The Ethics of Helicopters

Despite the title, this post isn’t about the ethics of privately-owned rotary-wing aircraft; the helicopters I want to talk about are people – the over-involved parents who are sometimes referred to as “helicopter parents” by the media. Everyone who works in Education has heard the stories: parents who call to complain that their children are not getting higher grades, lower workloads, better opportunities, superior working conditions, or whatever seems to be in vogue this week. When the children are five or six years old this sort of thing is merely annoying; by the end of high school it’s just pathetic, and when it goes on in college there are actual laws that prevent administrators or instructors from telling the parent anything in the first place. Apart from the obvious waste of time and considerable annoyance this creates for people in our field, there’s a very real concern that children who grow up this way have no concept of self-reliance and will deal with any problem by sitting down and waiting for their parents to show up and save them. But that’s not even the worst of it…

A couple of stories in the last month or so have told the story of parent calling their children’s boss to complain about job offers and try to negotiate a higher salary and/or benefits. One of these cases was a new Ph.D. graduate whose mother did not think the salary her new university was offering was high enough. I could offer several opinions about this syndrome, but they’d all constitute social or political commentary, and this is a business blog. The question I’d like to pose to anyone who has tuned in this week is what should YOU do, as a hiring manager, if you make an offer to a new applicant and shortly thereafter get a call from his or her parent asking if there is any way you can offer more money?

If you’re offended by this sort of behavior there would be a real temptation to rescind the job offer and go to your next most favored candidate, but this may not actually be fair to the employee. It’s always possible that the parent is acting without the employee’s approval or permission, and they really don’t know anything about it; it’s also possible that the employee has no idea that this isn’t the way things are done in your industry, or in business in general. You might be willing to salvage the situation, assuming you’re willing to make the effort and assuming the employee is valuable enough to be worth such an effort. You could make a condition of continued employment that you never get another call from the employee’s parents; you could even put that into an employment contract if you’re using one…

On the other hand, there’s a real chance that you will be getting more telephone calls like this – every time the employee in question gets a raise (because it wasn’t big enough), a promotion (the new salary isn’t high enough), a change in office or assignment (because it isn’t prestigious enough), an annual review (because it wasn’t positive enough), or just at random because the parent feels their child hasn’t had a raise, bonus or promotion recently enough. There’s also a chance that the employee will not be able to learn to make their own decisions on the job, which could be a real problem in certain professions, including management. Or, for that matter, that when you fire the employee because his or her parent keeps calling to complain after you already said that was a termination offense, that the parents will spring for attorneys and sue the company…

So how do you deal with this situation? Do you punish your applicant for the behavior of his or her parents and give a potentially valuable resource to your competition, or do you take preemptive measures to prevent the company from suffering from future depredations of helicopters?

It’s worth thinking about…