Jeffrey L. Seglin's Blog, page 72

Just because it's legal, is it ethical?

Early each morning during the school year, a big yellow school bus tries to maneuver the tight corner in front of my house. On-street parking is legal on both sides of the street, so there are times when it's particularly difficult for a big yellow school bus to maneuver its way around parked cars to make its way around the corner.
We can tell when it's a particularly challenging morning because we begin to hear the back-up beeps that large vehicles like big yellow school buses make when they attempt to back up, and the bus driver beeps his horn signaling that he's stuck.
While most neighbors know not to park their cars on both sides of this corner so large vehicles (fire trucks also have a way of getting stuck), parking remains legal on both sides of the street.
Recently, the owner of a 1990s blue sedan has decided to park regularly in the spot that is the direct culprit for making corner maneuvers tough. For several mornings, the driver of the big yellow school bus tried to navigate his way through the narrow corner passageway. Traffic piled up behind the bus streaming down a one-way side street, but on most of these days the bus made it through.
That success came to an end last week. The passageway was simply too narrow and the bus driver ultimately hooked onto the front side fender of the car. Traffic piled up. Neighbors emerged from their homes. The bus driver got off the bus to see if he could figure out who owned the blue sedan. (None of the neighbors knew at that point.)
Finally, the owner of the blue sedan came out from his house, asking neighbors if they knew what was going on.
"Someone's parked their car and blocked the school bus," came the answer.
The fellow looked toward the bus. "That's my car," he responded.
Meanwhile, as the bus driver approached the car owner, a neighbor was talking to the kids on the stuck bus to keep them calm. (For the record, they were not only calm, but were enjoying the drama.)
"The city should add a sign that says it's not legal to park there so the bus can make it through," the car owner said to the neighbor as she left the kids.
She told him that it would be a lot easier for large vehicles to make the turn around the corner if he didn't park his car where he had been parking it.
"But it's a legal spot," he responded, adding, "I'm a lawyer, so I know it's legal."
The car owner knows that it's difficult for large vehicles to make the turn around the bend when he parks his car where it does. But since it's not illegal to park there, he sees no wrong in doing so even knowing the resulting traffic tie up he often causes.
"The city should do something about this!" he argues.
The right thing, regardless of whether it's legal, is for him to do something about it and not park his car where he knows it's a problem. Other neighbors already know this is the right thing to do - even if it's not illegal to do otherwise. If ethics is how we decide to behave when we belong together, we shouldn't always need a no-parking sign to tell us how to act. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Teacher tricks can send wrong message if dishonest

When do teaching techniques lapse into questionable behavior?
A reader laid off from her newspaper job applied for a license as a substitute teacher. In her state, she says, new substitute teachers are highly encouraged, and in some districts required, to take a one-day training class. The class is conducted by an educational organization located in her state.
Most of the attendees in the class the reader took had education degrees. Some were new graduates and others former teachers.
During the class, the trainer revealed that she had a highly effective classroom management technique she wanted to share. When she is in the classroom, she writes the numbers 1 through 60 across the top of the blackboard or whiteboard. She tells her students that if they cooperate and get through everything in that day's lesson plan quickly, she'll let them have a few minutes at the end of the class to talk together. The plan is that she will mark off a number as they make their way through the lessons. As soon as they get to 55, she tells her students, they can have their free time.
The secret, she tells her trainees, is to mark off the numbers quickly at first so you get the kids engaged in the scheme. Then you stop marking off the numbers until they remind you.
"You'll never hit 55," she tells her trainees. When the bell rings for the end of the period, she instructs them to tell their class, "Sorry, we'll try this again tomorrow."
Several educators in the room were thrilled with this new technique, says my reader - who was appalled. Then others shared additional methods of lying to students and tricking them into staying engaged. "It seems this is something they are taught as educators," my reader said.
The reader was so upset by this class, she says, that she considered dropping out of the substitute teacher program because, "I can't do what everyone else seems to think is the smart thing to do."
Anyone who has ever stood in front of a classroom full of pre-adolescent or adolescent children knows that a technique to engage the students in the course of study that works is gold. If the trainer had used the 1 to 60 technique honestly and was genuine in her offer to give her students a break if they finished a day's assignment in a timely fashion, she might have had something worth emulating.
But since she went into the exercise with the intent of never letting the students reach the magic 55, it's a dishonest gesture. The students might work to keep up their end of the bargain, but the deal is fixed. Sure, they get a full lesson plan and might be paying more attention than they otherwise might have. But why lie? Why not engage the children and honor the commitment you seem to be making? Why not let them hit 55 and get a break if they worked hard to get there?
Lying to or misleading kids to get them to do what you want them to do hardly passes ethical muster. The right thing is to find techniques that work to keep students engaged, but to never lose sight of the lesson you send about honesty and honoring commitments.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Taking responsibility for our credentials

