Jeffrey L. Seglin's Blog, page 39

Should fabricated credentials result in dismissal?

In its 2017 survey of 4,000 human resources, recruiting, security, and management professionals, HireRight, an employee screening service reported that it found that 85 percent of respondents had found a lie or misrepresentation on an employee's resume or job application. Five years earlier, 66 percent of respondents reported making such discoveries.
Back in 2002, I wrote about how the then president of the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) had resigned because she had fabricated the earning of a Ph.D. Neither the degree nor the reported subject of study was a requirement for her to have done her job. Sixteen years ago, I cited Automatic Data Processing's (ADP) study of employee background verifications, which found that 41 percent "of education records showed a difference between the information provided by an applicant and that reported by the educational institution."
Granted, both HireRight and ADP sell services to assist employers in ferreting out falsehoods in prospective employees' applications and resumes. It's in their best interest to raise concerns among hiring managers who might look to either company to help them separate truth from fiction among job application details.
But there's nothing to suggest anything is hinky about these findings. People go far beyond "embellishing" and outright lie -- sometimes in small ways, sometimes with whoppers -- about their accomplishments. And the percentage of people who are discovered to have done so is approaching staggering.
What's an employer to do when such lies are discovered? The USOC president lost her position as have other high-profile employees. But loss of employment is not always the response.
A recent case in Boston, reported in The BostonGlobe, featured the story of a state government employee who had been suspended and demoted after it was discovered that she apparently incorrectly listed having earned a master's degree. An advanced degree was not required for the job from which she was demoted nor the one she had held previously. Nevertheless, the same alleged misrepresentation was made when she had initially been hired more than a decade ago. As I write, she continues to hold her job. The university from which the employee claims to have a master's degree reports it has no record of such a degree being earned.
If a state agency or any prospective employer wants to get a sense of the integrity of its applicants, a simple way to do so would be to verify a prospective employee's stated credentials. It's not a given that an employee who would lie on a resume will lie on the job, but not hiring people who lie to get a job seems a fairly low ethical bar.
If the state employee lied about having earned an academic degree when she was originally hired, she was wrong. If the state agency believed the fabrication of a graduate degree was enough to rescind a promotion, the right thing also would be to evaluate whether a lie had been committed on the original job application and decide if it's appropriate to keep an employee on who appears to have misrepresented herself from the get-go. 
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 answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 
F ollow him on Twitter: @jseglin  
(c) 2018 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Should my tenant's free-ness with her keys concern me?

In addition to her primary residence, a reader we're calling Lillian owns a two-family house, which she rents out. She does her best to manage the rental property herself, making sure everything works in each apartment and taking time to make sure that the yard is kept up. Mostly, however, Lillian relies on her tenants to take care of their apartments, asking them to alert her if anything is in need of repair.
Lillian has friends who also own rent properties. She's heard stories of tenants wrecking apartments, and even one who put a room in her apartment on Airbnb so she could make some extra cash, even though her lease prohibited subletting of any kind. For the most part, aside from an occasional late rent payment, Lillian has felt fortunate that she has had few run-ins with her tenants.
She says she is glad that the wear and tear on the apartment has been minimal. She takes the fact that most of her tenants come from word of mouth from previous tenants as a sign that her tenants have been pleased with their rental experience.
Lillian says she does her best to keep up each apartment and to make each tenant feel as safe as possible during their tenancy.
In addition to showing up regularly to take care of yard work or other tasks around the building, Lillian often drives by the apartments on her way home from work. "Just to keep an eye on things," she writes. Most often, there's nothing to see and the house seems in good shape.
But a few weeks ago, as Lillian was driving by the apartment, she saw a couple of people leaving the first floor apartment. One was carrying a tray of cleaning supplies. The other was lugging a vacuum cleaner. They were also wearing identical shirts with a pocket logo Lillian couldn't make out.
"It looks like my first floor tenant has a cleaning service," Lillian writes.
On the surface, this didn't strike Lillian as a bad thing. Having tenants who take care of their apartments is good. Still, Lillian was concerned.
"I didn't see my tenant when I saw the cleaning people," writes Lillian. "I'm worried that she's made a copy of the apartment key and given it to the cleaning people without asking me if that was OK to do."
While there's nothing in her tenants' leases that prohibits making copies of keys for others, Lillian is concerned about security because of apartment keys floating around about which she doesn't know.
"Am I going to have to change the locks each time I rent to someone new?" she asks. "Should I say something to my tenant?"
If non-renters having keys to the apartment concerns her, Lillian should certainly say something. If she wants to forbid the practice of having keys made, she might consider placing that in future lease agreements. 

