If you’re in business, eventually you’ll be on the victim end of unethical behavior.

Sometimes ethics collide. A company has one set of ethics and an employee has another. Or a financial advisor must meet one standard, while the client doesn’t want to comply because it’s not doing anything illegal.

“Conduct that is lawful may be highly problematic from an ethical point of view,” says Lynn Sharp Paine, an expert in management ethics at Harvard University.

The professional, especially one with a public fiduciary responsibility, has the right to demand all the facts before approving any client action, says ethics coach Mike Lednovich. And if the client won’t provide satisfactory documentation, the professional should refuse to sign off on the work. Quit the account if necessary.

Small-business owners don’t spend enough time thinking in advance about how they will respond if their ethics are challenged. How far will they push the limit? Occasionally, they go too far before realizing it.

It’s easy enough to say, “If you want me to lie, cheat or steal for you, forget it.” But what if your biggest customer asks you to verify that a financial transaction was legal. But you know nothing of the case. If you think long enough about the issue, you’ll probably do the right thing, but you might not have much time.

If you have written your code of ethics, you’ll know how to answer—in an instant.

Lednovich recommends six steps when trying to determine how to react to a situation that seems unethical:

1. Define the problem. Is it consistent with the company’s policies? It is legal? Does it conform to universal values of moral behavior? Does it satisfy your own definition of what’s right, good and fair?

2. Identify available alternative solutions to the problem.

3. Evaluate each alternative you have identified. What is the ethical impact of each, according to the questions in step 1. Will any alternative resolve the ethical violations you identified originally? Will the alternative create new ethical dilemmas?

4. Make a decision.

5. Implement the decision.

6. Evaluate the results with an eye toward any unanticipated ethical problems.

This process doesn’t guarantee that you can resolve the unethical behavior of others, Lednovich says, but the process will help you hone your own ethics and possibly avoid unethical business people in the future.