Jeffrey L. Seglin's Blog, page 15

Let's just all try to show up on time

Should we wait to start a meeting or an event until everyone has arrived? That’s kind of the question a reader we’re calling Petra asked after she recently found the ballet she had paid to watch start 15 minutes after the published performance time.

“What really got me is that they were still seating people who arrived even later,” wrote Petra, who noted that when someone arrived late, it often resulted in a whole row of people having to stand to let the person into their seat.

After the ballet performance, which Petra reported was exceptional, she considered whether she was overreacting. She remembered, however, that it’s not just ballet performances that seem to be interrupted by tardy attendees. More and more people seem to be showing up late to virtual or in-person meetings at work, Petra wrote.

What’s worse, she noted, was that they never seem to be called out on their lateness, nor do they offer an apology to the those who assembled on time. Most often Petra indicates the meetings start without the late attendees, but it particularly aggravates her when the convener says something like: “Why don’t we give people another few minutes to arrive before we get started?”

Why, wondered Petra, should those who were responsible enough to show up on time have to wait?

Petra has every right to be aggravated. There are occasions when people, even Petra, might be late for a meeting or an event because of unforeseen circumstances. But should they expect the meeting to wait for their arrival before it begins?

Employees of companies create the norms for acceptable behavior. If colleagues know that meetings never start on time, the message is likely to be received that showing up on time doesn’t matter. But if meetings were to start on time regardless of whether everyone had arrived on time, the message might be made clear that it was important to be there on time both out of an interest to accomplish whatever task is at hand and to show respect for colleagues’ time.

If an employee is perpetually late to a meeting, then the right thing is for that person’s manager to remind them of the importance of showing up. If the late arriver is the manager or boss, then the message is sent that lateness is OK. If lateness is the norm, employees like Petra will have to decide if the aggravation is offset by other positive aspects of working for this business.

As for the ballet or any other performance, the right thing is to make every effort to get people seated and to start on time. Once the performance starts, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to consider reverting to the old tradition of only seating people during breaks in the performance. I am confident some places already do this. Sure, it might be frustrating to late arrivers to miss some minutes of the performance, but then the vast majority of the patrons who are already seated won’t have to be frustrated by waiting longer for the action to start or to have it interrupted once it does.

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

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Should I have told my accountant I was leaving him?

How much of an obligation do you have to a service provider to let them know you’re switching providers? Does it make any difference if you knew the provider as he was getting his start in the business?

Typically, changing service providers would seem like no big deal. It’s rare, for example, that an individual at your cable television service provider would take it personally if you decided to avail yourself of a better offer from a competitor. But a reader we’re calling Penny finds herself wondering if she did something wrong by switching accountants – mostly because the accountant got in touch with her after the move to let her know how disappointed he was she hadn’t given him a heads-up that she was making the move.

Penny had met her former accountant before he opened his own firm. He had audited the business where Penny worked. They didn’t become friends outside of the workplace, but they chatted occasionally while at the office. When the accountant left the large accounting firm he worked for to start his own business, he let Penny know. She was in the market for an accountant to do her annual income tax reports so she signed on with him.

“He did a good job on my taxes,” writes Penny. For the first two years, she met one-on-one with him to discuss her tax filing. She even recommended his firm to others in search of tax form preparation services.

As the accountant’s practice began to grow, he added more accountants to the company. Penny was pleased that he and his firm were doing so well.

She was surprised, however, when at her most recent meeting with her old accountant, she learned that her account had been transferred to somebody new to his office whom she had not met before.

“He never told me he wouldn’t be doing my taxes himself,” wrote Penny. It was then that she decided to find a new accountant. “I might have stayed with him if he’d told me I was being moved to someone else and why. But I’m not sure.”

After she’d found a new accountant and asked her former accountant’s office to send her old tax forms to the new person, she received an email from her former accountant to let her know he was disappointed that she hadn’t told him she was moving and that he wished she had said something if she had been dissatisfied with the service.

“I didn’t respond,” she writes. “Should I have?”

The right thing would have been for Penny’s old accountant to let her know she’d be meeting with someone new at his firm and why. As his firm grew, it might have been understandable that he needed to spread the work out among others. Sure, it would have been good for Penny to let him know why she had made the move, mostly as a courtesy so he might avoid making the same mistake with others. But Penny did nothing wrong. The choice was always hers about what service provider best met her needs.

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

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

As deadlines loom and opinions fly, stay focused

     What is the appropriate response when all around you have an opinion on how something with which you are engaged should be done?

