I’ve come to realize that some of the things we are taught in school that we may think “don’t really happen” do. They very much do! In fact, I recently reflected upon a time when I was faced with an ethical dilemma at work.
I worked as one of four interns. As the only girl, as well as the only intern not working directly with the creative team but rather in another department, I was able to stand out and prove my abilities to lead the other interns in our projects. My colleagues soon gravitated towards my leadership and pulled on me to, in a sense, represent our intern group. This all came to play when one of the interns decided to up and leave the program about 3 weeks into the summer. It came as a shock and served as a bit of a scandal to say the least. In an agency environment, this news traveled fast, and everyone wanted to know the details. As you could imagine, gossip filled the office. The intern who left had sent the rest of the interns an email describing the reasoning behind his sudden departure. Here’s where the ethical dilemma came into full force: one of my colleagues asked me to forward him the email. With it only being the 3rd week of my internship, I still felt very new. Moreover, this colleague of mine was pretty high up in the company, and we had become friends during the first 3 weeks. Deep down though, and thanks to past in-class discussions on ethics, I knew that by forwarding this email, I would not only breaking my trust with the intern, but I would also be jeopardizing my own integrity by misusing my power to hit “send.” I declined my colleague’s request and eventually confronted my boss and the HR department about the situation. Even though I could have been seen as “lame,” it was a risk I was very willing to take. After all, who was I to share such information that I personally didn’t even need to know in the first place? A significant takeaway from this experience is just how tempting technology makes it to spontaneously send or click something without giving much thought to the matter at hand. The digital world in which we live today most definitely fuels impulsive behavior, and it is up to us, as colleagues, to pull on our ethical instincts. I’ve never been faced with such a dilemma. In fact, it’s so easy to read this type of occurrence in a textbook and think, “Oh, that’ll never happen to me.” This experience has proven to me that unethical behavior in the office does exist, and it’s more important than ever to nail down our knowledge of ethics in school before we experience the real world.
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