Working with Seniors: Health, Financial, and Social Issues
Chapter 22: Ethics in Doing Business with Seniors
“I think one of my wealthiest clients is showing signs of dementia. Should I inform his children who live out of state?”
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“I received a brochure from a CSA I’m considering doing some comarketing with, and I noticed that she’s making some deceptive claims about her services. Should I confront her?”
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“My brother-in-law said he’d give me $500 if I persuade my senior clients to use his roofing company—would this be a conflict of interest?”
Introduction
“Ethics is a code of values which guide our choices and actions and determine the purpose and course of our lives.”
—Ayn Rand
How does one decide what is ethical business behavior? When James Cash Penney opened his first Golden Rule store in 1902, he and his partners adopted a company motto built on four words: honor, confidence, service, and cooperation. These words formed the “Penney Idea”—and all business policies, methods, and acts in the company were judged against one simple question: Does it square with what is right and just? (J. C. Penney, n.d.)
A hundred years later, it seems that the test of ethical business behavior rests on whether or not someone is caught—the notion that if you can get away with it, it’s good business. In recent years, we’ve seen several once-respected business leaders doing the “perp walk” in handcuffs on their way to the courtroom. High-flying companies such as Enron and WorldCom that had been praised as American success stories have collapsed under the unethical business dealings of their top executives.
Accordingly, the American public has become increasingly cynical about the intentions of its business leaders. In June 2002, a Time/CNN poll revealed that 72 percent of Americans believed that business executives were engaging in an intentional pattern of deception (Gibbs, 2002). Right and just are not terms you hear from corporate America in the 21st century. The challenge for you and other CSAs is to rise above the muddled mess of unethical activity that plagues business today, and to demonstrate consistently right and just behavior.
But who is to gauge what is ethical or unethical behavior today? How do you decide if you’ve made the right decision? According to some people, it’s all relative. Absolute right and absolute wrong in business have gradually given way to a vast gray area of moral relativism, where the ends most often justify the means. Indeed, a July 2002 poll conducted by Zogby International for the National Association of Scholars showed that three-fourths of all college seniors reported being taught that right and wrong depend “on differences in individual values and cultural diversity” (National Association of Scholars, 2002). Only about a quarter of the students surveyed reported their professors as adhering to the traditional view that “there are clear and uniform standards of right and wrong by which every one should be judged.”
The notion that there are (or ought to be) “clear and uniform standards of right and wrong” is at the heart of business ethics for a Certified Senior Advisor (CSA)®. To become a CSA, you must agree to comply with the fundamental principles of ethical conduct as outlined in the CSA Code of Professional Responsibility. Many of the job-related decisions you will make as a CSA will involve moral or ethical judgments, like the questions that opened this chapter—and your reputation will be built by each judgment you make.
This chapter covers the basics of business ethics and examines the specific ethical considerations of serving the senior population, which can be more vulnerable to exploitation than other adults. It outlines the benefits of conducting your business in a consistently ethical manner, both for your business and also for the seniors you serve. In addition, it provides a seven-step process for ethical decision-making that you can use in your business.
These tools can help you avoid the creeping grayness of moral relativism, ensure that you are consistently meeting the standards of responsibility dictated by the SCSA, and enable you to be confident that you are acting in an ethical way.
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