Scott Thompson, the CEO of Yahoo, earned an accounting degree from Stonehill College in Easton, Mass. His degree was not also in computer science, a program that didn't begin at Stonehill until after Thompson graduated. Yet, in Yahoo's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Thompson was identified as having earned the degree in both majors.
Filing false information with the SEC about the CEO's background is not a particularly wise choice given that it violates the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and, as such, runs afoul of federal law.
But in spite of the fact that the erroneous academic credential has been featured as part of Thompson's public biography for years, the Yahoo CEO has said that he did not know about the error until it was pointed out by a Yahoo investor who wanted Thompson removed from his position.
Before Yahoo announced on Sunday, May 13, that Thompson was leaving the company, there was already fallout from the incident. One of the firm's directors, Patti Hart, who chaired the search committee that ultimately pinged Thompson to become CEO, stepped shortly after the resume embellishment hit the press.
If Thompson knew of the embellishment and did nothing to correct it, then he, like many executives before him who have been caught with a resume that didn't reflect reality, should be held accountable for not correcting the error. Ten years ago, I wrote about the president of the U.S. Olympic Committee stepping down after it was discovered that she did not hold the Ph.D. she claimed to have earned. In that case, the fake credential had nothing to do with the skills the person needed to perform her functions, nor did they run afoul of any federal laws.
If others posted the information about Thompson and knew that he did not hold the credential, then they, too, should be held accountable.
But what if it becomes clear that it's impossible to know who knew what when? What then? Should anyone be held accountable?
Yes, they should. And in this case, the ultimate responsibility lies with the boss. If Thompson truly didn't know what was in the SEC documents regarding information about the degree he earned, he should have. Granted, being a CEO of a large, public company is a consuming job and it may be impossible to keep track of every aspect of every detail that's involved in running the company.
But when it comes to personal information that is being presented, the CEO should be held accountable for knowing that it's out there on company documents and that it's accurate.
Would the search committee have offered Thompson the job if it turned out that he had a degree solely in accounting rather than a dual degree in accounting and computer science? Perhaps. Based on his extensive experience and documented accomplishments, what he majored in in college more than 30 years ago seems hardly likely to have mattered.
It's often the small stuff that does a fellow in. Making sure that how you're represented is accurate, particularly when it's your company doing the representing, is essential. Not just to avoid getting caught in a misstatement, but mostly because it's the right thing to do.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Giving hope to hopeless employees