Must every piece of advice be acknowledged? Is it wrong to not show appreciation for the advice even if you believe it to be a piece of debilitating hogwash? Is it OK to ignore myriad pearls from those who believe to know best even if it’s clear to you they haven’t taken the time to understand neither the context of your endeavor nor the urgency you might have in tackling it head on?

A reader posed such questions to me recently after sitting through a series of planning meetings for a project whose deadline was rapidly approaching. What was clear from the planning meeting to the reader is that there was no shortage of opinions, but little understanding of what it would take to get things done and done on time.

Oftentimes, the reader noted, the desire to discuss a challenge in an effort to make sure it’s tackled in the best possible way seems to get in the way of actually taking action. In such cases, the well-trod dictum (attributed to Voltaire, Confucius and Shakespeare, among others) that we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good seems apt advice.

But how to handle those who seem determined to offer advice that seems likely to slow down a project without improving its chances of getting done?

Seeking advice and wisdom is a good thing. If you are ready to move on, however, move on. There’s no need to be dismissive of others’ opinions at that point. A simple, “Thank you for the input” can be far more constructive.

If after the project is completed it turns out that some of that untaken advice might have actually improved the outcome, that’s always a risk. Perhaps that’s the time to embrace Samuel Beckett’s line from his novella “Worstward Ho”: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Maybe it’s best to recognize that there may be no one perfect way to tackle a problem. As one of Tom Stoppard’s characters in his play “The Real Thing” says, “Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.”

Or perhaps it’s as I regularly tell my students agonizing over how to write that perfect piece for class before turning it in that their pieces can only be as good as they can be by the time they hit their deadline.

We might grow frustrated in meetings where everyone seems to have an opinion about how we should do something without having any real sense of what it takes to get that thing done. The temptation might be to try to assess if the motives of others are well-intentioned or if they are determined to derail a project by slowing it down.

Rather than allowing ourselves to get distracted by being agitated in response, however, we’d do well to recognize that ultimately the best thing is to do what needs to be done, as well as it can be done, with the knowledge and time we have to do it. As deadlines loom, that seems the right thing to do.

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

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Can a reader get credit for something they're not sure they deserve?

Is it OK to claim ownership of something even though it’s unclear the thing was ever really owned by you? And would it make any difference if you planned to give that thing away to a good cause? These questions arrived from a reader we’re calling Florence.

Here’s the story as Flo tells it. For many years, Flo has volunteered at an organization that accepts donations of lightly worn or new clothing that can then be used to clothe military veterans who are in need. Flo’s role has typically involved sorting the donations by condition, type and size after they have arrived.

Flo’s partner is a veteran, and her youngest child is currently on active duty. “I like doing something to help the veterans,” Flo wrote.

Typically, she puts in a few hours each weekend. The most excitement she said she experienced was after the organization received a particularly large amount of useful clothing through which to sort.

“But last week I was going through the pockets of a winter coat we received,” wrote Flo, noting that occasionally they will find assorted notes, chewing gum wrappers or other items. The procedure is to toss such things into the trash and move the clothing item along. But last week, one of the pieces of paper Flo pulled from the pocket of an overcoat was a $50 bill.

After a moment of excitement, Flo did the right thing and turned the cash over to the manager of the veterans organization. He too was excited and told her he would add it to the cash donations the organization receives.

A friend mentioned to Flo that because she found the money and was the one to turn it in, she should consider claiming it as a charitable gift. Flo never considered this possibility, but was curious if it would be wrong to take credit for the donation of the $50 she found in the pocket of a donated winter coat. “It doesn’t feel right,” wrote Flo.

The $50 wasn’t Flo’s money but was part of the item donated to the veterans’ organization. She could have pocketed the $50 and then donated it herself, but that would have been dishonest. The coat never belonged to her. Given that $50 bills represent less than 5% of U.S. currency in circulation, it could be that whoever donated the coat meant the money as an anonymous contribution. But only the person who donated the coat might know why the $50 was in that pocket.

If a veteran receives a winter coat from the organization and happens to find cash in the pockets after they take ownership, it’s OK for them to keep it. Unlike Flo, that veteran will be the new owner of the coat. If the veteran wants to make a donation to the veterans’ organization, that’s up to them. But they have no obligation to do so.

That Flo is a dedicated volunteer to an organization whose mission she believes in is a good thing. That she was honest when she came across the cash in an item of clothing donated is also a good thing. That Flo trusted her instinct about trying to take tax deduction for turning the cash over seems both a good thing and the right thing to have done.

