In my book, one of the toughest things for a manager to do is to let someone go. Taking away a person’s job—their livelihood—is one of those things you never, ever want to do, but it is also one of those things that all managers must face if they are to successfully do their jobs.

By the same token, no serious manager ever makes light of having to fire, cut or “downsize.” Not only is it poor form and can bring on bad karma, it’s just not right.

Any executive who publicly seems to delight in getting rid of people deserves to walk the plank or get tossed into Dante’s lowest level of hell. And that’s where Randy Michaels comes in.

Michaels is COO of Chicago-based Tribune Co. Tribune is a media company owned by wild man Sam Zell, a guy known for outrageous outbursts and idiotic statements that only serve to demoralize his workforce and make him look crazy.

Tribune owns big newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun. Zell bought the company late last year and not only seems to have made a bad purchase, but also seems to be in way over his head.

Tribune has been cutting employees left and right, and everyone thinks there are more firings to come. Many of the cuts are being executed by a bunch of executives Zell brought in from radio giant Clear Channel, the company that has essentially destroyed local radio in this country. One of them is a former DJ, the aforementioned Randy Michaels.

According to the TellZell blog (written by an unnamed journalist at the Los Angeles Times), Michaels popped into the newsroom of the Chicago Tribune one evening recently, leading a group of people on a tour. Apparently wishing to amuse the unidentified gawkers,” the blog post notes, “the ex radio deejay decided to crack some jokes about his reporters and editors.”

This was all too much for one copy editor. “She stood up and confronted Michaels. … She brought up that a) we were working and b) 100 of us were going to be jobless next month. He made some crack about how it wouldn’t be so bad.

When she continued to press the issue, bringing up such obscure facts as how it sucks to live without income and insurance, he basically made an exaggerated sad face and told her to cheer up.”

Later, COO Michaels got into an e-mail exchange with a Tribune reader where he made light of all the layoffs. “Who cares, he says, if the Tribune fires a couple of hundred journalists: ‘The fact is that we can hire as many great journalists as we like because almost all papers are letting them go. Pointing out problems is not helpful,’ ” the blog post said.

I don’t know Randy Michaels, but from everything I have read and heard, he’s a pompous and arrogant ass. And in my book, this exchange only goes to prove it. No serious executive boasts that he can fire as many people as he wants because there is a ready supply of fresh meat available. Doing so invites bad karma and all sorts of other terrible things that I am sure are in Randy Michaels’ future.

This over-the-top performance by an idiotic executive gives Michaels a good shot at next year’s Stupidus Maximus Award, an “honor” I bestow on “the most ignorant, shortsighted and dumb workforce management practice of the year.”

Think you have a better candidate? Think Randy Michaels, Sam Zell and the management team at Tribune already have wrapped it up? Let me know with either a comment here or an e-mail to jhollon@workforce.com.

What can you say about an organization that has nearly $100 million in annual revenue, $150 million in the bank and a huge national membership but seems to be in no big hurry to name a new leader after the old one retires?

If this were a publicly traded company, stockholders and Wall Street would be getting pretty antsy and asking a lot of pointed questions. But this is a not-for-profit organization that isn’t bound by those silly business rules. Yes, I’m taking about SHRM—the Society for Human Resource Management.

I’m often critical of SHRM (as others are critical of me for being so critical), and it is largely because of things like this. To wit: letting the organization drift for six months after the old CEO announces her retirement. In other words, why hasn’t the SHRM board gotten its act together and hired someone already?

Sue Meisinger announced her retirement as the organization’s CEO on January 8  and said at the time that she would “remain at SHRM until a new CEO is selected to ensure a smooth transition.” I believe she was being honest when she said that because she thought the SHRM board of directors would move fairly quickly to find and name a successor.

In fact, I thought that it would happen at the annual conference in Chicago last month, because it offered the perfect opportunity to say goodbye to Meisinger, welcome the new leader and have a very visible passing of the baton from the old to the new. But clearly even Meisinger, the ultimate SHRM trouper, got tired of waiting for the board to act and her successor to be named. She left June 30, with SHRM saying at that time that they would have a new leader named by August 1. China Miner Gorman, SHRM’s chief operating officer, is the acting CEO.

I hope the SHRM board of directors follows through and names a new CEO this week, as they’ve indicated, but I’m not holding my breath. As I wrote from the SHRM conference last month, I think the board missed a marvelous opportunity to help the organization make a smooth transition to the future, but it would be well worth the wait if it was because the board was nailing down the perfect candidate to lead SHRM into the future.

And who would that person be?

