materials, or other donations can be found at http://www.habitatboston.org/donate.html.
But the Habitat project on Blue Hill Avenue, which is about half-finished, is still about $2 million short of the money it needs to complete the project. “Any good corporate citizen looking for a way to make a difference need look no further,” writes Bailey.
This afternoon I spoke with Bruce Percelay, the Chairman of the Board of Directors for Greater Boston’s Habitat for Humanity. He told me that the half a city block that Habitat purchased to build on from the City of Boston is the same one that burned down the night that Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot in 1968. It has been vacant ever since, until Habitat came in to build.
Percelay says that the model that Habitat for Humanity traditionally uses in more rural areas of building individual homes for families in need wasn’t going to work economically on Blue Hill Avenue…and it certainly wouldn’t be enough to turn around the area.
“You can’t rescue a neighborhood with a two-family house,” says Percelay, “but you can with a 22-family house.”
The Blue Hill Avenue project still needs $2 million to complete its ambitious project. Individuals or corporations who would like to make major contributions can contact Percelay directly at bpercelay@mvernon.com. Other opportunities to contribute money, automobiles, trucks, land, real estate rebates, building materials, or other donations can be found at http://www.habitatboston.org/donate.html.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
THE RARITY OF WOMEN CEOS
Judith Dobrzynski has another commentary related to the one she wrote for the Los Angeles Times (Return of the 'glass ceiling') on March 17th that I mentioned in the blog last Friday (How to Get a Company's Attention on Women's Pay).
Her current piece, Female CEOs still rare sight, is in today's Chicago Tribune and it emphasizes the glaring point that the number of females CEOs in Fortune 500 companies not only trails that of male CEOs, it is losing ground. This commentary focuses on Chicago-area companies.
Dobrzynski grounds her commentary on recent census data mined by Catalyst. A report on that data can be found at Catalyst Releases 2006 Census of Women in Fortune 500 Corporate Officer and Board Positions.
Both the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune require you to register to view their articles, but the registration is free.
Her current piece, Female CEOs still rare sight, is in today's Chicago Tribune and it emphasizes the glaring point that the number of females CEOs in Fortune 500 companies not only trails that of male CEOs, it is losing ground. This commentary focuses on Chicago-area companies.
Dobrzynski grounds her commentary on recent census data mined by Catalyst. A report on that data can be found at Catalyst Releases 2006 Census of Women in Fortune 500 Corporate Officer and Board Positions.
Both the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune require you to register to view their articles, but the registration is free.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
SOUND OFF: BONUS QUESTION
Both you and your company have had a banner year. Your boss has told you to expect a handsome bonus for your stellar performance in the past year, and has even mentioned a figure, which you've written down. When you get your paycheck, a few weeks later, you notice that your bonus is twice the amount your boss had mentioned.
Do you say nothing and figure that your boss must have decided to give you an even better bonus than he had anticipated? Do you say nothing and figure that, even if a mistake has been made, you deserve the extra money? Do you thank your boss for the extra money? Do you tell your boss that there must be some mistake? Or do you handle the discrepancy in some other way?
Send your thoughts to rightthing@nytimes.com or post them here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, your hometown, and the name of the newspaper in which you read this column. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. (If your hometown newspaper doesn't carry "The Right Thing" column, please request that they do. Contact information at the New York Times Syndicate is available on the left-hand side of this blog.)
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business" (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of http://www.jeffreyseglin.com, a Web log focused on ethical issues. Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," New York Times Syndicate, 609 Greenwich St., 6th floor, New York, N.Y. 10014-3610.
Do you say nothing and figure that your boss must have decided to give you an even better bonus than he had anticipated? Do you say nothing and figure that, even if a mistake has been made, you deserve the extra money? Do you thank your boss for the extra money? Do you tell your boss that there must be some mistake? Or do you handle the discrepancy in some other way?
Send your thoughts to rightthing@nytimes.com or post them here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, your hometown, and the name of the newspaper in which you read this column. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. (If your hometown newspaper doesn't carry "The Right Thing" column, please request that they do. Contact information at the New York Times Syndicate is available on the left-hand side of this blog.)
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business" (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of http://www.jeffreyseglin.com, a Web log focused on ethical issues. Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," New York Times Syndicate, 609 Greenwich St., 6th floor, New York, N.Y. 10014-3610.
