Many find themselves frustrated in their careers by lack of preparation for dealing with predictable dilemmas that regularly arise in the world of work. Two in five professionals fired in their jobs after college are terminated for lying, or misuse of technology. Easy to avoid! Or is it? What if you find you have to compromise your values to keep your job? What if they ask you to lie or cheat, even though you know if you are found out you will be fired? What if you find out the company is breaking the law?
Successful people know about and have the skills taught in this specialization. You should, too.
Those who wish to make a difference, build positive reputations, become leaders, and advance in their careers must cultivate professional success skills, along with their specific job skills. The central themes of this course – knowing yourself and your values, recognizing and meeting ethical challenges, using an analytical decision-making framework, identifying potential pitfalls, and developing tools to use in the moment – are essential soft skills for succeeding at work. In short, an ethical framework is necessary, and not just nice; smart ethics, as we define them, are integral to success.
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Week 2: Opening Up Problems through the Decision-Making Framework (DMF)
Learn a systematic approach to tackling any decision.
Director of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics (NCPRE), Professor Emerita of Business, and Research Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory
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The time reporting conundrum, as I said,
happens over and over and over in a whole variety of guises.
There's no good answer in this situation and
there's certainly no one answer for every situation.
>> I think one of the most common dilemmas to come up for all of my colleagues and
other friends I have who've just started work is time reporting, time and expense.
It's all over the place, and there's all these different pressures from a budget
for making sure you don't log too many hours, from logging time maybe you didn't
work because you didn't have enough work in a particular day.
There's all sorts of different angles, and
I've had friends who've experienced all of them.
I've also seen instances with friends where they are told one thing.
In this example, real life, log only 40 hours a week, then they get an email
that says, never only log 40 hours a week, always log what you work.
I think there's often a disconnect there between what is it company's values say
is important and then individual manager's metrics, and if you log too much time,
you might hurt their margin on a project, for example.
>> One of the best things to do is sit down with the individual as you
are completing your time sheet, sit down with the supervisor, and
explain why you've billed this many hours,
what problems you've encountered, what unexpected issues have arisen.
Why you've needed to do extra work and how you might be able to account for
it in such a way that maybe the client doesn't get billed.
Maybe it's an office training hour because you needed to learn some new technique and
had to spend ten hours this week figuring that out.
I'm going to suggest that open discussion and
conversation using good personal scripts is a great way to begin
to discuss these issues and to simply take the direction.
Don't report more than 40 hours, without having a supporting conversation
is going to damage your credibility in the long run.
Because then you will be seen as somebody who either a, takes direction without
responding in an appropriate way when you know that an appropriate,
different response is called for.
Or b, you're going to be the kind of person who is seen as a superstar,
who is always doing things for less than what's expected, and
that's going to create all kinds of pressure on you
because you're not always going to be that person, who knows every answer.
There will be times when you do need to take
more time to complete a particular task than perhaps had been estimated.
Open discussion, good personal scripts, trying to explain and making
sure that the supervisor understands what's coming, and why is quite critical.
>> I think it's having an open conversation and saying, I really feel
strongly and not just, I have to log what I work, it's just how I'm wired.
There's this saying, log what you work and work what you log, I have to go by that.
Could we think about this project and
maybe talk with the leaders on the project to understand why is it taking me so
much longer to do what you clearly think should only take 40 hours?
And that'll start to turn the conversation, I think,
to say, maybe we need an additional person.
Because I often think if something is taking twice as long as everybody else
thinks, it's either understaffed or poorly managed.
It's usually one of those two things that are at play.
I think having the conversation is actually a benefit
because I've seen many friends where, they have the conversation, and
it turns out they're literally doing twice as much as what maybe the partner or
the vice president thought they'd be doing.
At that point, the conversation has turned from hours and
tactical reporting standards to something else.
>> If this doesn't quite work out for you, another option is to go and
see the chief ethics and compliance officer in your organization and
say, how do you want me to address this issue?
What's a good way to address and resolve this kind of a core conflict,
where I see the standards as accurately report the hours and
now I'm being asked to either change the reporting category or
not report or whatever option might be being presented to you.
Ask for assistance, ask for help, ask for guidance.
That's why organizations put ethics and compliance programs in place, so
you can raise these issues and not find yourself in a position
that will be difficult to defend at some future moment.
>> In this particular circumstance,
it turned out that this student was being tested.
It was a form of probation.
It was a form of test to see what was this student's integrity or
this worker's integrity in this situation.
Would this worker say something and follow the rules, or
was this someone who was willing to cut the corners?
When the person spoke up and said, by asking questions,
not by challenging the boss,
not by saying, you've asked me to do something scummy, that's really not good.
Not a career advancing prospect.
Asking questions in a quiet tone, asking them politely,
asking them respectfully, gosh, am I confused at orientation?
Did I misunderstand?
How should I do that?
The first response was good for
you, you just passed an important test of your probation.
We're proud of you.
Does it always happen that way?
No. A lot of this comes down to who are you,
and what do you stand for, and what are you comfortable with?
And how do you feel about yourself,
if you know that you've done something you're uncomfortable with?
Will it get more and more comfortable over time?
Will you do it again?
A lot of these questions are deeply personal questions.
There's no one answer.
Asking questions and, at least,
being clear on the choice that you make can be very clarifying in understanding,
is this a place I want to be, and is this the way I want to behave?
Doesn't always tell you and there aren't always happy endings.
This particular one did have a happy ending and
it was a really good start to what turned out to be a stellar career.
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C. K. GunsalusDirector of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics (NCPRE), Professor Emerita of Business, and Research Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory
