I’ve been traveling the past week, so I spent the weekend catching up on my reading. Here are a few newspaper stories worth a look:

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—A long Sunday profile of new Home Depot CEO Frank Blake showed the big difference in management style between Blake and his pugnacious predecessor, Bob Nardelli. The article recounts how Blake recently met with dissident shareholder Leigh Baier, who was so fed up with Nardelli’s approach that he was considering a proxy battle before Nardelli was ousted. He related his first meeting with Blake:

“We just stood in the lumber department and talked. I basically told him that people are running out of patience and that he needs to lay out a plan to fix the problems pretty quickly,” Baier said. “He really seemed to listen and agree. There was a warmth and comfort level that I just didn’t get from Bob.”

A few days later, Baier got a handwritten note from Blake, thanking him for his two cents’ worth, Baier said.>“I operate in the world of big law firms. Everything is faxed or e-mailed. He’s the only person I’ve gotten a handwritten note from in a long time. That tells me it’s straight from him and not screened or cleaned up by somebody,” Baier said. “I’m pretty impressed so far.”

From The New York Times—Faith in the workplace is becoming a huge management issue, and a Sunday Times story headlined “When Religious Needs Test Company Policy” got into the issue of accommodating religious differences as more employees push to inject their faith into their working life.

Religion has become a flashpoint in many offices as more employees seek to bring their whole identities to work. So managers are contending with how to create workplaces that are comfortable and welcoming for employees of all faith —and of none.

“Managers have to think what the factors are that attract or cause people to leave their organization,” said Toni Riccardi, now the senior advisor on diversity and inclusion at the Conference Board, which published a report last November on faith in the workplace. “If religion is one, they have to think about how to manage that,” and create an environment that is inviting to as many people as possible.

From the Lebanon (Pennsylvania) Daily News—Workers at Hershey are worried about outsourcing and the manufacturing jobs that are moving from Pennsylvania to Mexico in the next three years. They blame their predicament not only on Hershey management, but also on the federal government, NAFTA, and the Hershey Trust. Hershey management has not been particularly forthcoming about its plans:

If Calvin Smith Jr. is going to lose his job, he’d like to know about it.

Smith and his fellow workers at the Hershey Co. already know the company plans to reduce its workforce by 1,500 jobs during the next three years and eliminate a third of its production lines. And when employees for a new plant to be built in Monterrey, Mexico, are factored in, the actual number of job losses at the company’s U.S. and Canadian plants could total 3,000.

But what Smith and his co-workers don’t know is when the ax will drop.

“Any human being with a soul has a fear of the unknown,” said Smith, who lives in Jonestown and serves as branch president of Local 464 of the Chocolate Workers of America. “We don’t know what our future is. … We don’t want the great American chocolate factory to become the great Mexican chocolate factory.”

There is a fascinating business drama flowing out of the flight delays, cancellations and schedule problems encountered by JetBlue Airlines, one worthy of a business school case study, and it’s this: How will JetBlue management respond to this business-altering crisis?

I’m not talking about the short-term response like free trips and refunds that CEO David Neeleman has been talking about. Those are fine, but also very predictable. JetBlue’s big challenge will be to figure out how to alter its business model to really learn from this meltdown and make sure there are better systems in place to ensure that things don’t unravel this way again.

Back in 2001, when it was still very new, JetBlue took a very customer-focused approach to the events of 9/11 and the shut down of air travel in the United States. JetBlue people chief Vincent Stabile talked to Workforce Management about how the company’s customer-focused approach helped it deal with the crisis, emphasizing that “from the moment the team at JetBlue realized that a true crisis was happening, all of the values people had talked about were in play.”

So what changed at JetBlue from 2001 to 2007? Why couldn’t the airline deal as effectively with a weather-related crisis six years later? These are the questions JetBlue management needs to answer. The people at the top must figure this out and come up with a long-term solution that leverages both the values of the company and the strengths of its workforce to prove to customers that the company’s mission statement—”To continue to bring humanity back to air travel”—isn’t just another slick marketing slogan that is quickly forgotten when things get tough.

Too many managers and executives forget a key principle of leadership: the rank and file watch everything the bosses do and model their behavior accordingly.

In some places this is called “walking the talk,” and it comes down to whether what a manager says is in sync with that they do. It’s basically leadership by example and it can be a powerful force to either rally the troops to your side, or show them you’re full of it.

Sometimes, the leader can make a big symbolic gesture to break with the past and show the workforce that he means business. Here’s a good example of this from Frank Blake, the new CEO of The Home Depot, that was mentioned this week in The New York Times:

“For six years, it was a perk that Home Depot’s chief executive, Robert L. Nardelli, could not do without: a catered lunch for his top deputies, served daily on the 22nd floor of the company’s headquarters in Atlanta.”But several days into his tenure as Nardelli’s successor, Frank Blake quietly abolished the free meal, telling senior executives to take the elevator down to the first floor and, on their own dime, eat with the company’s rank and file in the cafeteria, according to an employee.

“It is the kind of symbolic gesture that has come to define Mr. Blake’s short time as head of the nation’s largest home improvement retailer, as he tries to distance himself from the tumultuous reign of Nardelli, who was ousted several weeks ago over his sky-high pay package and authoritarian style. Blake’s message, however, could not be any less subtle: the era of the imperial chief executive at Home Depot is over.”

I don’t know if Frank Blake is the guy to right the ship at Home Depot, but getting the top leadership to eat lunch and mingle with the troops is a big step in the right direction. But it also begs a bigger question: how do guys like Nardelli get away with such things?

Whether it is the mayor of San Francisco admitting a fling with the wife of his campaign manager, or an astronaut love triangle gone wrong, this much is clear: no manager wants to deal with an intimate workplace relationship gone bad.

Nationally syndicated radio talk show Tom Leykis puts it another way—If you want to keep your job, don’t sleep with people you work with. I’ve given employees that advice (although slightly more delicately), but really, by the time you get to the point of telling them that, it’s usually too late.

One time, I was managing the news desk of a major metropolitan newspaper. Two of my assistant news editors got involved, and everyone who worked with them knew it. In fact, they could talk about little else. Complicating the matter was this: both of my assistants were married to other people in the newsroom. One of them was the sports editor, a large, intimidating fellow who could be extremely nasty when mad or drunk.

Not only was the affair distracting to everyone else in my department, but it had the potential of becoming violent if the sports editor ever found out. I had to deal with it, but how?

I enlisted two other editors to help. The plan was to sit down one of two assistants (the male), and give him three reasons to end the affair, listed in this order:

1. If he didn’t end it, his career growth would probably be over.
2. If he didn’t end it, his wife would likely find out and divorce him
3. If he didn’t end it, the large and intimidating sports editor would likely find out and probably kill him.

Guess what? He laughed at reason 1 and shrugged off reason 2. Reason 3, however, got his attention. He ended the affair the next day.

We’re a little late to the blogging world here at Workforce Management, but we are finally going to remedy that.

This is the first of what I hope will eventually be a number of blogs on all manner of workforce topics. My little slice will be something I refer to as “The Business of Management”—a focus on all things related to managing and leading a workforce.

Of course, management and leadership are not the same thing, and as the late great management thinker Peter Drucker (see Leading Well Is Simple and Drucker Knew Best) once wrote, “To expect every manager to be a leader is futile. There are … thousands, if not millions, of managers—and leadership is the rare exception and confined to a very few individuals.”

I’ll be writing here about management, for the most part, and leadership (or the lack thereof) when appropriate. I hope you will feel free to contact me, at jhollon@workforce.com, with your thoughts, concerns, and observations about managing a workforce. I promise that I’ll use the most interesting and enlightening views in this space as frequently as possible.