Notes from 46th International STC Conference
Cincinnati, Ohio, May 16-19, 1999

Notes from Networking Lunch: Making Ethical Choices on the Job

Facilitator: Dan Voss

Note: Participants shared several vignettes concerning ethical conflicts they faced on the job, and we discussed possible alternatives.

• Vignette #1: The first vignette involved a "turf war" between a recently promoted Bank One documentation manager and a peer whose computer illiteracy had resulted in a highly defensive and adversarial managerial posture in a closely related department. The question was how best to combat her guerrilla warfare tactics (e.g., foot-dragging on important business requests such as policy and procedure updates) without stooping to her level. Escalation was suggested; it had already been tried and was unsuccessful. The doc manager's supervisor had already tried to influence the situation, failed, and was now, in essence, washing her hands of it, leaving the doc manager to finesse the conflict on a day-to-day basis. The supervisor of the recreant manager did not appear willing or able to force her subordinate to act in a more team-like fashion. The core issue appeared to be that the person's seniority had made her virtually immune from traditional management leverage, allowing her, in essence, to operate a petty little fiefdom based on personal insecurities and near-pathological behavior. Not only the other departments, but the person's own employees were suffering the consequences. Nobody seems willing to step up to the challenge of "shape up or ship out." The ethical message appears to be that even in a friendly team environment -- indeed, especially in a team environment--there comes a time when a person has to be held accountable for his/her actions and, if he/she does not respond, be removed... or, as a minimum, reassigned to a position where others are not being impeded on a day-to-day basis.
• Vignette #2: This was probably the best vignette in terms of direct applicability to technical communication. A Texas Tech nursing manager working on her Ph.D. in technical communication recounted a tale of how a major cellular phone company advertised its "nation-wide service" in large type while in small print specifying that "nationwide" depended on whether or not local carriers were signed up... in essence, the offer was "good only at participating McDonalds" -- without telling just how many were participating. As a result, customers who did not read the fine print could, and did, wind up purchasing a cell phone, going out on field assignments, and then finding them useless. The ethical issue for the technical communicators working on the informational brochure was how far they should go in standing up to management pressure to suppress the information about the limitations on coverage. The caveat in fine print met the company's legal obligations, but it very clearly did not clear the ethical gate... if the intent was to deceive, the fine print did nothing to exonerate them. The best approach was for the communicators to attempt to convince management that burying the caveat, while conducive to greater profits in the short-term, was inimical with the long-term success of the company, because users would inevitably be disappointed, feel taken advantage of, and give up the service as soon as their contracts ran out -- if not sooner.
• Vignette #3: This one was set in Vienna, where a member of the new Trans-Alpine Chapter, a technical writer for a major beverage company, told how in order to leverage its existing investment in communication products, deep-pocketed management based in Atlanta was imposing inappropriate communication solutions on shallow-pocketed European subsidiaries, utterly without regard for a technical communicator's charter (and ethical responsibility) to develop the correct solutions for a different market and audience. The writer said she raised her feeble voice in protest but soon learned that "conscientious objectors were silenced and kept at a distance from management." She was, after all, "only a technical writer." That caused a number of us at the table to bristle, but the reality is undeniable. The issue was how to empower individual practitioners of our profession to stand their ethical ground in the face of corporate political realities. There is not easy solution. One path is for STC to take a more aggressive role in intervening on the behalf of its members who face situations like this one. The next vignette dealt with a similar situation within a medical context.
• Vignette #4: The next vignette was presented by the nursing manager, triggered by the Transalpine STCer's "only a technical writer" comment. Years earlier, when she was "only a nurse," she had encountered a situation where an M.D. specialist was flagrantly leveraging a patient into an unnecessary and invasive diagnostic procedure--one which was also quite costly, and therefore quite profitable for him!--by threatening to discharge the patient from his care if she did not consent to the procedure (thereby terminating her insurance coverage for her condition). The nurse escalated the dilemma to her supervisor, who basically told her to keep her nose out of it. Obviously, the doctor had the political clout to take this kind of unethical action with impunity. The nurse reluctantly caved, but has regretted it every since. The patient did not die or suffer permanent damage, but she did suffer unnecessary pain. Here again, the individual practitioner of the profession was hopelessly overmatched by other stakeholders with far more power. The best answer would be for her professional association, in this case the American Nurses' Association, or ANA, to wield an ethical scimitar in her defense. Granted, the AMA would be a formidable adversary, but one can certainly hope that when confronted with the facts, the AMA would censure rather than support the physician.
• Vignette #5: The final vignette presented an opposite situation to the "fine-print" scenario in Vignette #1. In this case, a telephone manufacturing company has been driven to be scrupulously ethical in its documentation and procedures, due to the enormous potential for litigation from the Sprints and Ma Bells of the world should the manufacturing company's procedures be implicated in a failure that caused a service interruption over a wide regional grid. Since the procedures had to be pitched to technicians with an eighth grade reading level, the writers had to resort to statements that were nearly on the order of "do not pull plug; you will black out Chicago." Needless to say, documentation pitched at that level proved to be patronizing to more sophisticated users. The solution appeared to be multiple products, but that would probably not be realistic from a cost standpoint. Is a puzzlement...!