"Some people are hopeless cases."
That's what a reader wrote me after recounting his efforts to provide assistance to a young employee.
The reader was the boss of a "rather brash" young employee who fancied himself a good writer. Part of the young man's job was to write quite a few memos for my reader. But each time he wrote one, his boss found himself having to do a rewrite.
After months of the young man not showing any improvement, his boss spent a good deal of his personal time wrestling with how he might help him improve.
"Without making any specific edits, I wrote down general suggestions about a memo he wrote," my reader says. "I gave him a list of things to consider - his tone, the position of the intended recipient, the need to avoid repetition of superfluous information and run-on sentences, and so on." It was, the reader recalls, a pretty long list.
The morning after giving him the list, the reader called the young man into his office. He asked him to take another look at the memo he had written in light of the list his boss had given him.
"He was back in my office in maybe two minutes, handed me the memo back, looked me in the eye, and said, 'I wouldn't change a word of it.'"
At this point, my reader arrived at his conclusion that "some people are hopeless cases."
One question raised by the incident is whether it's OK to make such broad assumptions and give up on someone as being untrainable. But a larger question is if it is fair to expect that the young man should have understood his boss's intentions if the boss didn't take the time to be more specific about his concerns.
The boss did go out of his way to try to guide his employee, but assuming that the young man could deduce from the extrapolated list what he should do with his own writing may not have been a particularly effective method. It assumes that the young man will be able to see that what the boss outlines on his list reflects problems with his own writing. The hope is that the young man would have caught on and transformed his writing.
But hope is not a particularly reliable teaching or training method. Different approaches work for different people.
Perhaps if the boss had been more direct with the employee and gone over the specifics of what was not working on the memos he wrote, the message would have sunken in more clearly. Perhaps it was those "specific edits" that my reader decided not to include that would have been precisely the technique that worked. After all, the young man was writing memos for his boss, so it was more than reasonable that the boss should have those memos reflect a style he preferred.
The right thing then is not to immediately cast off as hopeless that which doesn't change instantly based on our instruction. Instead, explore different methods to see which one works the best. If, after several attempts, the performance fails to improve then it's reasonable to decide that the employee is not the right fit for the job and to perhaps do a more thorough job screening for his replacement.  Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Is the juice worth the squeeze?

On April 26, Joel Ward scored the winning goal for his Washington Capitals in a National Hockey League playoff game against the Boston Bruins. It was the seventh game of a tied playoff series, so fan passion was at a high. Ward is one of the few black hockey players in the NHL.
Almost immediately, dejected Bruins fans (or those appearing to be) began tweeting racist comments about Ward. The comments were ugly and the response from the teams and the league swiftly condemned the epithets.
In one case, reporter Bob Hohler wrote in The Boston Globe that a young man had directed a particularly offensive comment at Anson Carter, a black man who had played for the Bruins in the late 1990s. Carter tracked down the tweeter, who turned out to be a college student, and reported him to his school. Carter received an apology from the tweeter, to which Hohler reports that Carter responded, "Don't think you can hide behind your computer and say that to someone."
In a perfect world, the young man might learn that words have consequences. They have sting - and they can stick with you far longer than you might expect.
There's no question that writers - whether they be columnists or tweeters - should think about what they write and the impact their words might have both to the subject about whom they're writing and on themselves.
While racists may rarely stop to think about the effect their words might have, many reasonable, intelligent people do. Through blogs, tweets, and assorted other venues, it's far easier than ever before to find a platform from which to espouse a viewpoint. But a question that often looms large, particularly among those at the beginnings of their careers, is: Will something I write come back to haunt me in the future?
It's a fair concern. Published words do stick around a lot longer than they used to and have the capacity to gather a larger audience than ever. (Students still regularly enjoy reminding me about a column I wrotefor an online magazine more than a decade ago about the ethics of faking an orgasm. Others like to point to an ethics column in which I copped to lifting butter knives from a fancy restaurant or two in my youth.)
Racist statements are never OK. But what about viewpoints on an issue about which you feel strongly that you fear might paint you in a less attractive light to future potential employers? What's the right thing to do when trying to weigh if such a risk is worth taking a public stand on something you believe is important? The old saw of trying to calculate if the juice is worth the squeeze is apt.
The right thing is to determine how important it is to you to get your message out into the world. Not everything any of us believes rises to the level of needing to have a larger audience simply because in a digital age anyone can publish or post with ease. Common sense should prevail. If you believe you'd be embarrassed by what you write, reconsider. Also, keep in mind that those things you fear will come back to haunt are often not the ones that do. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Must my civility be yours?

