When to Disobey the Boss

By Eve Tahmincioglu

Recently, the manager of an Abercrombie & Fitch store in Virginia Beach decided to keep, what some deemed, risqué photos of models hung up on his store walls even though local police told him to take the pictures down.

Why didn’t he listen to the cops? Because the manager’s corporate bosses asked him to display the photos.

The manager ended up with a citation by the local authorities and faced possible jail time and a fine.

While the charges were eventually dropped, this event serves as a great lesson for all employees out there. You don’t have to do everything your boss tells you to, especially if it runs afoul of the law.

Clearly, breaking the law can get you in real trouble, but blindly following orders and engaging in illegal or unethical activities on the job can wreak havoc on your career and possibly hurt other people.

Take Barbara, a Denver-based senior underwriter for a major mortgage company.

Over a two year period, she was asked by her manager to sign off on home loans for individuals that she knew were not worthy of loans because of their questionable credit and employment backgrounds.

“I determined that the information these people provided wasn’t accurate, or questionable but my manager would say, ‘let it go,’” says Barbara, who declined to use her full name.

After months of doing what she felt in her gut wasn’t right, she became depressed as she began to hear about people who were losing their homes because of loan defaults.

So, this past fall, she decided to take a stand and wrote a letter to the company’s human resource department even though she thought she was jeopardizing her job. "I couldn't take it anymore," she explained, still a hint of agony in her voice.

The real estate industry, says Ralph R. Roberts, author of “Protect Yourself from Real Estate and Mortgage Fraud,” is rife with these types of scenarios that began with the housing boom and have only gotten worse as management at many of these firms become desperate to get business in a housing slump.

But it’s not just real estate.

Workers in a host of sectors are feeling pressure to compromise their ethics standards, or break the law, according to Patricia Harned, president of the Ethics Resource Center, an independent research organization. Among the top industries where this is seen are entertainment, hotel and food services, transportation, retail, and healthcare, just to name a few.

“There is no question that supervisors and management have a tremendous amount of influence on employees’ decisions on how they handle tough situations,” Harned says.

Overall, about 10 percent of employees report they feel pressured to compromise their standards in order to do their jobs, and of those 69 percent say the pressure is coming for their immediate supervisor, Harned notes.

“We have certainly seen this situation getting worse as far as the number of instances where employees are seeing misconduct happening around them and feeling pressure to compromise standards themselves. It is on the rise and very worrisome,” she explains.

Difficult economic times, she adds, are contributing to the increase. “There is a lot of pressure to increase profits, keep the company going. Workers want to bring value to the company and do well in their jobs.”

Typically, in a large organization, when serious wrongdoing occurs, at least ten to 15 people are probably involved or know what’s going on, says Richard Cellini of Integrity Interactive, a company that provides businesses with ethics policy tools.

“Someone sets it in motion, usually someone with authority, but they don’t do the work themselves. They pass it on. The people who do it are usually the staff. They do what they’re told,” he explains.

In most cases, he adds, workers are doing bad things for what they deem are good reasons – to help the company, help the team, etc. “And in the overwhelming majority of cases, they are either responding directly to a request from a boss, or what they think their boss wants them to do,” he says.

But workers who engage in illegal activity are going to have a weak leg to stand on when law enforcement comes a knocking. “My boss made me do it,” is a defense that doesn’t tend to hold up in court, legal experts say.

“It’s like the Nuremberg defense,” says Nancy Cornish, an employment lawyer with Denver-based Kissinger & Fellman, referring to the “only following orders” legal defense used by some of the Nazi officers who were tried by the Allies in Nuremberg, Germany, after World War II.

The question is, she explains, if you’re acting within the scope of your job duties but you do something illegal, who is liable, you or your employer? Unfortunately, in many cases, the employee can be liable, she says.

“When a bouncer assaults a patron on instructions from the club owner the prosecutor is going to tell the bouncer, ‘I don’t care,’’ she points out. “If a pizza delivery guy goes down a residential street at 80 miles an hour should he get a ticket,” she asks, even though his boss tells him to speed in order to expedite deliveries? “Yes,” she notes.

In one case, Cornish’s client, a trucking company, sent a delivery man to a neighborhood early in the morning to make a drop off, but the community restricted morning deliveries. The truck driver ended up with a ticket.

While the trucking firm took care of the situation for its employee, she says, the driver in this case would have ended up holding the bag if his employer hadn’t stepped in.

If you refuse to do something illegal, and you’re fired or demoted because you report it to HR or law enforcement, you’ll likely be protected under whistle blower laws. But claiming after the fact, when the authorities start rounding up the parties involved, that you were told to do it but didn’t want to probably won’t hold up in court.

“An employee can’t disagree in silence with the practice,” says Jon Meer, chair of the Employment and Labor Group for DLA Piper US in Los Angeles.

Bottom line, says Barbara Repa, author of “Your Rights in the Workplace”, “no one gets to break the law, and you don’t get to hide behind the skirts of employers.”

When you’re being asked to do something that just doesn’t feel right, Repa suggests you talk to your supervisor about it. If, however, you believe your job could be at risk by talking to your boss, go above his or her head and find someone you trust who has integrity, or go to your human resources department.

You can also go to local authorities, and under whistleblower laws have your identity remain anonymous.

Depending on what the illegal activity is, there are a variety of government agencies you can go to, Repa says. If it involves a work safety issue you should contact OSHA. If it’s an issue of discrimination you can contact the EEOC. If it’s something that could put someone in harm’s way, or involves fraud, local police, or the FBI or the SEC might be the best avenue.