KNOWING MORE THAN YOU'RE TELLING
Eleven years ago, at a neighborhood yard sale in Somerville, Mass., my soon-to-be son-in-law paid 25 cents for a 1930s-era electric fan made by Diehl. The woman who sold it to him was unloading some clutter from her very cluttered home. He got it home, cleaned it up, fixed the motor and held onto it until four years later, when he decided to unclutter his own home.
After doing some research online, he discovered that people were paying more than $100 for similar fans, so he decided to list his on eBay. He ended up selling the fan for $150.
My son-in-law says that he had no idea what the fan was worth when he bought it -- he simply liked its looks. But his experience begs the question: If he had known how much it was worth, would he have had any obligation to tell the seller?
Precisely that question came up a few weeks ago, when P.J., a reader from Timonium, Md., e-mailed me about what he refers to as "unknowing little old ladies who have yard sales." When they have their sales, he writes, professionals show up as early as possible to spot the valuable stuff, which they buy at bargain-basement prices without ever letting on what they know.
"They may pay $10 for a $10,000 vase," P.J. says. "That makes it a profitable transaction for the crafty, but what about the little old lady?"
For his part, P.J. writes, if he goes to a bank to change $20 and he's handed $50, he knows that he has an ethical responsibility to return the extra money. So far as he can tell, the two situations are essentially the same.
"If I know that a vase is worth five figures," he says, "don't I have some obligation to inform the owner? Would it make a difference if the owner is a pauper and I'm wealthy?"
My take on this is clear-cut. At a yard sale, the rules are simple: The seller tries to get as much as she can for an item, and the buyer tries to pay as little as possible. If the seller wants to know if any of her items are particularly valuable, she should take the time to do the research before the yard sale, the way my son-in-law did before listing his fan on eBay. The buyer has no obligation to inform the seller that an item may be worth more than she is asking, even if it's worth far more. And that holds regardless of how wealthy or how poor either the owner or the buyer may be.
But P.J. goes a step further: What if the owner directly asks the prospective buyer how much he thinks the vase is worth, he asks, and the buyer says, "Five bucks, but I'll give you ten"?
"Surely," P.J. writes, "it's not ethical to lie."
He's right, of course: It's not ethical to lie. But there's a difference between lying and not divulging everything we know, and often telling all isn't in our best interest. To volunteer your bottom-line best offer isn't a good negotiating tactic, whether you're working out a corporate merger or haggling over a yard-sale find, and it's not unethical to negotiate cannily -- again, if you can do so without lying. Rushworth Kidder, the executive director of the Institute for Global Ethics in Camden, Maine, once told me about a woman who said that she found that she never had to lie, because she had so big a vocabulary.
If the seller asks how much the buyer thinks an item may be worth, in short, he's wrong to lie to her -- but not obliged to answer her at all. The right thing for him to do would be to respond by telling her how much he's willing to pay for the vase, ignoring the question of its value or his opinion on same. He's not there to appraise her goods, he's there to get a good deal. That's how yard sales work.
Now, if P.J. would e-mail me the address of this neighborhood where $10,000 vases are going for 10 bucks, I'd be obliged.
After doing some research online, he discovered that people were paying more than $100 for similar fans, so he decided to list his on eBay. He ended up selling the fan for $150.
My son-in-law says that he had no idea what the fan was worth when he bought it -- he simply liked its looks. But his experience begs the question: If he had known how much it was worth, would he have had any obligation to tell the seller?
Precisely that question came up a few weeks ago, when P.J., a reader from Timonium, Md., e-mailed me about what he refers to as "unknowing little old ladies who have yard sales." When they have their sales, he writes, professionals show up as early as possible to spot the valuable stuff, which they buy at bargain-basement prices without ever letting on what they know.
"They may pay $10 for a $10,000 vase," P.J. says. "That makes it a profitable transaction for the crafty, but what about the little old lady?"
For his part, P.J. writes, if he goes to a bank to change $20 and he's handed $50, he knows that he has an ethical responsibility to return the extra money. So far as he can tell, the two situations are essentially the same.
"If I know that a vase is worth five figures," he says, "don't I have some obligation to inform the owner? Would it make a difference if the owner is a pauper and I'm wealthy?"
My take on this is clear-cut. At a yard sale, the rules are simple: The seller tries to get as much as she can for an item, and the buyer tries to pay as little as possible. If the seller wants to know if any of her items are particularly valuable, she should take the time to do the research before the yard sale, the way my son-in-law did before listing his fan on eBay. The buyer has no obligation to inform the seller that an item may be worth more than she is asking, even if it's worth far more. And that holds regardless of how wealthy or how poor either the owner or the buyer may be.
