Whenever I think that I’ve seen just about everything in the way of management practice and behavior, I get shocked by something so outlandish, ridiculous or just plain unbelievable that even my jaded and cynical soul is shaken by it.

This one hits close to home (more on that in a bit), and is something you won’t see taught to MBA students anytime soon: An impassioned management defense of an employee’s boorish behavior, and his right to embarrass the company by picking his nose in public, on television.

It’s a little complicated to fully explain and do it justice, so you might want to check out this link to the Los Angeles-area blog LAObserved.com for the full background. Essentially, the story is that a longtime newspaper employee who was taking a buyout was accused of deliberately picking his nose and embarrassing the publication on camera during a television broadcast from the newspaper’s newsroom. When the television producer complained about the on-camera nose picking and behavior of this newspaper employee during this and other newscasts, the story was picked up by both local and national blogs and media Web sites.

Here’s the outlandish/incredible/unbelievable part: The supervising editor/boss of the on-camera nose-picker wrote a long, impassioned memo defending the behavior and complaining that he was the victim of “drive-by journalism.”

This all happened in the newsroom of a large suburban daily newspaper in Southern California—The Orange County Register, where I worked as an editor for nearly 12 years, departing in late 1992. I also know the principals involved in this, both the accused nose-picker, who used to work for me, and the editor who wrote the nose-picking defense.

While I greatly admire any manager who goes to bat for a subordinate wrongly accused, I still can’t believe that the defense essentially comes down to “Yes, he picked his nose on camera and embarrassed us, but he didn’t mean to. And by the way, being loud and boorish is just the way he is.”

Defending bad behavior is not a sound management practice anywhere on this planet. As bad as this employee’s behavior looks, whether he did it on purpose or not, I’d hate to be the manager known for defending an employee’s right to pick his nose in front of a substantial television audience.

What do you think? Add your comment below.