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

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Passing comments can have a long impact

My son Ed has been a high school English teacher for 28 years — five years more than I have been a college instructor. Early in his career, when I was still working as a magazine editor, he invited me to guest teach in his class.

It was eye-opening. For the first time, I experienced how challenging it was to engage a group of teenage students. But more importantly, I got to see how good a teacher he is and how devoted his students seemed to be to him.

His students were also curious about his life. At the end of the class he let students ask any questions of me or Nancy, my wife and Ed’s mother, who was also a guest. One young woman asked Nancy: “So he was your little boy?” The spark of recognition that he too had been a child once like them, somebody’s little boy, made her and others in the class smile.

I bring the experience up because it was that day Ed answered my question of how he knew he was reaching his students. He told us he didn’t know for certain but figured that if even one thing he taught throughout the term stuck with a student long after the class was over, he should count it a success. Many of his students stay in touch with him years after studying with him. He can count many successes.

Now that I have been teaching for 23 years, I have embraced the idea that while I work hard to teach specific stuff to specific groups of students, I never know what will stick. It turns out that sometimes small successes happen with those who are not even in a class with me.

Last June, I received an email from a student. “Early during Fall semester,” he wrote, he was walking to someone else’s class when he happened to notice a quote I keep taped to my office door. It’s from poet Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

“The more I thought about it, the more courage I got to do things I wanted to do and be rather than what my environment was telling me to do,” he wrote. "In a lot of ways, it defined how I used my time at [school] and what I want to do from here on in my life.”

He ended by thanking me for having inspired him. My first impulse was to respond by telling him that I hadn’t inspired him, it was Oliver’s words that had. But I had chosen that quote and a few others to place on my door, hoping students or others on campus might find them useful. It was my son Ed who inspired me to do whatever I could, inside the classroom or out, to try to reach students in any way.

Instead of brushing off the compliment from the student, I responded by thanking him. And now I will remind Ed of how much his passing comment early on in his teaching career and before mine began has influenced the way I try to teach. When someone gives us something that has a lasting impact long beyond its origin, it only seems the right thing to do.

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

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

 

Is a partner wrong not to agree it's time to behave differently?

     For some time, I’ve been sitting on a question raised by a handful of readers who happened to share a practice in their marriage that caused them to wonder about its ethical intricacies. The practice went something like this: As one member of the marriage spent money on themselves, the other felt it only fair that they spend an equal amount, even if they didn’t really desire anything at that moment. Judging from the questions, the practice evolved from some sense that the partners didn’t entirely trust one another to be responsible with money so they better spend equivalent amounts before the resources ran out.

I suspect there was more behind the motivation to keep score on who spent what, but the underlying premise was it was only fair that if partner A got whatever, then partner B deserved to get an equal whatever. The question I received typically arrived after one of the partners wanted to stop this practice while the other one didn’t. Was their partner’s choice not to stop unethical, was the question.

Let me remind readers that I am not a marriage counselor, psychologist or any sort of psychotherapist. My approach to therapy, I sometimes joke, would be to hear what behavior is bothering a client and then tell them to knock it off. If they arrived at the next session without having knocked off that behavior I would double my rates, and then proceed to double them each time the client showed up not having resolved the problem. While I might find such an approach inspired, I am confident it does not make for good psychotherapy. I don’t know, because I am not a therapist.

But the question of whether it’s unethical for a partner not to agree to stop a joint behavior because the other partner wants to change is one I can address. The short answer is that no, it is not inherently unethical behavior if someone doesn’t agree to stop doing something we don’t want them to do.

There are behaviors we might not like in others, behaviors with which we disagree, behaviors which we wish weren’t so, but that doesn’t make them unethical. In her essay, “On Morality,” published in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," Joan Didion wrote: “Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.”

I agree. Simply because we disagree with a behavior does not make it unethical.

Taking the time to find out why there is enough of a lack of trust in one another to feel the need for such a tit-for-tat practice seems the right thing to do rather than to perseverate about who is right and who wrong. If the services of a strong marriage counselor or therapist is needed to kick-start and mediate such a conversation, then that seems better money spent than trying to buy stuff simply to keep up with a partner’s outlays.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Check yourself when riding with others

“Check yourself,” an older woman who was seated on the subway car in Boston yelled quite loudly and clearly agitatedly at the young man who was standing next to her. “Your backpack keeps hitting me.”