But P.J. goes a step further: What if the owner directly asks the prospective buyer how much he thinks the vase is worth, he asks, and the buyer says, "Five bucks, but I'll give you ten"?
"Surely," P.J. writes, "it's not ethical to lie."
He's right, of course: It's not ethical to lie. But there's a difference between lying and not divulging everything we know, and often telling all isn't in our best interest. To volunteer your bottom-line best offer isn't a good negotiating tactic, whether you're working out a corporate merger or haggling over a yard-sale find, and it's not unethical to negotiate cannily -- again, if you can do so without lying. Rushworth Kidder, the executive director of the Institute for Global Ethics in Camden, Maine, once told me about a woman who said that she found that she never had to lie, because she had so big a vocabulary.
If the seller asks how much the buyer thinks an item may be worth, in short, he's wrong to lie to her -- but not obliged to answer her at all. The right thing for him to do would be to respond by telling her how much he's willing to pay for the vase, ignoring the question of its value or his opinion on same. He's not there to appraise her goods, he's there to get a good deal. That's how yard sales work.
Now, if P.J. would e-mail me the address of this neighborhood where $10,000 vases are going for 10 bucks, I'd be obliged.
Friday, March 23, 2007
How to Get a Company's Attention on Women's Pay
In a March 17, op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, Judith H. Dobrzynski wrote about a study from Catalyst that shows that the number of women among top positions in Fortune 500 companies has shrunk since the last census was taken. So too has the number of companies that do not have one woman on their corporate board.
Dobrzynski report on this "dishonor roll" is worth reading at Return of the 'glass ceiling'.
Dobrzynski was editor of the Sunday Money & Business section of the Sunday New York Times when I wrote the following "The Right Thing" column that appeared there on March 17, 2002. The topic's related and things don't appear to have changed all that much in the past five years.
[The column below originally appeared on Sunday, March 17, 2002, in The New York Times Money & Business section, where "The Right Thing" column ran monthly from September 1998 through January 2004. In February 2004, "The Right Thing" started running as a weekly syndicated column in newspapers throughout the country and internationally. A collection of "The Right Thing" columns from September 1998 through July 2002 is available by clicking on The Right Thing Book from amazon.com.]
THE RIGHT THING; How to Get a Company's Attention on Women's Pay
Women who are managers make less money than their male counterparts. There's no shock there. But for decades, that salary gap has been shrinking -- until now.
In a recently released study of the 10 industries that employed the most women from 1995 to 2000, the General Accounting Office found that the gap between the salaries of men and women had widened for managers in seven of those sectors. The largest widening was in entertainment and recreational services, where female managers were earning just 62 cents for every dollar made by a male manager in 2000, down from 83 cents in 1995. Only three industries showed improvement for women -- albeit slight. The biggest gain was in educational services, where the figure rose to 91 cents on the dollar, from 86 cents.
The G.A.O. report is supported by other studies, including one conducted by the Women's Research and Education Institute in Washington showing that overall managerial salaries for women slipped to 71.3 cents in 2000 from 73 cents in 1995.
An obvious question arises from these findings: Is it is ever ethically justifiable for executives, men or women, who make compensation decisions to pay women less than they pay men for doing the exact same job? There's no gray area here. The answer is no.
Certainly, explanations can be found for the gap. "Just because there is the presence of a wage gap, one should be hesitant to infer that there's discrimination going on," said Elizabeth Owens, a government affairs manager for the Society for Human Resource Management in Alexandria, Va. "A problem with these pay-gap studies is that they don't take into account individual choices that people make about what jobs they want and what they don't." Some women, for example, may decide to work fewer hours to meet family needs.
Still, it's impossible to dismiss discrimination outright as a reason for the widening of the gap. Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, says a study like this turns a spotlight on "basic fairness issues."
Variations in lifestyle choices might justify the existence of a wage gap. So, too, might the varying levels of experience and managerial responsibility that the G.A.O. study couldn't measure. What these factors don't explain, however, is why the gap has grown.
"The change is bad news for women," said Heidi Hartmann, director of the Institute for Women's Policy Research in Washington. "Women have been getting more education and staying in the labor market longer. Women are doing everything right, and still this is happening. Progress has stopped."
Others say the slippage may result more from losing sight of the issue. "I don't think it matters less to us," said Laura P. Hartman, a business ethics professor at DePaul University in Chicago. "But I think we've paid less attention to it and become complacent."
Consider this, then, the sounding of an ethical alarm to stem the widening gap. But how?
