Comments on: Using Management Grandstanding to Deal With the Employee From Hell

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:33:13 +0000

I’d have to disagree. Childs claimed he didn’t want to give up the codes to the DA, police or the city IT managers because he didn’t trust them, basically. Infoworld ran a good article looking at the technical aspects of the allegations against him, and it’s clear that, from the court filings, those groups either were out to smear him, or they were completely incompetent.
The mere fact that a single IT administrator had the ability to hold the city’s networks hostage screams incompetent. Things happen to people all the time - they get fired, they get into accidents, they die - and here you had someone who had control and information like this with no backup methods available? The IT managers of the city should be fired, and the DA’s office should be reprimanded for their bogus filings.
Childs is not an innocent victim in this, but your portrayal of him takes the city’s filings at carte blanche.
Here’s the InfoWorld article on the facts and myths of the case. It appears that most of the actions portrayed as nefarioius by the city were either standard practices, or even required practices in a network IT environment.
It was a hellish situation, but not just because of the employee.
The mayor was already paying consultants a king’s ransom for their time in trying to hack into the system and get the codes out - without any success. He quietly went in and got the codes. That doesn’t strike me as grandstanding.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/07/30/31NF-terry-childs-fact-fiction_1.html

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:57:55 +0000

I respectfully disagree.

It is this type of red tape management that runs this country, that creates unnecessary use of time and effort.

Newsom should be commended for his actions, and everyone else should be reprimanded, from Childs’ supervisor on up for allowing one person to keep such sensitive information to themselves. What would the city have done if Childs were unavailable for any reason at some point???

By: Bob James

Bob James — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:11:27 +0000

If Terry Childs is as you described him, I doubt the cops could have forced him to give up the codes. Unless they were ready to go the CIA waterboard route, I think Newsom’s efforts in this case were justified.

By: Janet

Janet — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:31:58 +0000

Terry Childs may be the employee from hell, but he didn’t get there without assistance. There’s plenty of bad-boss/manager behavior going on here. No one should be the sole keeper of critical business information like Terry Childs was allowed to be. His immediate management should be taken to the woodshed for failing to properly deal with this situation from day one. When Childs’ anti-social, fiefdom-building behavior began to occur, he should have been coached, then reprimanded, then fired for failure to follow procedures. His department management failed to have appropriate procedures and protocol, checks and balances, etc., to ensure that continuity and redunancy existed. No team should ever find itself in a situation where it’s totally disabled because of the loss (or incarceration) of a single team member.
And you’re absolutely correct about the inappropriate response by Gavin Newsom. Aside from it being another opportunity for him to aggrandize himself, it’s a pathetic statement about his confidence in the abilities of the people trusted to do the work.