In this overly litigious day and age, there aren’t many workplace acts left that are so over the line that they qualify as drop-dead, you’re-fired-on-the-spot, no-additional-proof-needed offenses.
In fact, there’s only one that readily comes to mind as I think back over a long career of managing far too many people who seemed hellbent on doing something stupid that would get them canned. You know what I’m talking about—it’s taking a punch at someone while on the job.
Generally speaking, people who get physical with other people in the workplace lose their job, and usually pretty quickly. And, that’s what is probably going to happen at The Washington Post, where a longtime editor recently blew his cool over a story and came to blows with a reporter who called him something incredibly vulgar that I can’t repeat here.
According to Washingtonian.com, “Details are sketchy, but numerous witnesses report that veteran [Washington Post] feature editor Henry Allen punched out feature writer Manuel Roig-Franzia on Friday. The fracas took place in sight of Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli’s office. Brauchli rushed to separate the two. It should be noted that Allen is nearly 70, but he served in the Marines in Vietnam. He also won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for criticism. Both apparently came into play when Allen jumped Roig-Franzia.”
Gentle readers will need to read the Washingtonian version (or this report from the Washington City Paper) to get the full flavor of what was said and the circumstances that led up to the comment and fistfight, but it’s safe to say that the altercation is a reflection of the pressures people are feeling in their jobs during these uncertain times.
“Hooray that there is still enough passion left somewhere in a newsroom in America for violence to break out between colorful characters in disagreement over the quality of a story. … Newsrooms used to be places filled with interesting eccentrics driven by unreasonable passions—a situation thought of as ‘creative tension’ and often encouraged by management in eras when profits were high and arrogance was seen not as a flaw but a perquisite of being smart and right. Sadly, over the years newsrooms have come to resemble insurance offices peopled by the blanched and the pinched and the beetle-browed; lately, with layoffs thought to be on the horizon, everyone also behaves extra nicely to please the boss.”
I’m old enough to remember the era that Weingarten writes about. I experienced it as a very junior editor at the old Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, a long-dead Hearst newspaper that was well-known for such eccentric and passionate newsroom behavior.
I saw fistfights in the newsroom and at the watering hole we called a bar that was just across the street, people falling-down drunk on the copy desk, and all sorts of other behavior that was casually ignored back then but that would get you quickly canned now.
It was colorful, it was fun, but mostly, it was all fueled by the intense passion people had for their work. This is what Gene Weingarten remembers, and it is an era that, for better or for worse, is long gone.
Today, passion in the workplace is defined as work that you find incredibly meaningful or challenging (known now as employee engagement), and managers are all for more of that, but they tend to draw the line at having so much passion for the job that it pushes you to punch someone in the nose.
Back in the days that Weingarten and I remember, passionately defending your work was viewed as a good thing, not something that you worried about losing your job over. Managers back then were more concerned about channeling that passion back into improving the work, and HR was only consulted when the situation got so out of hand that the line manager couldn’t control it anymore.
So, there’s almost something retro to reading about fisticuffs taking place in a major American business over part of the job that people are passionate about. Unfortunately, passion like this gets you fired today, and HR is involved at the first hint of trouble and to make sure all the legal bases are covered so no one, least of all the company, gets sued.
So it goes in the American workplace, circa 2009. You be the judge of whether that’s good or bad.
Dealing with bullies in the workplace is one of those management topics that never seems to grow old, mainly because bullying behavior is probably as old as the workplace itself.
According to the AP, “Moira Cameron—a veteran of long military service—was named a warder at the Tower two years ago. Hers was supposed to be a happy story about how a bastion of male supremacy could become a place where women, too, could serve queen and country. [But] on Monday, embarrassed Tower officials conceded that Cameron had apparently been subjected to a campaign of bullying and harassment conducted by some of her resentful male colleagues. They said two male warders have been suspended and a third is under investigation for suspected harassment of Cameron.”
What constitutes bullying in the ranks of the British Beefeaters? Britain’s Sun newspaper reported that “Cameron’s uniform had been defaced and … nasty notes had been left in her locker.” In addition, the newspaper said that Cameron’s entry in the online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia had been defaced as part of the campaign against her.
I’m sure that it was tough being the first woman to join an all-male group like the Beefeaters, but Moira Cameron seemed to be a great choice to break the gender barrier given that she had served in the British military for more than 20 years, with stints in both Cyprus and Northern Ireland, and, because she doesn’t seem willing to take too much crap from anyone.