For anyone who notices wage disparity in his or her company, the initial impulse may be to raise a ruckus in the workplace demanding equal pay for equal managerial jobs. But such loud noise may be counterproductive.
"This is a volatile issue," said Joseph L. Badaracco Jr., a business ethics professor at Harvard Business School and author of "Leading Quietly" (Harvard Business School Press). "Most people don't like to be accused of being unfair, and they like it even less if you rub their face in it by documenting it. This is a minefield."
The first step, he said, is to "have some indication that there is a conspicuous disparity within your organization."
"Without that," he added, "you're not going to get anywhere waving a government study."
Next, he suggests going to a couple of people within the organization whom you trust, to see if you have the facts right and to learn who else might be sympathetic to finding a solution.
The wage gap is the kind of issue "where behind closed doors in a friendly rather than threatening way, and with analysis, somebody could make a case," Professor Badaracco said. "And the case is roughly, 'Look, there are disparities; the women in the organization know about them. Things could get stirred up. We could get sued. Can we work together to find some way to move forward?' "
Ultimately, you have to go to someone who has the power to make changes. Regardless, Professor Badaracco said, "you have to move with extreme caution."
True enough. There's no upside to raising an issue in a way that creates only divisiveness. But doing something, cautiously or not, is imperative. It's unconscionable that women make less as managers than they did five years ago. American business should be ashamed.
Dobrzynski report on this "dishonor roll" is worth reading at Return of the 'glass ceiling'.
Dobrzynski was editor of the Sunday Money & Business section of the Sunday New York Times when I wrote the following "The Right Thing" column that appeared there on March 17, 2002. The topic's related and things don't appear to have changed all that much in the past five years.
[The column below originally appeared on Sunday, March 17, 2002, in The New York Times Money & Business section, where "The Right Thing" column ran monthly from September 1998 through January 2004. In February 2004, "The Right Thing" started running as a weekly syndicated column in newspapers throughout the country and internationally. A collection of "The Right Thing" columns from September 1998 through July 2002 is available by clicking on The Right Thing Book from amazon.com.]
THE RIGHT THING; How to Get a Company's Attention on Women's Pay
Women who are managers make less money than their male counterparts. There's no shock there. But for decades, that salary gap has been shrinking -- until now.
In a recently released study of the 10 industries that employed the most women from 1995 to 2000, the General Accounting Office found that the gap between the salaries of men and women had widened for managers in seven of those sectors. The largest widening was in entertainment and recreational services, where female managers were earning just 62 cents for every dollar made by a male manager in 2000, down from 83 cents in 1995. Only three industries showed improvement for women -- albeit slight. The biggest gain was in educational services, where the figure rose to 91 cents on the dollar, from 86 cents.
The G.A.O. report is supported by other studies, including one conducted by the Women's Research and Education Institute in Washington showing that overall managerial salaries for women slipped to 71.3 cents in 2000 from 73 cents in 1995.
An obvious question arises from these findings: Is it is ever ethically justifiable for executives, men or women, who make compensation decisions to pay women less than they pay men for doing the exact same job? There's no gray area here. The answer is no.
Certainly, explanations can be found for the gap. "Just because there is the presence of a wage gap, one should be hesitant to infer that there's discrimination going on," said Elizabeth Owens, a government affairs manager for the Society for Human Resource Management in Alexandria, Va. "A problem with these pay-gap studies is that they don't take into account individual choices that people make about what jobs they want and what they don't." Some women, for example, may decide to work fewer hours to meet family needs.
Still, it's impossible to dismiss discrimination outright as a reason for the widening of the gap. Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, says a study like this turns a spotlight on "basic fairness issues."
Variations in lifestyle choices might justify the existence of a wage gap. So, too, might the varying levels of experience and managerial responsibility that the G.A.O. study couldn't measure. What these factors don't explain, however, is why the gap has grown.
"The change is bad news for women," said Heidi Hartmann, director of the Institute for Women's Policy Research in Washington. "Women have been getting more education and staying in the labor market longer. Women are doing everything right, and still this is happening. Progress has stopped."
Others say the slippage may result more from losing sight of the issue. "I don't think it matters less to us," said Laura P. Hartman, a business ethics professor at DePaul University in Chicago. "But I think we've paid less attention to it and become complacent."
Consider this, then, the sounding of an ethical alarm to stem the widening gap. But how?
For anyone who notices wage disparity in his or her company, the initial impulse may be to raise a ruckus in the workplace demanding equal pay for equal managerial jobs. But such loud noise may be counterproductive.
