Spygate: What To Do When Your Boss Asks You To Bend The Rules

All in all, it’s fair to say that 2008 hasn’t shaped up to be too good a year for coach Bill Belichick and his New England Patriots.

Belichick, the irascible football genius who coached the Patriots to three Super Bowl trophies, began the year losing Super Bowl XLII to Eli Manning and the upstart New York Giants . The loss was one of the greatest upsets in football history and denied the Patriots the chance to make history by being the first team to go 19-0 in a single season.

Then, the long-simmering Spygate scandal that first made headlines early in the 2007 season got some legs and promises to be front and center through the off-season. The NFL is looking into allegations that Belichick and the Patriots staff were secretly stealing the defensive and offensive signals used by their opponents.

Recent headlines have revolved around a former member of Belichick’s staff, Matt Walsh, a video assistant who has emerged as a key figure in the scandal involving the illicit videotaping of opposing team signals.

Walsh is due to meet with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and other officials on May 13 to discuss what he knows. Last week, he turned over several tapes to NFL officials showing the team’s surveillance practices.

Walsh, it seems, was in the uncomfortable position of being asked by his boss to do something illegal. What should you do if you find yourself in a similar situation? How do you handle being asked to do something illegal, immoral or somewhere in between?

It’s a situation one hopes never to be in, but as the career experts point out, corporate malfeasance can be a difficult grey area, so it’s best to know ahead of time how to deal with the situation before it arises.

“The problem is this: Bill Belichick, or any other white collar guy, never comes up to you and says ‘I need you to do something diabolical or illegal today,’” says Walter Pavlo, a former senior manager and finance officer with MCI.

Pavlo should know: He spent two years in federal prison for his part in an MCI accounting scandal and scam in the late 1990s and early 2000 that involved cooking the books for shareholders and embezzling funds.

Pavlo, who wrote a compelling book based on his experiences, is now a popular lecturer on white collar crime and business ethics, speaking to MBA students and corporations. In a corporate setting, pressure to be a team player is a very powerful incentive, Pavlo and others say, and can often overwhelm your better judgment.

“The way it happens is this person that you trust, maybe even a mentor, says ‘we’re in a jam, you’re a team player and this is for the team, we need your help’ or things of that nature,” Pavlo says. “And, they never spell it out so it’s like that other person empowers you do something that if it was all clear and out in the open, you would never do.”

The trick to dealing with these situations, the experts say, is to force the boss to spell out exactly what it is they want you to do.

“The best advice I can give is to keep asking questions and draw it out,” Pavlo says. “Ask things like ‘What exactly is it that you’re asking me to do? I don’t think this allowed; is there something in the rules I don’t know about?’”

By asking lots of questions, you’ll force the person to make explicit what they want to keep implicit. And this will work to your advantage because in most instances, once what’s being asked is clear, most bosses will back off asking you to directly violate the law, or a league policy, whatever the case may be.

And should they persist, you’ll be in a much better position to decline. “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to do something illegal” puts you in better stead than trying to wiggle through the gray area that these situations usually present themselves in.

In Walsh’s case, he can breathe easy: His lawyer inked a deal with league officials indemnifying himself from any wrongdoing. Belichick, however, may not be lucky.

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