But the right thing is for Lillian to get clear on what concerns her. Is it not being asked if it's OK for a tenant to make a key for a cleaning person? Or is it not wanting anyone but her renters having a key? Once she is clear on that, she should speak with the renter and let her know. Until she does, the renter does not appear to have done anything wrong. 

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 answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 

F ollow him on Twitter: @jseglin  

(c) 2018 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Do good flower boxes make good neighbors?

There's a bit of a construction boom going on in Theresa's (that's what we're calling her here) neighborhood. Once a quiet, tightly knit neighborhood on the outskirts of a relatively small city, it had recently been discovered by a new generation of buyers and developers looking to invest in the next hot city neighborhood. By virtue of having been born and raised there, Theresa had discovered the neighborhood long ago.
Some of the activity has involved people buying older homes in a new neighborhood for themselves. Other activity has resulted from developers buying older properties and either renovating them and flipping them to sell or knocking them down and building larger, more modern units to sell.
While the activity has driven up the value of most of the houses in the neighborhood, including Theresa's, it's also resulted in a lot of noise and construction traffic during the week and often on weekends. Theresa says she will be happy when the activity dies down.
For about a year, developers have been working on a multi-family house behind Theresa's house. The backs of the two houses share a private road, along with four or five other houses. Most of the homeowners keep their trash cans out back and don't pay nearly as much attention to how the area looks as they do with the area in front of their houses.
But the developers next door are hoping to charge a premium price for the units behind Theresa's house and they're not sure prospective buyers are going to love the idea of looking out onto random trash cans and old porch stoops.
"The developer asked if he could attach a flower box to the railing of my back porch," Theresa says. He's indicated that he'd pay to have the flower box attached and also planted with flowers once it's installed. Apparently, according to Theresa, he's asked the owners of other houses on that shared road the same thing.
"I don't want to be a bad neighbor," says Theresa. "But I don't want to have a flower box out there that I have to keep up all the time. It's where I keep my trash." As long as the trash is neatly secured, Theresa says she doesn't care as much how it looks behind her house as she cares about the lawn and gardens in the front and side yards.
"He did offer to pay for it," she says. "But would it be wrong to decline his offer?"
Of course it wouldn't be wrong to decline his offer. It's her house and the right thing is to decide what to do and what not to do to it, regardless of who pays. It's not Theresa's or her neighbors' responsibility to tidy up so the developer next door can get top dollar for his new units.
But if Theresa or any of her neighbors always wanted a flower box for their back stoop, there'd be nothing wrong with seizing the opportunity to have someone else pay to install it and to plant the first round of flowers, knowing they would be footing the bill for any flowers to come. 
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 answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 
F ollow him on Twitter: @jseglin  
(c) 2018 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

When parents break the rules, should other parents report them?