Last fall, I received an email from a columnist inToronto who noticed that I used a column she had written as one of the onlinereadings for a class I teach on column on and opinion writing. The columnist wrote to me to ask about the course as well as how I incorporated the readings into the course.
I didn't know the columnist, but she had taken the time to write to me with a reasonable question. It struck me that the civil thing to do was to respond. So, I responded by email. I try to respond to emails I regularly receive from readers of the column, even the angrier ones.
This raises the question, however, of whether it's wrong for the receiver of a message not to respond to someone when they reach out in a thoughtful manner whether it is by phone, conventional post, email or other avenues. Or, given the shift and breadth of communication venues over the past couple of decades, is it wrong for the sender to assume that the receiver is only civil if response is via the same communications venue?
A few weeks ago, for example, after reading an editorialthat a former student wrote at a college where I used to teach, I sent him an email congratulating him on the piece and also giving him some background I believed he might find useful given the topic of his column. No response.
The silence would have made any devotee of Miss Mannersboil (if boiling in itself weren't an inappropriate response). C'mon. I know that texting has replaced email as the immediate communication conduit of choice, but how hard is it to acknowledge a kind gesture put forth in an email?
Shortly after sending the email to him and having my WWMMD (What Would Miss Manners Do?) moment, I received an alert that thestudent columnist had started following me on my Twitter account.
If you wrote to me via email and, rather than respond to you in kind, I decided to find you on a networking site like LinkedIn to see if we could connect, would that be uncivil? Or maybe I decide to see if you're on Twitter so I can follow your posts, see if there's anything interesting, and have a way to respond to you and you to me if we have a common interest. Perhaps my choice was driven by a desire to set up a method of having an ongoing conversation rather than a one-off email.
Many people still respond directly via the same method of communication when you contact them. But given the new options that are available, that's not the only way to respond. The right thing may still be to acknowledge when someone reaches out to us, but there are many right routes that can be taken to make such acknowledgements.
My former student's decision to find me on Twitter and follow me to engage in occasional conversation was a right thing to do. Increasingly, one person's email could be another's tweet.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Can this fence inspire good neighbors?

A reader from Southern California and her husband are replacing the old fence around three sides of their property. Her husband has taken on the project himself and does not want his wife's daily involvement. But, she writes, she still has to deal with the many issues that have come up with neighbors.
Originally, the escape of a neighbor's dog who is a "notorious digger" was blamed for the fence construction. But even after the dog was found, the neighbors decided a new fence was in order. Well, all of the neighbors except for the one couple who wanted nothing to do with the fence rebuilding and "whose yard is basically a junkyard" and have "exhibited threatening behavior in the past," my reader writes.
Most neighbors in her area do not know each other well. But she and her husband do know their neighbors. Initially, the erection of the fence was to be a project among all but one - the threatening one -- of the abutting neighbors. That's no longer the case.
"Everyone wanted in in the beginning," my reader writes. "But they all disappeared when help was needed. Now no one remembers that they were informed that the fence would go up."
She observes that the "spirit of cooperation has evaporated." Given that her husband has taken it on himself to make sure the fence is erected, she wonders if it is her responsibility to try to restore this cooperative spirit among neighbors originally gung-ho for the project.
If the neighbors made a commitment to help with the costs and labor of the fence repair, then they have an obligation to follow through on that commitment. My reader and her husband should not have to shoulder the burden of completing the project.
But my reader cannot force her neighbors to change their behavior. If the completion of the fence has become important to only her and her husband, then the right thing is for them to decide whether they want to complete it or, like their abutting neighbors, forget about the whole project.
Without a legal agreement to jointly build the fence, the reader and her husband have only the word of their neighbors to go on. That should have been enough, but as anyone who has ever been involved in a group project of any kind knows, there are often those who simply don't follow through. The choice is then to scuttle the whole project because not everyone participates or to move forward and get the job done.
Following through on their initial commitment to get the fence completed is a choice my reader and her husband made. While it would be good to think that her neighbors might rally and a "cooperative spirit" could be reinstated, it is not my reader's responsibility to force the issue.
It is often true that good fences do make good neighbors . . . or, at the very least, make the neighbors more tolerable.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

Radio Interview with RTÉ news

An interview with Avril Hoare of RTÉ Radio's "This Week" news program about what media faces after making very public errors appears here.

