How Loyal Should a Secretary Be?
It’s a dicey issue, one you can bet is not likely to be discussed much today as bosses celebrate National Secretaries Day by treating their assistants to top-drawer lunches, adorning their desktops with flowers and otherwise rewarding them for their loyal service.
The issue unlikely to be dissected is loyalty iself--a subject traditionally governed by unspoken agreements. But in the late ‘80s--as breaches of business ethics appear continually in the news and secretaries such as Fawn Hall are being investigated along with their bosses--many secretaries have had to seriously assess just how far their organizational loyalty goes.
Most secretaries do not wind up smuggling government documents out of the White House and destroying them, as Hall admitted doing for Lt. Col. Oliver North. But some find themselves agreeing with Hall’s statement that “Sometimes you have to go above the written law, I believe.”
One secretary to a top Hollywood mogul for example, asked if she’d ever been asked to do anything illegal or unethical, responds, “Let’s put it this way. I would probably wind up in jail.”
Law vs. Ethics
She distinguishes, however, between what violates the letter of the law and what violates her own ethics. “You use your own good judgment,” she says. “I certainly wouldn’t do anything morally wrong, but that’s probably because my boss would never ask me to do anything morally wrong . . . I think it’s important that the boss feels comfortable with you and knows that whatever is said in your presence is totally confidential.”
Ethical dilemmas can also arise when a secretary isn’t asked to do something unsavory, but suspects others in the office are involved in illegal activities. Consider the experience of a Los Angeles secretary who holds a degree in anthropology but in the last year has worked as a temporary secretary in about 25 different Los Angeles area offices--after being fired from a full-time secretarial job.
On that job, she says she was hired as a permanent word-processor/public relations coordinator at a physician’s office. “One time a couple of very large checks came through from a relative of one of the company’s officers,” the secretary recalls. “I asked my boss, ‘Why is she paying the doctor?’ He wouldn’t answer me and two days later I was fired (after three months on the job) for having an uncooperative attitude.”
“When you’re a secretary, you do as you’re told,” explains the secretary who, like most interviewed for this article, agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity. “You can’t question what you’re told to do. You shouldn’t. It makes a guy think you’re opposing him . . . I’m open and honest and stupid about things. When I get there and ask insightful questions, it scares people.”
Janet Dight, author of “How to Get Out from behind the Typewriter and into a Management Job,” points out that the phenomenon of secretaries assisting their bosses in illegal or immoral activities is hardly new--it’s simply being discussed more openly now.
‘Only Skin Deep’
“Loyalty to me, in a business environment, is a very superficial emotion and that’s the way it should be. It should be only about skin deep,” she says. “If your boss is doing something immoral, illegal or unethical, you should not cover up for him.”
She emphasizes that secretaries who object to having to repeatedly lie (in large or small ways) or who find themselves working for crooks may have only one choice: “Go elsewhere.”
But that’s not always so easy for many secretarial and clerical workers, observes Deborah Meyer, associate director of 9to5, National Assn. of Working Women.
“People have told us that some members have been asked to do illegal things. It is a real dilemma. On the one hand, you’re dependent on the job. Most clerical workers are not working casually. They do need the money. On the other hand, most members said that they would not go along with the illegal activitity,” Meyer says.
According to one secretary, ethics problems can usually be avoided by steadfastly refusing to do objectional work. Brooke Victoria, a secretary who works temporary jobs and also has a Los Angeles-based business through which she organizes the wives of top executives, maintains that she will do almost anything to get a job done.
She recalls, however, that one executive wife who was having an affair asked her to keep a personal journal with extensive false entries.
“I didn’t do it,” Victoria says. “I get clients by referrals. I don’t want to be deceitful. They have to know that I’m an honest person.”
Psychological Consequences
One former secretary who was aware that her boss was not only unfaithful to his wife but also engaged in illegal activities warns other secretaries about the psychological consequences. Though she was not asked to engage in anything illegal or immoral herself, she says, just being in an environment she despised took a serious toll.
“I only stayed in that job a little more than two months. It paid really well for secretarial work but it was a nightmare,” recalls the secretary, who has since moved to a different line of work. “He lied constantly. I saw him even abuse customers.” she says. “When Friday came I couldn’t relax. On Fridays, I’d start dreading Mondays. I’m still psychologicaly freaked out by it.”
Ethically compromising situations are hardly rare for workers at all levels, in the view of John E. Fleming, a professor of management at the USC School of Business Administation.
“The dilemma that I see is that if your boss asks you to do something unethical, the normal reporting system is through your superior,” says Fleming, who teaches classes on corporate policy and businesss ethics. “And if you decide you don’t want to do what you’re being asked to, you may become either an internal or external whistleblower.”
Fleming favors an ombudsmen system through which employees can report on a confidential basis. But one option at many companies--a chief executive officer who maintains an open-door policy--may be ineffective for lower-level workers such as secretaries, says Fleming. “What often happens is that someone in a secretarial position would be too threatened to go up to Mahogany Row.”