Each school-day afternoon during the school year, the pick-up line at a particular public grade school can wind out of the school parking lot and onto the shoulder of the entering street for at least a half a mile. The school has no official school buses, so parents must arrange to pick up their children after school.
Because so many cars are moving in and out of the parking lot, the officials at the school have made their best effort to impose safety regulations on all students and drivers to ensure that the pick-ups are safe. One of the rules hammered home to parents is that once they are in line, they are asked to refrain from speaking on their cellphones. From a safety perspective, this lessens the chance of distracted drivers holding up the line or inadvertently rolling into the car ahead of them. It also helps ensure that the flow of cars continues to move. (In this public school's state, it's illegal to text while driving, but not illegal to speak on your cellphone.)
Often, parents are not great about following the no cellphones in line rule. The teachers or staff monitoring the line do their best to remind parents, but, well, they're not always successful.
Recently, a parent reports that when she was home one evening checking her Facebook newsfeed, she clicked on the unofficial page for her child's school. Often that site is full of announcements about upcoming events and relevant bits of information about the school. But tonight, she came across a link to a short video that was posted by one of the other parents to promote her small business.
"It didn't seem entirely appropriate to have this post on the unofficial school Facebook pages," writes that parent who noticed the post. "But that's not what concerned me the most."
On the video, the parent was clearly taping her announcement while sitting in the front seat of her car. She announced to the viewers that she was taping as she was sitting in the pickup line for her child's school.
"She was using her cellphone and then posted the video to the Facebook group," writes the parent who noticed the post.
"Am I obligated to tell school officials about this?" asks the parent. It struck her as a flagrant violation of the rules.
There's no obligation to report the parent. If the observer is concerned that the taping posed a safety threat or that it could have disrupted the pick-up procedure, the right thing would be to post a comment in response to the video letting the poster know this. If the view believes that promoting a business on the unofficial school site is inappropriate, the right thing is to message the site's administrator and ask for the post to be removed. But the right thing and the thoughtful thing for the parent making the video while on the pick-up line is to reconsider doing such things in the future and instead wait until she is not in line to record the post. 
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 answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 
F ollow him on Twitter: @jseglin  
(c) 2018 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Keeping the books and all that comes with them

Every year, a reader we're calling Bert looks forward to his town library's massive used book sale. The sale takes place over several days. Bert visits the sale on several days and uses the event as a way to stock up on some of his reading for the following year.
Often, after he has finished reading the books he purchases, if Bert doesn't want to keep them on his own shelves or if he doesn't have a friend to whom he might want to give a copy of a book, Bert will donate copies back to the library for it to sell at the next year's sale.
Bert writes that he's come away with some real gems over the years, ranging from first editions of decades-old titles to paperbacks of relatively new offerings. He's also occasionally found interesting material tucked among the pages of his purchases such as old bookmarks with the names of faraway bookstores; Inscriptions to prospective readers from someone presumably giving a book as a gift; Even a personal letter or two tucked away in the pages.
The only downside, Bert observes, is that he doesn't have enough bookshelves to store all of his purchases. It's not unusual for piles of books to sit by his bedside or to be stacked up on random tables and flat surfaces throughout his house.
Because his haul of books each year is sizeable, Bert often doesn't get around to reading each book until well after the book sale has ended. A few weeks ago, as he was choosing a next title to take on, Bert settled into a favorite reading chair with a book and began to thumb through its pages. Within seconds, a piece of paper floated onto his lap. Upon closer inspection, Bert saw that the piece of paper was a $20 bill.
Given that books at the sale are generally $1 or $2 a copy, he rarely spends much more than $20 each year. With this newly discovered windfall, Bert pretty much had recoupled his used book expenditures for that previous year.
While he writes that his first reaction was one of pleasure, he soon grew concerned that keeping the $20 might not be the honorable thing to do.
"The library is trying to raise money by selling the used books," Bert writes. "Is it wrong for me to keep the money knowing that the sale is a fundraiser for the library?"
Bert should not feel any guilt about keeping the $20. If he wants to, he can certainly donate the $20 to the library. Or he can use it to buy an extra $20 worth of books at the next sale. Or he can simply keep the money.
Similarly, if Bert had discovered that one of his $2 purchases turned out to be a book he could sell to collectors for far more money, he would have no obligation to share any profits with the library.
When he purchased the books, he was buying everything contained within their pages.
The right thing is for him to rest easy in whatever option he decides to take and to settle in to another good read. 
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 answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 
F ollow him on Twitter: @jseglin  
(c) 2018 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Is it wrong to take student discount if I'm not a full-time student?