The father, the mother and the daughter who cares

The elderly parents of a reader in the Southwest are suffering from dementia. Her mother has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and is in need of care to help her get around the house. "She is not a very neat eater, but I'm just glad that she is eating," the reader writes.
The reader's father is responsible for taking care of his wife most of the time because he does not permit the caretakers his daughter has hired to help him. "He has always been very judgmental of other people and their appearance, and quite vocal about it," writes his daughter.
Her father has begun to get verbally abusive to her mother, the reader believes. "He talks in her presence about how frustrated he is with her abilities - how she spills her drinks, can't walk right, or is always packing to go somewhere. He rolls his eyes and acts superior to her. He is quite demeaning to her."
The reader tells her father that he is being "completely rude to mom," but when she does he forgets within minutes and "continues his diatribe."
"I would like to shock him by being very rude to him," she says, "but he would forget in minutes and start again. If I do it often enough he might eventually get the point."
"My dad's dementia does not allow him to remember our talks and his pledges to 'do better'. He has no patience to learn any new communication techniques in this stage of his life.
"Doctors have tried talking to him but he blows everyone off. I had his legal and pastoral counselor talk to him and they left it that dad has 'free agency' and can do whatever he likes."
"Where," she asks "does my responsibility for respecting my parents and my effort to protect my mother become a moral obligation to protect one over the other?"
The reader's father can indeed do whatever he likes as long as he doesn't bring harm to his wife or others in the process.
His daughter seems to have two concerns: changing her father's behavior and making sure that her mother is safe and cared for. The right thing is to focus on the latter of these concerns.
While the daughter clearly seems to care for her parents and wants them to live as good a life as they can given their medical issues, she cannot change the way her father behaves. She can, however, work to make sure that her mother gets the help and assistance she needs, whether this is through home health care or at a health care facility that specializes in caring for residents with her mother's illness.
Hearing her father castigate her mother or those who care for her is clearly discomforting. Few people want to see their parents behave inappropriately. But the energy spent trying to change her father is likely better directed toward an immediate need that can be addressed - namely, her mother's care. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  
(c) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.

There's no need to be your neighbor's keeper

If you suspect a friend is skirting the law, should you drop a dime or keep your mouth shut and go your merry way? That's what a reader in the Midwest would like to know after a friend of 30-some years confided in him that he receives checks from Social Security.
The friend's wife has also received Social Security checks for about 30 years now, the reader writes, but "I wholeheartedly believe she deserves them." The reader has doubts, however, about her husband's "reported health problems."
Apparently, the friend is capable of working around his home - "on ladders painting, spreading gravel down his driveway, repairing plumbing, electrical and a multitude of other physical chores, but he insists that what he gets from the government is his due."
The reader admits that he is "not a doctor, nor do I profess to be." But to him, "common sense dictates" that his friend is not disabled.
"If I have a feeling the he is milking the system, is it my responsibility to report a friend to the appropriate authorities?" the reader asks. "Or should I leave well enough alone and expect his doctors to determine his limitations with regards to being on the dole?"
It irks the reader if, friend or no friend, someone has the ability to work as hard as this friend of his has done at home, but then is not expected to work at a job.
He has confronted his friend directly. "Because I have argued my point with him, we have gone our separate ways," he says. "I can't abide by this sort of dishonest behavior!"
The reader acknowledges his definition of what disabled is may be quite different than the medical or legal profession's definition Still, he has decided that the best thing to do is pass his opinion on anonymously to the proper authority and "let them determine what's right in regard to this person's abilities."
If the reader is looking for affirmation from me for his anonymous "turning in" of his friend to the authorities, he won't get it.
It may irk him that his friend collects Social Security payments while he is still capable of doing chores around his house, but as the reader points out, he has no knowledge of what this fellow's disability is. All he knows is that his doctors continue to validate his status.
By his own admission, the reader acknowledges that he has no real sense of how a disabled status is determined and yet he has decided that his friend is faking it while his friend's wife has a legitimate case.
In other words, the reader has absolutely no idea of whether this friend is defrauding the system. Yet he has taken it upon himself to alert the authorities with little proof aside from his observation that the guy can climb a ladder.
If he had more substantive proof of fraud, that would be one thing. But without that proof and an acknowledgement that he doesn't know what he's talking about, the right thing is for the reader to back off and leave the fellow alone. Just because something irks us doesn't always mean it rises to the level of unethical, or in this case, illegal behavior.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School . Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.  





(c) 2012 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by Tribune MediaServices, Inc.