Unit 7 Response to Data Management and Ethics

Unit 7 Response to Data Management and Ethics


How would I handle being asked to be unethical by manipulating data? Well, this happened to me in my present position with a slight tweaking of the circumstances.

Here is my story. I worked for an attorney who the secretaries called “Evil Spawn”. I was not told about this attorney until my first day of employment. It was as if management was hiding something from me and this alone is not ethical or at least this is not good business practices and as a prior manager, I would not practice this form of deceptive management. However, I started working for the firm and had several other wonderful attorneys, so I dealt with having one bad one. I worked for this “bad” attorney for about three years, with very little conflict and thought his reputation was ill founded. In year four, his behavior changed and he came into the office less frequently and when he did, he was disorganized, curt in his behavior toward me and began asking me for answers to questions that he as an attorney should have known the answer to and or responded to others instead of me as go between. I could go on and on, rather, I will get to the point. He began to miss hearings and appointments and tried to blame me for not telling him, but I did and had documented when and how I told him (thank goodness). He asked me to cover for him and that “he would scratch my back, if I would scratch his.” I told him no, that I would not do this and that it was unethical for him as an attorney, nor was it ethical for me as a professional secretary and as you might imagine, he tried to retaliate against me. I refused to cover for him and told my boss that something was wrong with him and I suspected drug use or that medically he was ill.

One day, I called him at home because the court called me asking for him at a very important court appearance. He was at home sleeping and the client was waiting at the court for him. Bad, really bad.... He asked me to cover for this missed appearance and lie to the client and I couldn’t do this. Regardless of how I feel about my firm, of which I have shared about before, I had to protect its name, myself, the other attorneys in our firm, and of course we didn’t want to lose the client. This attorney was lying to the client and the client reported this to the manager. It was a very bad situation. This attorney also wanted me to sign his name on declarations under the penalty of perjury.

I was very worried that because he is an attorney and has much more clout and power then I do as a secretary that somehow he would manipulate the situations that had occurred and I would be held accountable. This occurs quite frequently in other firms I am sad to say.

My boss protected me from his retaliation and his employment with my firm was terminated.

If the situation was with a co-worker, it would depend on the situation; however, if asked to change or modify information or data, no I wouldn’t do that. I am not a saint, but don’t put me in a position that jeopardizes my job. This is an extreme form of selfishness.

Metrics-Blog 2 BUILDING TRUST

In this Blog assignment, I want to look at trust and how it is very much integrated into the employment relationship. My first thought was what is trust...what is it really? I looked at Silzer and Dowell (2010) and read about trust, which is that trust "...must be real, pervasive and here and now" and that it is the foundation of the employment relationship (p. 133). Our stakeholders need to know that our agenda, whatever it is, is focused on the health and welfare of the corporation. No matter what our role is for our organization, the relationship that we have with those in charge  and each other has to be based on our credibility and of course trust because we will be given confidences and we could be privy to confidential information (p. 727). "Without trust, you get shut out of critical discussions..." (p. 740). So, how do we build this trust? First is credibility and as I have mentioned before, speak their language. Know what I am talking about, speak clearly, get to the point, speak confidently and openly and if "...organizations do not know what difference their training makes," I had better know how and why my recommendations are going to make a difference (Griffin, 2010, p. 3). 

I can also build trust by regular and/or frequent communication with those I am reporting to and give them measurable progress. What also comes to mind is that many stakeholders are men, or at least many of them are in my field and they don’t have time for indecision. As a woman, this means that I present my ideas, get to the point, have suggestions for solving the challenges that I present and ask for their input. This relationship of trust is built over time and by experiences. To overcome distrust, maybe it would be good to talk about the distrust instead of avoiding the topic. Start with little projects and build from there. Maybe mistrust will always be there because HR is seen as a “different kind of animal,” however, this is where persistence is important. Some stakeholders will be willing to trust and those relationships can be built as we work on building our relationships with managers and others.

 Resources

Griffin, R. P. (2010). Means and ends: Effective training evaluation. Industrial and Commercial Training, 42(4), 220-225. doi:10.1108/00197851011048582

Silzer, R., & Dowell, B. E. (Eds.). (2010). Strategy-driven talent management: A leadership imperative. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.