"This is a volatile issue," said Joseph L. Badaracco Jr., a business ethics professor at Harvard Business School and author of "Leading Quietly" (Harvard Business School Press). "Most people don't like to be accused of being unfair, and they like it even less if you rub their face in it by documenting it. This is a minefield."
The first step, he said, is to "have some indication that there is a conspicuous disparity within your organization."
"Without that," he added, "you're not going to get anywhere waving a government study."
Next, he suggests going to a couple of people within the organization whom you trust, to see if you have the facts right and to learn who else might be sympathetic to finding a solution.
The wage gap is the kind of issue "where behind closed doors in a friendly rather than threatening way, and with analysis, somebody could make a case," Professor Badaracco said. "And the case is roughly, 'Look, there are disparities; the women in the organization know about them. Things could get stirred up. We could get sued. Can we work together to find some way to move forward?' "
Ultimately, you have to go to someone who has the power to make changes. Regardless, Professor Badaracco said, "you have to move with extreme caution."
True enough. There's no upside to raising an issue in a way that creates only divisiveness. But doing something, cautiously or not, is imperative. It's unconscionable that women make less as managers than they did five years ago. American business should be ashamed.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
My Principles, or the Milk and Cookies?
[This column originally appeared on Sunday, January 18, 2004, in The New York Times Money & Business section, where "The Right Thing" column ran monthly from September 1998 through January 2004. In February 2004, "The Right Thing" started running as a weekly syndicated column in newspapers throughout the country and internationally. A collection of "The Right Thing" columns from September 1998 through July 2002 is available by clicking on The Right Thing Book from amazon.com.]
Growing up in Boonton, N.J., I routinely stopped at the supermarket on my way to the local bowling alley to pick up a package of Archway ginger cookies, my favorite snack at the time. More than 30 years later, as an adult living in Boston, each time I shop at the grocery store I buy three half-pint boxes of milk -- the kind that requires no initial refrigeration -- to have on hand in the pantry. And I continue to buy Archway cookies.
Both products are made by Parmalat, the Italian conglomerate in which executives are accused of making up phony bank accounts and siphoning off millions in company funds to finance other ventures.
Now I face a choice: Should I stop buying both products as a sign of dissatisfaction with the company?
What makes this scandal different from some others is that Parmalat makes products that I immediately recognize. In my daily life, I never encounter the Enron brand, and I wouldn't recognize a Tyco product if it were to hit me through a $6,000 shower curtain. But Parmalat's products are different. I use them. I like them. I feed them to my grandsons.
So do I stage a personal boycott? If I say yes, is it because I believe it's wrong to buy products from a company in the midst of a scandal? Or because this is the scandal that broke this camel's back? Or because I believe that not doing so would signal that I condone bad behavior at the top?
"One of the questions you have to ask yourself is, 'What message am I sending and to whom?"' said Michael Josephson, the president of the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Marina del Rey, Calif. He said that by boycotting the products, I would be more likely to hurt the roughly 36,000 employees at Parmalat companies who have not been accused of wrongdoing.
But do companies deserve an ethical pass out of concern that a boycott might cost employees their jobs? "Employees can be innocent victims of boycotts and this is unfair," said Joseph L. Badaracco Jr., a professor of business ethics at Harvard Business School. But the problem is unavoidable, he said, "short of giving up boycotts, which isn't good either," adding that doing so would let "bad managers use their employees as human shields to protect themselves from boycotts they deserve."
But the question remains: Is a boycott deserved? "If executives are willing to engage in financial corruption, I would be less likely to trust them and less likely to buy their product," said Linda Klebe Trevino, a professor of organizational behavior at Pennsylvania State University. "I would ask myself if these executives would also be willing to compromise product quality or even safety for short-term financial gain."
Even Mr. Josephson, who expressed concern that a boycott might punish the wrong people, said his biggest fear was that the cumulative effect of egregious corporate behavior would be to make people "immobilized and immune" -- to cynically accept such behavior as the status quo.
All this insight, of course, does nothing to instruct me about my Parmalat conundrum.
"If you don't like what a company is doing, then you shouldn't buy its products, not because you hope it will impact them, but based on the principle that you don't want your personal money going to some firm that is doing something of which you disapprove," said Laura P. Hartman, a professor of business ethics at DePaul University in Chicago and co-editor of "Rising Above Sweatshops: Innovative Approaches to Global Labor Challenges" (Praeger, 2003).