That’s easy to answer: It should be someone like former SHRM chief executive Mike Losey, a strong businessperson with top leadership experience who knows how to drive an organization ahead. Or it could be a creative, experienced, strategic HR professional—someone like former Home Depot HR chief Dennis Donovan. (Donovan, it should be noted, already has a pretty interesting job—running HR for Cerberus Capital Management.) In any event, SHRM needs someone strongly grounded in business and managing people, and not a bureaucrat or organization professional.

How hard is this executive search, anyway? Do you have any ideas on whom SHRM should name CEO? Have you heard any chat on the grapevine about candidates? Feel free to send any thoughts to me at jhollon@workforce.com or add them to the bottom of this post. If the SHRM board fails to deliver a candidate by August 1, they may need some help from all of us getting this CEO thing figured out.

Here’s another reminder, as if you needed one, on why you and your workforce should always remember that there is no privacy in the workplace: stories in Seattle’s two newspapers this past weekend about a group of Port of Seattle employees fired over explicit content they were e-mailing in the office.

“A year after a scandal engulfed the Port of Seattle’s Police Department over smutty, derogatory e-mails, 15 more employees in a different section of the port have been caught exchanging similar e-mails, some for nearly a year,” according to a story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “The employees were part of a survey crew in the aviation division. Spokeswoman Terri-Ann Betancourt said eight employees, including the crew’s top two managers, were fired … seven others were suspended without pay. Four contract workers were found to be involved in the e-mails and were dismissed from the crew’s project, which had been the repaving of a runway.”

I won’t go into the details of what was sent in the e-mails (the Post-Intelligencer story does a pretty good job of that, if you’re interested), but suffice it to say that “the e-mails, which contained pornographic, racist, sexist and demeaning material, started as early as June 2007, soon after [Seattle Port Chief Executive Tay] Yoshitani informed employees of his zero-tolerance policy against harassment and improper computer use.” The chief had to remind his workforce to not send such e-mails after the Post-Intelligencer reported last year “that nearly a third of the Port of Seattle’s sworn police force had been exchanging racist, sexist and sexually graphic e-mails for years, until a few were finally reprimanded.”

What kind of person, working in a professional position in today’s modern workforce, doesn’t understand that sending stuff like this over an employer’s computer is wrong and grounds for immediate termination? The Port of Seattle situation is even more unbelievable, given that this very same problem erupted a year ago in a sister agency (the port’s police department) and steps were taken then to raise everyone’s consciousness about it.

This story also shows you that sometimes, the most interesting details are the ones you have to hunt a bit for. The Seattle Times version of this same story reported that “The Port of Seattle has fired eight employees and four consultants [emphasis added] for inappropriate computer use, including viewing sexually explicit photos, sexually oriented jokes and jokes about race, gender and national origin.”

Let me get this straight: Four consultants engaged in this behavior—consultants who were brought in by the Port of Seattle, probably at a premium rate of pay, to advise on best practices? I could go off on a rant about consultants here— I believe that too many are paid too much to tell you and your organization what you probably already know. In this case, I’ll just say that the situation in Seattle really speaks to how consultants are just given too much free rein when they get hired, and that this is probably even more the case at a public agency than it is in the private sector.

Port of Seattle Commission President John Creighton told The Seattle Times that he did not see the offensive e-mails and other content, but had them described to him. He said some of it was as “vile and disgusting” as the police e-mails that were so troublesome the year before.

“When setting a zero-tolerance policy, it is appropriate to hold people absolutely accountable,” Creighton told The Seattle Times. “We’re a public agency, and it is appropriate the public holds us to a higher standard.”

I know Creighton is right, but this makes me wonder: If a public agency should be held to a higher standard, why is Seattle dealing with this same problem so soon after the last incident was made public? My guess is probably the same as yours—it’s because the people managing the public agency aren’t being held as publicly accountable as they should be.

In May, CareerBuilder came out with a survey that said 25 percent of all workers plan to stay in touch with work via e-mail while they are on vacation this year. The survey also noted that this trend is growing because the number was only 20 percent last year, and that 10 percent of all workers were expected to stay in touch while taking time off.

I think this is a troubling trend, and as I said in May, good managers know that it is important to encourage workers to take their allotted time off.  Helping your staff stay refreshed and rejuvenated is just as important as anything else you do.

Well, here’s one guy who proves my point: columnist Mike Cassidy of the San Jose Mercury News. Mike recently went on vacation and made a personal pledge to himself to “check out from work without checking in. Taking a cue from Stanford law professor and cybercelebrity Lawrence Lessig, I pledged to steer clear of my e-mail in-box while reconnecting with my extended and far-flung family in the woods of Wisconsin.”

Mike’s story is a worthwhile read, especially for those of you who (like me) can’t seem to ever really get away from work no matter how hard you try. But there is a trade-off. “I’m paying now for my ‘no e-mail on vacation’ pledge,” Cassidy writes. “But it was so worth it…. And you know what? The world didn’t end. The Mercury News published without me. Colleagues welcomed me back with no apparent hard feelings over my slow response to e-mail that must have seemed very important at the time.”