The young man shifted a bit presumably so his backpack would be behind him and not knocking against the seated woman next to him. No luck.

“Just take the backpack off,” she yelled, repeating: “Check yourself.”

Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority can be an amazingly efficient way to get to work. I ride it every weekday morning. Most typically, it is anything but efficient. As more riders returned this year, the MBTA claimed it was short-staffed so trains ran less frequently, which resulted in longer waits and many passengers seeming to be a bit more on edge. Sometimes the boards announcing wait times work. Sometimes they don’t. And sometimes an announcer asks people to remove their backpacks before boarding, but most often that announcement doesn’t run. The MBTA is consistently inconsistent.

More passengers carrying backpacks do not remove their backpacks when they are riding the train. Rarely does anyone call them on it, even when their backpacks occasionally knock into the person behind or next to them.

But the seated older woman on this morning called out the young man quite sternly and loudly.

Should the young man have been thoughtful enough to remove his backpack upon entering the train? At the very least should he have been aware enough of his surroundings to realize his backpack was knocking into the woman next to him? Should he have had the wherewithal to “check himself” without having to be yelled at to do so?

And was the seated older woman right to yell at the young man before asking him if he could remove his backpack? She did, after all, go right to a DEFCON-level engagement before simply asking him to remove his backpack because it was hitting her.

No one I know likes to be smacked around with a backpack. It seems a normal response to be agitated when it happens. But sometimes simply pointing out the issue to the backpack wearer and asking if they might remove it can resolve the issue. And yes, sometimes people being asked to correct their behavior – even if asked politely – respond badly.

In searching for the right thing to do in such circumstances, the young man should have been more aware of how his appendage might cause discomfort to other passengers and the older seated woman should have considered whether yelling was the most effective way to resolve the issue.

The young man did not remove his backpack, but he did get off at the next stop. I placed my backpack that had been on one of my shoulders between my feet as I stood for the rest of the ride. I should have thought to check myself and place it there when I got on the train in the first place.

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

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

The stories we tell should be our own

Back in the day, before there were “essay mills” online that offer to sell prewritten school essays to college students to pass off as their own, cheating still existed, though it was decidedly of a more low-tech variety. Some fraternities or sororities would keep files of papers that had been written by members. Sometimes the files were passed off as resources for students to use in developing their own ideas, but too often they served as a way for a student to pass off someone else’s work as their own. Since the filed papers had been returned with grades and comments on them, the cheating student could even take a moment to improve upon the stolen work by addressing any shortcomings a professor had noted. Such practice was cheating then, and it’s cheating now in the new form it takes where students can buy a paper written by someone else.

One of my professors at college had been an undergraduate there as well about 15 years before I attended. He had been a member of a fraternity, and shortly before our first paper was due for class, he liked to tell the story of how a recent student had submitted quite a well-written paper that seemed awfully familiar to him. “A brilliant piece of work,” my professor said (or something akin to that), “but the problem was that I had written it.” The student had simply retyped a paper he found in the file cabinet of papers up at the fraternity house.

The message was clear: “Don’t try to cheat. I will catch you and you will fail.”

What I was never sure about was whether the story he told actually happened, or if it was one of those apocryphal stories teachers sometimes tell to try to set their students on the straight and narrow. At the time all that mattered to me is that I was given fair warning not to cheat, something I’m pretty sure was already embedded in my psyche anyway.

Does it matter if the story happened exactly the way my professor recounted it? As long as it happened and he wasn’t making it up out of whole cloth, I’m not convinced a little embellishment crossed any ethical line. Does it really matter, for example, that it was not likely “a brilliant piece of work”? Not so much.

Over the years that I’ve been a teacher, I have never had a student turn in a piece of work I had written years earlier. But I do tell them in the past I’ve found articles I’ve written among the samples being sold by online essay mills. I don’t tell them this to scare them out of cheating, though they know I’m against that too. I tell them to let them know they should never be OK with someone else stealing their work. I also tell them that because it’s true.

We might embellish the stories we tell. We might not remember everyone who was involved in the stories we tell. But if we are using stories to make a point whether we are teaching or doing anything else, the right thing is to make sure those stories are true.

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

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

There's no moral high ground to using ethics as a bludgeon

I make mistakes. Most of us do. Even though I have written “The Right Thing” column about how people make ethical choices since September 1998, I am not immune to an occasional ethical lapse or have fallen short of making the best right choice I could have made.