If I buy her argument, am I destined to a life without my favorite cookies and milk? Not necessarily. "If the firm makes the right choices, ousts the bad guys and changes its practices, then you should go ahead and support it again," she said.
As I write this, 10 people associated with the Parmalat scandal have been arrested. A turnaround team had been brought in to try to shore up the company's finances. None of this is enough to indicate that the company has been set straight. But it's a nice start. And, soon, Parmalat's milk and cookies may again be gracing my cabinets.
Growing up in Boonton, N.J., I routinely stopped at the supermarket on my way to the local bowling alley to pick up a package of Archway ginger cookies, my favorite snack at the time. More than 30 years later, as an adult living in Boston, each time I shop at the grocery store I buy three half-pint boxes of milk -- the kind that requires no initial refrigeration -- to have on hand in the pantry. And I continue to buy Archway cookies.
Both products are made by Parmalat, the Italian conglomerate in which executives are accused of making up phony bank accounts and siphoning off millions in company funds to finance other ventures.
Now I face a choice: Should I stop buying both products as a sign of dissatisfaction with the company?
What makes this scandal different from some others is that Parmalat makes products that I immediately recognize. In my daily life, I never encounter the Enron brand, and I wouldn't recognize a Tyco product if it were to hit me through a $6,000 shower curtain. But Parmalat's products are different. I use them. I like them. I feed them to my grandsons.
So do I stage a personal boycott? If I say yes, is it because I believe it's wrong to buy products from a company in the midst of a scandal? Or because this is the scandal that broke this camel's back? Or because I believe that not doing so would signal that I condone bad behavior at the top?
"One of the questions you have to ask yourself is, 'What message am I sending and to whom?"' said Michael Josephson, the president of the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Marina del Rey, Calif. He said that by boycotting the products, I would be more likely to hurt the roughly 36,000 employees at Parmalat companies who have not been accused of wrongdoing.
But do companies deserve an ethical pass out of concern that a boycott might cost employees their jobs? "Employees can be innocent victims of boycotts and this is unfair," said Joseph L. Badaracco Jr., a professor of business ethics at Harvard Business School. But the problem is unavoidable, he said, "short of giving up boycotts, which isn't good either," adding that doing so would let "bad managers use their employees as human shields to protect themselves from boycotts they deserve."
But the question remains: Is a boycott deserved? "If executives are willing to engage in financial corruption, I would be less likely to trust them and less likely to buy their product," said Linda Klebe Trevino, a professor of organizational behavior at Pennsylvania State University. "I would ask myself if these executives would also be willing to compromise product quality or even safety for short-term financial gain."
Even Mr. Josephson, who expressed concern that a boycott might punish the wrong people, said his biggest fear was that the cumulative effect of egregious corporate behavior would be to make people "immobilized and immune" -- to cynically accept such behavior as the status quo.
All this insight, of course, does nothing to instruct me about my Parmalat conundrum.
"If you don't like what a company is doing, then you shouldn't buy its products, not because you hope it will impact them, but based on the principle that you don't want your personal money going to some firm that is doing something of which you disapprove," said Laura P. Hartman, a professor of business ethics at DePaul University in Chicago and co-editor of "Rising Above Sweatshops: Innovative Approaches to Global Labor Challenges" (Praeger, 2003).
If I buy her argument, am I destined to a life without my favorite cookies and milk? Not necessarily. "If the firm makes the right choices, ousts the bad guys and changes its practices, then you should go ahead and support it again," she said.
As I write this, 10 people associated with the Parmalat scandal have been arrested. A turnaround team had been brought in to try to shore up the company's finances. None of this is enough to indicate that the company has been set straight. But it's a nice start. And, soon, Parmalat's milk and cookies may again be gracing my cabinets.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
WHEN OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS, DO YOU OWE THE COMPANY?
[This column syndicated by the New York Times Syndicate originally ran the week of February 28, 2005.]
"Let's say you take a new job with a new company," M.T. of Columbus,Ohio, wrote. "You agree to a salary, and the company pays for your move. Let's say three to four months later you find a similar job that pays more. Should you feel that you owe the company anything?"
It's a terrific question and one that many workers today face as they shift jobs with increasing frequency. M.T. has been going back and forth on the question with his wife. He wants to know what would be the right thing to do in such a circumstance.
His concern is well-placed. A company that invests in moving an employee and then training him expects he will stick around long enough to recoup its investment. But does that expectation equate to any ethical commitment for the employee?
Unless employees have signed a contract that commits them to work a set number of months before they bolt, I don't believe they should balk at seizing better opportunities.