Partly because she wants her online purchases of books and products delivered swiftly and free, and partly because she wants to follow-up on friends' and colleagues' suggestions of shows to watch on Amazon Prime's streaming television service, a reader we're calling "Sally" has decided to sign up for Amazon Prime. Colleagues at the large university where Sally works regularly chat up one another about their latest weekend binge-watching activity, and Sally finds some of their entertainment choices intriguing enough to want to get in on the binge.
Given that she already pays for cable service, internet service, a Hulu subscription, and a Netflix subscription, Sally wasn't crazy about the $119 per year fee to join Amazon Prime. But a colleague who works with her told her that the price for college students with an .edu email address is only $59 a year, plus students can get a six-month free trial, before the annual fee kicks in.
Everyone who works at the university has an .edu address, even if they are not students. One of the perks of working at the university is the ability to take one course every semester for a nominal fee, or, if you've been working there as long as Sally, for free.
"I've tried to take a course every semester," Sally writes. "So technically, I guess this makes me a student." But she acknowledges that the reason she has the required .edu email address is because she's an employee of the university, not because she's a student.
Sally wants to know if it would be wrong for her to sign up for the student rate on Amazon Prime even if she is not a full-time student.
It's certainly worth a shot. If Amazon's intention is to give those taking college courses a break on the price, then taking even one course a semester seems to fit the criteria. Some students go to college part-time, so Sally's level of engagement with college might not be all that different from many other college students.
"I'm not sure if it's something I want to keep," she writes, "so the six-month trial is really attractive."
If Sally wants to try out the service, the right thing for her to do is to go to the online signup page and begin the process of signing on for the six-month trial. As she fills out the application to join, she might find that some questions posed make it clear that she is not eligible for the college discount. But if she finds that she is able to fill out the form successfully, providing all the information asked for, then she should rest easy with her decision to join her friends and colleagues who get free two-day shipping on purchases and access to however much programming Amazon Prime offers.
Of course, given that Sally already has cable television, Hulu, and Netflix, she might find that adding yet another streaming television service to her life finally pushes her over the edge on entertainment. But that's a different conundrum for another day. 
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 answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 
F ollow him on Twitter: @jseglin  
(c) 2018 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Showing kindness without thanks

Winter weather had finally given over to a glimpse of sunshine in the Boston area. Nevertheless, the subway trains were running particularly slow one April morning. At regular intervals on M.N.'s ride to work, the train would remain a few extra minutes at the station with a barely audible message alerting passengers to a "schedule adjustment" or "traffic ahead," although the latter of these seems a given for any train on any track ever.
While riders seemed a bit happier than a few weeks earlier when they sloshed through snow and muck to catch the train, patience was wearing a bit thin because of the delays. Finally, about halfway to M.N.'s destination, a subway employee helped an elderly gentleman using a support cane onto the train. A few passengers moved and offered their seats to the man who appeared to be blind, an assumption that was confirmed when he sat down directly across from M.N., and said in a loud voice: "I'm blind. I hate the world."
A young woman sitting next to the gentleman asked him if he needed any help, to which he responded, "I don't know you" in a response that sounded somewhat perturbed.
The doors closed and the train finally made its way to the next station.
There wasn't a delay at the stop and M.N. was concerned that the man might miss his stop. As they were about to arrive at the next station, M.N. shouted across the way, "What stop do you want to get off at?"
The man responded, "Who are you?" again sounding perturbed.
"I'm the guy you told you were blind and hated the world," M.N. responded.
The gentleman laughed. Loudly.
When they finally pulled into M.N.'s stop for work, he saw that the gentleman got up as well.
"Do you need help?" M.N. asked him.
"Yes, I'm going downstairs to catch the bus?"
As they exited the train M.N. offered the man his arm, which he took, and they started walking.
"Can't you walk any faster?" the man asked M.N.
So M.N. picked up the pace. They arrived at the lower-level bus stop.
"OK, we're here," M.N. said.
The man removed his armed, grumbled "yeah," and walked away.
M.N. was a bit taken aback that the gentleman seemed brusque and didn't offer as much as a "thank you" for M.N.'s efforts.
Now, M.N. wonders if he was wrong to offer help.
Offering help to someone who seemed in need was an appropriate and kind gesture. If the man didn't want the help, he could have refused it. But he accepted the offer and M.N. helped him get to his desired location.
The polite and gracious thing would have been for the man to thank M.N. But if M.N.'s motivation was to do something helpful to someone who appeared to need help, then that act alone should have been sufficient. While a thank you might have made M.N. feel good, not getting one doesn't diminish the kindness he tried to show.
Getting acknowledged for a good act shouldn't be the primary driving force if the desire is truly to show kindness or to help someone in need. The right thing is to know that sometimes showing kindness to a stranger is its own reward. 
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 answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 
F ollow him on Twitter: @jseglin  
(c) 2018 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

