Moral misalignment
I’m curious whether anyone else has experienced a situation where leadership unintentionally rewarded behavior that crossed professional boundaries, resulting in those behaviors becoming the expectation for everyone else.
This isn’t really about someone taking initiative or being ambitious. I appreciate coworkers who become trusted resources because they’re collaborative, dependable, and improve outcomes for the people we serve.
My concern is different.
I work in a counseling-adjacent role where we regularly interact with people experiencing significant mental health crises. These individuals are very vulnerable and we are often interacting with them on their worst day.
Professional boundaries, confidentiality, role clarity, and client-centered care aren’t just preferences. They’re fundamental to doing the job ethically.
Over time, one coworker has increasingly positioned themselves as an unofficial leader by inserting themselves into additional responsibilities, acting as the primary contact with outside agencies, communicating in ways that imply authority they don’t actually have, and taking on tasks that often extend beyond what the rest of us consider appropriate for our role. I have seen them leave our clients worse off with having limited skill in warmth, validation and rapport building.
Leadership has praised this behavior publicly and even referred to it as the standard the rest of the team should follow.
The problem is that many of us don’t believe those behaviors actually represent good practice.
Instead, they often blur professional boundaries, encourage unnecessary involvement in situations that don’t require it, prioritize visibility over clinical judgment, and create pressure for everyone else to operate the same way if they want to be viewed as high performers.
The hardest part for me isn’t that someone is getting recognition. I genuinely don’t care who receives credit. I wouldn’t be in the mental health field if recognition was a driving factor in my work.
What I struggle with is watching practices that I believe compromise professional boundaries become institutionalized simply because they’re highly visible. It leaves me wondering whether maintaining appropriate boundaries will eventually be viewed as doing less, even when I believe it’s the more ethical approach.
This person is very newer to the field and is younger. People have changed departments because they didn’t’t like this person and their ethics. It’s hard because our leadership only see the outcomes of our work in the form of documentation in billing. They do not see us work with clients and they are not around to see the miss use of databases that is going on.
Has anyone else worked somewhere that confused “doing more” with “doing better”?
If so:
Did leadership eventually recognize the difference?
Did these expectations become permanent?
How did you maintain your own professional standards when the culture rewarded something different?
For supervisors, how do you distinguish between healthy initiative and boundary crossing when evaluating employees?
I’m especially interested in hearing from people in behavioral health, crisis response, social work, counseling, healthcare, or similar professions where boundaries and ethical judgment are central to the work.
Is it time to start looking for a new job?
If there are any questions or need for specific situations, I will try to provide those.