If M.T.'s company relocated him, trained him, and then four months later announced a merger with another company that would result in layoffs, is the company obligated to keep him on simply because he uprooted himself and his family to take the job? No. In fact, M.T. might find himself among the first to go since he has the least tenure there.
Why then should he owe the company more loyalty than it would show him? While the civil thing might be for the company to help laid-off employees find new jobs and for M.T. to give enough notice for a replacement to be found, ultimately the responsibility falls on the company to do what is in its best interests and likewise M.T. for himself.
We all weigh our options and try to make the best decisions while trying not to do damage to others in the process. M.T. may value his loyalty to his company, but he might value his commitment to caring for his family more, and would be right to accept what he believes is a better offer for his livelihood and his family's future.
That said, we also must take responsibility for any fallout from such decisions. If M.T. leaves too many jobs after a short tenure, then future prospective employers might decide he's not worth a long-term investment. (And Mrs. M.T. may soon grow tired of so many moves in so little time.)
Likewise, any company that consistently lays off employees in what's deemed a move for the greater good of the company may find it difficult to attract the best candidates, since few quality people seek out job insecurity.
The right thing for M.T. to do is to weigh the opportunity against the possible downside and decide what is best for him and his family. If it's the new job, he should take it.
"Let's say you take a new job with a new company," M.T. of Columbus,Ohio, wrote. "You agree to a salary, and the company pays for your move. Let's say three to four months later you find a similar job that pays more. Should you feel that you owe the company anything?"
It's a terrific question and one that many workers today face as they shift jobs with increasing frequency. M.T. has been going back and forth on the question with his wife. He wants to know what would be the right thing to do in such a circumstance.
His concern is well-placed. A company that invests in moving an employee and then training him expects he will stick around long enough to recoup its investment. But does that expectation equate to any ethical commitment for the employee?
Unless employees have signed a contract that commits them to work a set number of months before they bolt, I don't believe they should balk at seizing better opportunities.
If M.T.'s company relocated him, trained him, and then four months later announced a merger with another company that would result in layoffs, is the company obligated to keep him on simply because he uprooted himself and his family to take the job? No. In fact, M.T. might find himself among the first to go since he has the least tenure there.
Why then should he owe the company more loyalty than it would show him? While the civil thing might be for the company to help laid-off employees find new jobs and for M.T. to give enough notice for a replacement to be found, ultimately the responsibility falls on the company to do what is in its best interests and likewise M.T. for himself.
We all weigh our options and try to make the best decisions while trying not to do damage to others in the process. M.T. may value his loyalty to his company, but he might value his commitment to caring for his family more, and would be right to accept what he believes is a better offer for his livelihood and his family's future.
That said, we also must take responsibility for any fallout from such decisions. If M.T. leaves too many jobs after a short tenure, then future prospective employers might decide he's not worth a long-term investment. (And Mrs. M.T. may soon grow tired of so many moves in so little time.)
Likewise, any company that consistently lays off employees in what's deemed a move for the greater good of the company may find it difficult to attract the best candidates, since few quality people seek out job insecurity.
The right thing for M.T. to do is to weigh the opportunity against the possible downside and decide what is best for him and his family. If it's the new job, he should take it.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
THE GHOST OF MISJUDGMENTS PAST
In my entire life I've fired three people. I dreaded every moment of each incident, and remember each occasion vividly. However warranted I may have been -- and I still think I was in each case -- firing each of these employees was a gut-wrenching experience. And, of course, it was far worse for them than it was for me.
Most people loathe firing someone. Many will go to great lengths to avoid dismissing a person, no matter how clear it is that he or she should be let go. But keeping under-performing employees can wreak havoc on employee morale, especially when others must pick up the slack. And when managers don't fire employees who clearly do wrong, the unintended consequences can be daunting.
In February one of my readers from California faced such consequences head on when he walked into the main office of a not-for-profit agency that he used to run. There, sitting behind the reception desk, was a guy who some time ago had stolen several thousand dollars from that same agency.
My reader had started running the beleaguered agency in 1990. The theft, which involved forging receipts for reimbursement, was discovered shortly after his arrival. There was no question of the employee's guilt, but the agency's board of directors didn't want to risk damaging the agency's reputation by allowing the theft to become public knowledge. It therefore directed my reader to eliminate the thieving employee's position, rather than simply to fire him.
He didn't totally agree with that course of action, my reader says, but he carried it out. No mention of the theft was ever made, and the agency never recouped the stolen money.
