Where is Your Line?

Recently, Microsoft terminated an employee for disrupting a 50th anniversary presentation on AI. The employee disagreed with how Microsoft’s AI products had been used in a wartime scenario.

In early February several attorneys resigned from the Department of Justice after being ordered to drop an alleged corruption case. These included John Keller, acting head of the Justice Department’s public corruption unit, and Danielle Sassoon, acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Later in February, more than 20 civil service employees resigned from DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency), saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”

An employee unwilling to cross an ethical line isn’t new, but it is on the rise.

Of course, an employee unwilling to cross an ethical line isn’t new, but it is on the rise. During the pandemic, the U.S. Department of Labor showed that in September 2021, 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs. This was 1.1 million more than for the same period the previous year. Research at the time found that employees were re-prioritizing their lives and in many cases, putting work behind family or personal pursuits. The authors concluded this was a profound shift in work values, with significant implications for organizations going forward.

Somewhat closer to home (for me), during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, a Black employee in my own organization wrote an email that called out all leaders in his organizational hierarchy (including our SVP) for inaction. The employee didn’t resign, but he strongly believed the email would be a career limiting move, if not cause for his dismissal*. 

Ok, there’s a lot here. 

But right now I am less interested in these organizations’ actions and more interested in these employees’ actions. In each of these cases, employees found themselves facing a personal moral boundary and either risked or gave up their paycheck, benefits, and likely their career progress rather than step over that line.

There was a moment for each of them when what was asked was too much. The employee who attended a 50th anniversary celebration, the lawyer required to drop a corruption case, the tech worker required to impact public services, and all these others reached a tipping point. 

Some of them likely didn’t know they had that ethical boundary until they felt pushed up against it.  When I made my own choice to step away from a role rather than cross an ethical boundary, I had some time to consider the likely outcomes, and was frankly surprised to find that immovable line. 

So here’s my question: What is the line you won’t cross? If you’re not sure, what is an example of when you felt you were close to it?

(*Good news, it was neither. It was a call to action, but that’s a story for a different day.)