Writing a column about ethical decision-making gives me no special powers to be more ethically righteous than anyone else. Because it’s part of my job, I may think about such things more frequently than some others, but my own shortcomings remind me that each of us is fallible and the best we might be able to hope for is to strive to do right by others.

There are times, however, that the fact of me writing this column has been used as a bit of a bludgeon. Once, after an editor and I got into a heated argument about how best to describe something in an article I had written, he grew impatient and said, “All right, Mr. Ethics, there’s no arguing with you.” That may have shut down our discussion for a moment, but it didn’t fix the article passage. My editor’s suggestion seemed to be that because I write about ethics I must think I have all the right answers. He was wrong. I don’t.

Another time when I was being interviewed on stage by a business school professor in the Midwest about how businesspeople can make sound ethical decisions, an attendee took some joy in asking how either the dean or I could be trusted to be an expert on the topic of ethics when we flagrantly ignored the signs on the auditorium door that read “no drinks,” as evidenced by our bottles of water sitting alongside us on stage. The audience member was correct. We violated the rules even though the water was on stage greeting us when we arrived. But if his suggestion was that either of us claimed to practice perfect ethical behavior in business because we were discussing it on stage, he too was wrong.

From time to time, I try to let readers know what has influenced the reasoning I use when writing a column on the ethical choices we make. Sometimes this takes the form of referencing a piece of writing. Other times it involves citing someone far wiser than I am about a particular topic. What I never try to do in the column, however, is to suggest that somehow I have the only appropriate ethical response to a given question or situation. I don’t.

For many situations, there’s no one right answer or choice. The ethical work involves thinking through all the possible choices we can make in response to something to try to arrive at the best right choice possible. You and I may arrive at a different solution to an ethical challenge with neither of us necessarily being wrong.

The right thing, it seems to me, is to avoid using ethics as a bludgeon with which to judge others or to assume you or I or someone else has some sort of moral high ground, but instead to focus on how to think through the decisions and choices we make. Ideally, we’ll make these choices motivated by doing what’s best not just for ourselves but also for those who might be affected by our actions.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.  Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.  Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Are we obligated to forgive?

Are we ethically obligated to forgive someone? That question arrived from a reader a few weeks ago and, lest he hold a grudge for me not attempting to answer, I am going to give answering it a whirl.

Putting aside hard-held beliefs by some that we “forgive and forget” or “turn the other cheek,” how much of an ethical responsibility do we have to do so? Some depends on what the transgression was and who we are.

If the transgression was slight (failing to hold a door open for the person behind us, not sharing a friend’s like for a favorite book or movie, wearing white shoes after Labor Day), there seems little reason for putting off forgiveness, especially when the transgressor might not even know there was anything to be forgiven. If the transgression is a bit more serious (quietly rooting for the Yankees in a Red Sox household), it might take some more time to fashion forgiveness, but seems hardly worth losing a relationship over.

There are times, however, when someone does something that strikes the recipient as so egregious, they just can’t bring themselves to forgive the person. When, for example, a boss is unsupportive or dismissive of an employee, is it any surprise that the employee may not find the ability to forgive? Or if a friend goes to prison for writing hundreds of bad checks including some to us, are we really ethically obligated to forgive?

Some, as I wrote earlier, depends who we are. If we decide everyone deserves a second chance and shouldn’t be judged by one action, then perhaps forgiveness is warranted. Does that mean we should recommend that overbearing boss for a job or trust our finances to the check kiting friend? Does that mean we should not warn a friend who asks about what that awful boss was like to work for? No, of course not. Even if forgiveness is granted, it doesn’t automatically trigger amnesia about whatever the transgression might have been. Sure, “forgive and forget” can work just fine for minor infractions. For greater ones that might have set someone’s life askew, forgetting might be too much to ask.

We shouldn’t force anyone to have to forgive someone unless they truly want to forgive them. And that forgiveness should only come when the genuine desire exists to forgive. Otherwise, it is a hollow gesture.

It’s important to remember, however, that the act of forgiveness gives us no claim to moral righteousness, nor does it guarantee that everything between us and whoever wronged us over whatever will be set straight. Whoever wronged my longtime reader who asked if we are ethically obligated to forgive someone may find that the person who wronged him doesn’t give one whit if my reader forgives him or not. If he cares to remember the incident at all, the person who wronged him may maintain that he did nothing that needs forgiveness.

If we’re going to forgive someone for something, the right thing is to do so when we genuinely want to forgive, even if we receive no acknowledgment of that forgiveness in return.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.  Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.  Follow him on Twitter @jseglin