If a tree falls, who owns it?

A reader we're calling, Gil, and his neighbor, Roger, became friendly shortly after Gil and his family bought their house about a decade ago. Since Roger had lived on the property abutting Gil's backyard for more than 30 years, he was quick to share wisdom about the neighborhood and most anything else to which Gil was willing to listen.
Roger was older and made clear to Gil that the two of them did not share political views. Occasionally, Roger was prone to make an inappropriate remark about a particular group of people and Gil was in the habit of regularly calling Roger on why what he said was thoughtless or worse.
Nevertheless, the two neighbors got along well and, as Gil tells it, enjoyed the occasional company of one another.
Shortly after Gil purchased his house, he began to stack fallen twigs and leaves behind a row of trees in the back of his yard. He stopped once Roger pointed out that Gil was "technically" dumping stuff on his property line, which he proceeded to walk off as a way of pointing out to Gil what was Roger's and what wasn't.
Gil was pretty certain that the plot map indicated his twigs and leaves were stacked on his property, but he wanted to avoid an argument, so he began placing them in a heap next to the shed in his side yard - well out of view of Roger's house.
This past winter hit Gil's and Roger's neighborhood hard. Week-long, sub-zero temperatures followed by snowstorms accompanied by 60-plus mile-an-hour winds wreaked havoc. Pipes froze, though luckily nothing burst in Gil's or Roger's houses.
They weren't so lucky when it came to the two 50-foot trees that fell between Gil's and Roger's house. The trees had tipped over, broken, and the root ball had lifted out of the ground. They would need to be removed by a tree service so more damage wasn't done to other trees during a subsequent storm.
Since the trees were right behind where Gil had placed those twigs and leaves years earlier, he asked Roger if he planned to call a tree service to have the felled trees removed.
"I'd be glad to, but they're on your property," Roger responded. Gil then says he walked off the property line to show Gil where it was, although this time it was a few feet back from where Roger had walked off the line years earlier.
Now, Gil wants to know if he should remind Roger that he had claimed that property as his own and get him to pay for the tree removal, even though Gil always believed the property was his? Or should he be a good neighbor, have the trees removed, and eat the cost?
Gil could spend the money on a surveyor to settle who owns what, but that's likely wasted money since his plot plan already points to the land as his. The right thing to do is for Gil to pay to have the trees removed because they are on his property. He should then feel free to dump his twigs and leaves where he originally wanted. 
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 answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 
F ollow him on Twitter: @jseglin  
(c) 2018 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Should one person's behavior result in another's meddling?