And Cassidy also makes another important point. Way too much of the e-mail we deal with each day is pure, unadulterated crap that doesn’t really help us to do our jobs any better. “Since my return,” he writes, “I’ve scanned the first few lines of the e-mail that I let pile up. Two-thirds of it is junk. The rest ranges from interesting to marginally so.”

The art of managing people frequently involves getting them to do something they aren’t inclined to do on their own. All too often, that includes getting them to take the time to unplug, disconnect and recharge themselves. Bob Nardelli tried to do this by demanding that Chrysler workers take time off, and as ham-handed and poorly communicated as his edict was, embedded in it was the notion that workers need to take some time for themselves when they are not worrying about their job.

A better idea is IBM’s vacations-on-demand approach , under which workers take off whenever they want for as long as they want as long as they get their work done. Yes, this approach won’t work for everyone and every business either, but it does a whole lot more to encourage people to get away and recharge than the Chrysler edict does.

Are you planning to get away this summer? Are you going to completely unplug and get away, or will you be peeking at e-mail while away? I’d love to hear what you are planning, either in a comment at the bottom of this post or in an e-mail to me at jhollon@workforce.com. I’m guessing that a lot of you would like to take the Mike Cassidy approach, but like Mike, you may be reluctant to completely go cold turkey during your getaway.

You may remember my blog post about the Employee From Hell, a disgruntled computer engineer who had taken over the city of San Francisco’s computer system and denied access to everyone else despite being arrested and thrown into jail with a bail of $5 million.

Well, he’s finally surrendered the access codes to the city’s computer system, but only after a jailhouse visit and chat with Gavin Newsom., the mayor of San Francisco. “Newsom came away with the access codes Monday night after talking with Terry Childs, 43, of Pittsburg, California, who has been held since July 13 on four felony counts stemming from what prosecutors describe as an effort to block administrative access to the network that handles 60 percent of the city’s information, including sensitive law enforcement, payroll and jail booking records,” according to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The interesting thing about this meeting was that it was so secret that Mayor Newsom told very few people he was doing it. “The visit was so secret that the mayor did not tell District Attorney Kamala Harris’ office or police about it,” according to the Chronicle. Newsom decided on his own to accept an invitation from Childs’ attorney, Erin Crane, according to mayoral spokesman Nathan Ballard. “Newsom ‘figured it was worth a shot, because although Childs is not a Boy Scout, he’s not Al Capone either,’ Ballard said,” the Chronicle reported.

And the newspaper adds: “Ron Vinson, the chief administrative officer for the [city of San Francisco] Technology Department, said Newsom hadn’t told him about the jail visit in advance. ‘But we are glad he was successful in getting the codes, since no one else has been able to,’ he said, adding that officials expected to have full control of the computer network soon and to generate new passwords for administrators.”

I don’t know about you, but as a manager, I’m torn about the way Newsom dealt with this. On the one hand, he did what he needed to do and took a very pragmatic approach by meeting with the disgruntled computer tech and getting the codes out of him. Newsom cut through everything and solved the problem.

But on the other hand, did the San Francisco mayor actually set himself up to be held hostage by other city employees who have a similar gripes and feel they can do something wild and crazy because ultimately, they will get some personal time and attention from the mayor? And isn’t that the real reason why he didn’t tell the police chief or district attorney about this beforehand? Chances are they would have advised against setting that kind of precedent.

As the Good Morning Silicon Valley column in the San Jose Mercury News points out, “since the story broke, a clearer picture of Childs has emerged, and it bears a remarkable likeness to one of the stock characters of the business world: the control-freak sys admin who thinks he’s surrounded by fools. The network—which handles 60 percent of the city’s information, including sensitive law enforcement, payroll and jail booking records—was Childs’ baby. He designed it, installed it, configured it and managed it, and he didn’t want anyone screwing it up, so he kept access to himself.”

In other words, Terry Childs was one of those nut-case workers you hear about all the time, and the mayor of San Francisco jumped his own law enforcement experts to deal with the nut-case city worker himself. Yes, he got the desired result, but should he have let the law enforcement system work this problem a little more before getting involved?

That’s what I would have done. What Newsom did reeks of grandstanding by a guy who harbors ambitions of being the next governor of California. I’m not a fan of Newsom, and some of his own past personal behavior has been suspect, including a fling with the wife of his campaign manager.

If you believe that the end justifies the means, you probably view what Newsom did with the control-freak sys admin as being the smart act of a decisive executive. Well, I don’t. To me, it’s a classic example of someone who isn’t patient enough to let the well-established system deal with the problem and instead jumps in and big-foots everyone else in order to garner a little political edge.