Barbara, the underwriter from Colorado, went to her HR department and the company launched an investigation. The manager that asked her to sign off on bad loans was subsequently fired, and new policies were implemented to prevent similar situations.

Looking back, she says, she would have reported the problem earlier.

“We are so overwhelmed trying to meet our own financial requirements for our kids and our families, that we tend to go along with employers,” she says. “You have a right to say ‘no’. I should have pushed back right away.”

For Better or Worse, Until Pink Slip Do Us Part

Consider your relationship and each other’s personality before teaming up

By Eve Tahmincioglu

Divorce can be hell, but it can be even more hellish if the husband and wife work together.

A perfect example of this is the drama publicly unfolding between the estranged couple that ran the Los Angeles Dodgers together, team owner Frank McCourt and his wife and former team CEO Jamie McCourt.

The husband fired the wife last month. She went to court to get her job back but lost her bid to be reinstated Thursday during a hearing in the couple's messy divorce proceedings.


It’s McCourt vs. McCourt, and it’s also a cautionary tale for all couples considering sharing a bed and a workplace.

“You’re taking career, finances and your key relationship and adding additional stress,” says Greg McCann, who teaches family business at Stetson University. “Over half of marriages end in divorce; why would you add this stress to it. Most couples probably shouldn’t do it.”

You don’t have to tell Karey Bohmer, a project manager for US Airways in Phoenix, how difficult it can be.

Bohmer met her husband Daniel, an airplane mechanic, on the job. Although they now work in different departments, they have worked together and for each other for the past 15 years.

“We’ve had supervisors try to pit us against each other, accused us of favoritism, and had lots of ugly rumors spread around about us,” she explained. “We’ve also been divorced and remarried, and a big part of our divorce was because of work.”

While they've learned how to work together, Karey Bohmer says day-to-day issues make it tough on both of them.

“Some days we hate each other. We’re carpooling together, living together,” she says. “When I get home, I want to leave work at work. He wants to talk about work, but there are a lot of people I get along with that he doesn’t get along with.”

There’s also the issue of having too many eggs in one basket. Layoffs have plagued the aviation industry, including at US Airways. “It’s constantly in the back of your mind,” she says. “If layoffs hit, we could both be unemployed.”

Firing your spouse
Andrea Sittig-Rolf, who runs a sales training company called Sittig Inc. in Redmond, Wash., ending up pink-slipping her husband Brian after a year of him working for her. “I decided I’d rather keep him as a husband than as an employee, so I had to fire him,” she says.

She asked her husband to join her team at Sittig after he was laid off from a sales job at Waste Management in 2005. But soon their divergent personalities caused friction.

“Brian is the kind of person that wants a plan in place. I’m the kind of person that leaps and waits for the net to appear,” she says. She started bossing her husband around and became “mean and controlling.”

It was starting to impact the couple’s relationship, so she made the tough decision to let her hubby go. “I said, ‘I can’t do this. I don’t like what it’s doing to our relationship.’ ”

But it’s not all doom and gloom for life partners who also want to be work partners.

Making it work
Max Dobens works for his wife, Jacky Teplitzky, who runs one of Prudential Douglass Elliman’s top real estate businesses in New York City.

Dobens, who had worked in the hotel industry and for a dotcom but ended up getting laid off from both jobs, was asked by his wife to join her real estate team. He accepted after passing the real estate exam in 2001.

He had heard dire warnings about what might happen if he worked with his wife, but he was so sick of corporate politics that he took a chance — and is happy he did.
“I want to be a family, work together and be with my wife,” he says.

He admitted there were drawbacks, such as “a very fuzzy line between what’s personal and what’s business. It’s hard to go out to dinner and not talk about what’s going on in the office.”

And after the bottom dropped out of the New York real estate market last year, he wondered if he made the right decision.

What helps them make it work is that they’re focused on different things while on the job. “I’m off working with my own clients, doing a lot of my own thing,” he says. “If we were both chefs working in the same kitchen, there would have been a stabbing years ago.”

Dividing up responsibilities
Indeed, experts say it’s a good idea to separate responsibilities because one of the major issues husband-and- wife co-workers deal with is the power struggle, especially if one is the boss of another.

Maureen Borzacchiello, owner of Creative Display Solutions Inc. in Garden City, N.Y., discovered that in the first few months after she asked her husband to join her at her company in 2005. “Suddenly I had someone with an opinion that was happy to give me his opinion,” she says. “In the back of my mind I was thinking, ‘This is my company, mister.’ ”

The couple sat down one night and had an honest discussion, dividing up roles and responsibilities instead of trying to do everything together. “We drew a line in the sand,” she says.

They also promised never to fight in front of employees about work matters, and they make sure to give each other space on those days they need it.

Spouses never know if they’re cut out to work together until they actually try it, says Stephanie Losee, co-author of “Office Mate: Your Employee Handbook for Romance on the Job.” But a failed attempt, especially in this economy, can be costly to everyone concerned.

The worst-case scenario is when you thought there was a certain level of compatibility and friendship at the core of your marriage, and “one goes to work for the other with the thinking that you’re extending that relationship, and it backfires.”


Working with your spouse

For those thinking about working with a spouse, Losee offers some questions to consider:

• — Have you ever worked on a project together, at your kid’s school or a home improvement project, for example? How did it go?
• Who’s the boss in your family? Who pays the bills? There is always someone who is the boss. That could determine if one spouse is comfortable taking orders from another.
• Is there some other way to go? Before you make this decision, look at the situation that raised the question of working together. Did it happen because someone’s job went south? That foundation is pretty slippery. If the root of it is something you both wanted, then you’re standing on very solid ground.