My reader retired from his position five years ago. Recently, however, the same agency asked him to do some consulting, and my reader was stunned to find the former employee serving in a volunteer job that often leads to full-time employment. What's more, the job involves receiving donations dropped off at the front desk.
Seventeen years ago, the right thing would have been to fire that employee, given convincing evidence that he had been stealing. Besides firing him, the agency ought to have considered pressing charges and tried to recoup as much of the stolen cash as possible. While safeguarding the agency's reputation is important, not taking forceful action made the agency itself complicit in the misdirection of donated funds, a more serious matter. Given the choice between the perception that donations might not go to a worthy cause and the reality that donations didn't go to a worthy cause, the agency did the wrong thing.
Besides, because at the time the board of directors avoided doing the right thing, the agency again is exposed to this former employee who stole thousands. The not-for-profit is no longer being run by those who know his history, so no alarms went off when he volunteered.
Luckily my reader walked in the door, but now he faces a dilemma: Should he tell the current leadership about this person's past? Or, given that he truly believes that people can grow and change for the better, should he keep silent and give the former employee a second chance?
The right thing for my reader to do is to tell the organization's current leadership what he knows. If the agency keeps the formerly wayward volunteer on board, it should do so with full knowledge of his past and perhaps with limits on how much he deals with donations. If it chooses to dispense with his services, neither the agency nor my reader should feel guilty, since the former employee, in offering himself as a volunteer, clearly didn't tell the whole truth about his past work with the agency.
It's not only this former employee who can learn from his past, however -- my reader also has a lesson to learn. Because he let himself be led into the mistake of not addressing the issue head on 17 years ago, his agency was left vulnerable to subsequent exploitation. Now he has the chance to correct that error. He should seize it, and try not to make the same mistake again in the future.
Most people loathe firing someone. Many will go to great lengths to avoid dismissing a person, no matter how clear it is that he or she should be let go. But keeping under-performing employees can wreak havoc on employee morale, especially when others must pick up the slack. And when managers don't fire employees who clearly do wrong, the unintended consequences can be daunting.
In February one of my readers from California faced such consequences head on when he walked into the main office of a not-for-profit agency that he used to run. There, sitting behind the reception desk, was a guy who some time ago had stolen several thousand dollars from that same agency.
My reader had started running the beleaguered agency in 1990. The theft, which involved forging receipts for reimbursement, was discovered shortly after his arrival. There was no question of the employee's guilt, but the agency's board of directors didn't want to risk damaging the agency's reputation by allowing the theft to become public knowledge. It therefore directed my reader to eliminate the thieving employee's position, rather than simply to fire him.
He didn't totally agree with that course of action, my reader says, but he carried it out. No mention of the theft was ever made, and the agency never recouped the stolen money.
My reader retired from his position five years ago. Recently, however, the same agency asked him to do some consulting, and my reader was stunned to find the former employee serving in a volunteer job that often leads to full-time employment. What's more, the job involves receiving donations dropped off at the front desk.
Seventeen years ago, the right thing would have been to fire that employee, given convincing evidence that he had been stealing. Besides firing him, the agency ought to have considered pressing charges and tried to recoup as much of the stolen cash as possible. While safeguarding the agency's reputation is important, not taking forceful action made the agency itself complicit in the misdirection of donated funds, a more serious matter. Given the choice between the perception that donations might not go to a worthy cause and the reality that donations didn't go to a worthy cause, the agency did the wrong thing.
Besides, because at the time the board of directors avoided doing the right thing, the agency again is exposed to this former employee who stole thousands. The not-for-profit is no longer being run by those who know his history, so no alarms went off when he volunteered.
Luckily my reader walked in the door, but now he faces a dilemma: Should he tell the current leadership about this person's past? Or, given that he truly believes that people can grow and change for the better, should he keep silent and give the former employee a second chance?
The right thing for my reader to do is to tell the organization's current leadership what he knows. If the agency keeps the formerly wayward volunteer on board, it should do so with full knowledge of his past and perhaps with limits on how much he deals with donations. If it chooses to dispense with his services, neither the agency nor my reader should feel guilty, since the former employee, in offering himself as a volunteer, clearly didn't tell the whole truth about his past work with the agency.
It's not only this former employee who can learn from his past, however -- my reader also has a lesson to learn. Because he let himself be led into the mistake of not addressing the issue head on 17 years ago, his agency was left vulnerable to subsequent exploitation. Now he has the chance to correct that error. He should seize it, and try not to make the same mistake again in the future.
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