Last fall, a reader, let's call him Wade, had a run-in with a woman we'll call Helen, during a meeting of a local nonprofit that supplied services to the area. Wade sat on the board and Helen was a resident of one of the communities seeking services. As Wade recalls it, when it came time for Helen to address the board, the tone turned accusatory, suggesting that her requests had been overlooked.
"Did you make a written request?" Wade recalls asking, to which he recalls Helen suggesting that she shouldn't have to because she had been quite vocal about her requests in the past and the board knew what they were, adding that the whole community was behind her.
After explaining that the process required written requests, Helen expressed her displeasure, but insisted she would have a written request submitted to the board by its next meeting. Several board meetings have taken place since. No written request was ever submitted by Helen.
Now, Helen is running for an elected office in her community. Wade does not reside in that community so he gets no vote. But he does have friends and colleagues who live there. Wade still rankles from Helen's behavior at the fall nonprofit board meeting. He is tempted to urge his friends and colleagues who live in Helen's town to vote for her opponent.
But Wade has discovered that where Helen's stance on many of the issues mirror those he would care about in his own town, her opponent's views are the type he'd typically vehemently oppose. He's never met the opponent and has no idea if he too has irked someone at a meeting.
"Should I still urge people not to vote for her?" asks Wade, "even though I don't live in their community and, on the issues, she and I agree?"
Wow. Wade sure holds a grudge.
If Wade believes it's important for those he knows who have a vote to know of an incident where Helen might not have followed up as rapidly as he would have liked, he has every right to let them know. But if he's going to delve into business which is really not his own, then he might also add that he has no beef with Helen when it comes to the platform on which she is running for office. Her opponent's views on the other hand? As long as he's weighing in, Wade's associates might find it useful to know that he finds his views on the issues abhorrent.
Urging them not to vote at all rather than to vote for Helen would be unacceptable.
Instead, if he feels strongly enough about it, Wade can tell his friends about his run-in with Helen, perhaps add that he'd be hard-pressed to vote for her ever for anything, but that his views are based more on personality than on the issues facing the town. That might make Wade feel better, but it would be of little use to those who actually have the right to vote in the election.
The right thing for his friends to do is learn as much about the candidates and issues as they can, and then to vote for the person they believe can do the best job. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 
F ollow him on Twitter: @jseglin  
(c) 2018 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

If I've offended you, I'm sorry

"I'm sorry. I was wrong."
"Thank you for your apology."
There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
Is it wrong not to apologize when being called out on some deed or transgression? It's a question that looms large lately with news reports of harassment, bullying, turning a blind eye, and assorted bad behavior from well-known players in various walks of life.
Sometimes taking responsibility for a bad act may arouse fear of losing credibility or livelihood. But sitting silent when the evidence suggests that, at the very least, an apology is called for, often results in chipping even more away at a reputation built.
A non-apology apology ("I'm sorry if any of my actions caused [assorted names here] to believe I did something wrong") often only serves to fuel the perception that the non-apologizer has behaved badly.
In the early 1990s, when I was working as an editor at a business magazine, we would often invite founders of startup companies to join our editorial team for an informal lunch. While these lunches didn't always turn into stories, they did provide opportunities for us to get to know people who were doing interesting things in the marketplace.
At one lunch, the founder of a company that made children's toys visited us. There was nothing remarkable about the lunch. We asked questions about where the founder got the idea for the company, how she planned for it to grow, and why she thought it might succeed in a market where no one had yet tried the approach she was taking.
The founder became a runner-up in a founder-of-the-year-type program we ran, but a couple of years later I ran into her at an industry conference and, after greeting her, learned that she found the lunch with us to be demoralizing because she found us to be condescending in our questions. That wasn't our intention, but rather than explain that it was our job to ask probing questions I simply said, "I'm sorry."
Clearly, there are times when apologizing would be wrong. If accused of doing something of which you know you are not guilty, holding fast is in order. When Socrates was accused of corrupting Athen's youth, he may have defended himself, but he never apologized, if his student Plato's account is trusted. Things didn't end well for Socrates (see hemlock/death), but he died sticking to his story.
When a well-known newscaster took aim on Twitter at a teenage activist last month because he shared on Twitter that he hadn't been accepted to several colleges, the teenager successfully convinced some of the newscaster's advertisers to pull advertisements from her show. Only after these advertisers acted did the newscaster sort of offer an apology. If the student wanted to go high in response, he simply could have responded, "thanks," even if he kept up the effort to influence her advertisers.
If adults want to model good ethical behavior for teenagers attempting to do good, the right thing is to be honest and forthright in their apologies if they discover they erred. If we're going to own our successes, we should also own our shortcomings. 
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 answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 
F ollow him on Twitter: @jseglin  
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