Workplace Ethics

Questions and model answers

1. What do you do when you notice a small mistake in your own work?

   Depends how far it's gone, honestly. If it hasn't left my desk I just fix it and don't mention it. Once someone else has seen it, I say something, and I've learned to do that fast — the gap between noticing and telling is where it turns into a thing. I used to write a long apology with it. Now it's one line: here's what's wrong, here's what I've changed. What I try not to do is explain why it happened in the same message, because that reads as an excuse even when it's just information. If someone wants the reason they'll ask. Mostly they don't. They want to know whether the number in front of them is right.

2. If a colleague asked you to cover for them, would you?

   For most things yes, and I'd want them to ask rather than just disappear. Covering a shift, taking a meeting, saying someone's out today without explaining why — that's what a working team does, and I'll need it back at some point. Where I'd stop is anything that requires me to state something I know isn't true to someone who's relying on it. Not on principle exactly, more that it stops being a favor and becomes a position I'm holding for them. The awkward part is that the line moves depending on who is asking, and I'd rather admit that than pretend I have a rule. I've said yes to things for a friend that I'd have refused from someone else.

3. Tell me about a time you saw something at work that you weren't comfortable with.

   Somebody I worked with was signing off his own expenses, which wasn't allowed but had gone on so long that nobody read it as unusual. The amounts were small, and that's what made it difficult — raising it felt out of proportion to thirty dollars a week. I sat on it for about a month, then mentioned it to my manager as a process question rather than as a thing about him, which I still think was the right shape for it. It got fixed quietly. What stayed with me is how long I waited, and that the reason wasn't really loyalty. I didn't want to be the person who'd noticed. That's less flattering than the reason I'd have given at the time.

4. Should employees be expected to report a colleague's mistakes?

   Mistakes, no. Patterns, yes, and the distinction matters more than it sounds. An expectation to report individual errors produces a workplace where the rational move is to hide them, which is exactly how small problems turn into expensive ones. Aviation worked this out decades ago and went the other way, protecting the person who reports, even when that person caused the problem, so that the information keeps arriving. What should carry an obligation is the repeated thing, or anything with someone's safety attached to it. The objection is that this leaves the judgment with the individual, and it does. But a rule broad enough to remove that judgment would either be ignored or would turn colleagues into monitors, and I'd take the messier version.

The Korean translation, the expression breakdowns, the reusable frames and the common-mistake notes for these four questions are in the book. The recording and this transcript are free, here and on YouTube.