“I’ve had some comments,” she said early in her tenure as a Beefeater. “ I had one chap at the gate one day who said he was completely and utterly against me doing the job … I said to him, ‘I would like to thank you for dismissing my 22 years’ service in her majesty’s armed forces.’ ”
It will be interesting to see how the British deal with this incident—who handles HR issues for the Beefeaters, anyhow?—especially since the decision to bring women into what had long been an all-male bastion like the Beefeaters must have been made at a very high level by people who knew the potential for something like this to happen.
Dealing with bullies is always tricky, as we noted here at Workforce.com in this article on “Tips for HR: Dealing With Workplace Bullies,” mainly because “the HR professional must be able to distinguish a bully from an earnest but perhaps difficult or even troubled supervisor.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone being earnest about the abuse being directed toward Beefeater Moira Cameron, but I suppose that’s possible. What is clear, however, is that every manager must be prepped and ready to handle bullies in the workplace because it is a problem that is never, ever really going away.
Bullying, unfortunately, seems to be one of those quirks of human nature that you can’t stamp out. And no matter how much you do to solve the problem in your own workplace, I guarantee that it will pop up again when you least expect it—even at the Tower of London.
This isn’t some subjective observation on my part, but rather, what I have learned firsthand from managing people for the better part of 30 years. But one reader of this blog thinks I’m dead wrong on this subject and makes a very articulate challenge to my point of view.
“The problem with the examples here is that they typify the worst kind of sleazy behavior by married people with a substantial power differential between themselves and the people they’re having affairs with. All the office romance bans in the world aren’t going to begin to stop that behavior—the egos are too big and the sense of power too inflated.
“What such policies will do is push normal, healthy relationships underground, so that no real discussion with the employer can take place. You may call it prattle, but it’s unrealistic to believe that people won’t have workplace romances. The best policies I’ve seen accept this and deal with it an adult fashion instead of forcing the employees to try to fly below the radar.”
Now, let me be clear: I have never, ever called for a formal ban on office romances. In fact, here’s what I said about this last year at Valentine’s Day: Office romances have always been part of the equation in any workplace since the dawn of time, and there’s no evidence that the problem has gotten appreciably better or appreciably worse. Yes, sometimes office romances go bad, but the trend The New York Times was touting back in 2007 was to not get too worried or worked up about co-workers dating.
I certainly understand that very pragmatic viewpoint, but my own opinion on office romance hasn’t changed—hype, trends and surveys notwithstanding. It’s a bad idea. That’s because, in my experience, they go bad all too often. And, spoiled office romances leave the participants—and the co-workers around them, who have to live with the bitter, sometimes litigious aftermath—much worse off as a result.
Yes, I’ve written about the fallout from high-profile office affairs like the recent one with ESPN’s Steve Phillips (who just got fired for his bad judgment) and David Letterman before him. And yes, I agree with reader HR PS that these two examples DO “typify the worst kind of sleazy behavior by married people with a substantial power differential between themselves and the people they’re having affairs with.”
As bad as those are, the ones that drove me crazy were of the more mundane variety, like the three-month relationship between two co-workers who sat next to each other. When something like that goes sour, it affects everyone around them, generally for the worse. And, it’s a management headache I’ve had all too often.
But am I wrong here, as reader HR PS says? Can pragmatic office policies realistically deal with affairs of the heart, or are they just a Band-Aid approach to an emotional and hard-to-handle workforce problem?
Hey, Management Guy! Given how tough the economy is these days, there’s lots of built-up tension in the workplace. Lots of tension frequently fuels lots of emotion, and sometimes it makes you want to just pound someone. That makes me wonder: Is there ever a circumstance where it is appropriate to take a punch at a co-worker?
This just goes to prove what the Management Guy has always said: Violence has no place in the workplace, and getting physical with a boss or co-worker is usually a surefire way to get fired in any universe.
That’s why it will be interesting to watch what happens with the National Football League’s Oakland Raiders, because just this week, there are reports that two coaches got into an altercation that ended up with one coach punching out the other.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “If you asked some other folks with knowledge of the incident, they’d tell you that it was [head coach Tom] Cable who clocked defensive assistant Randy Hanson earlier this month, a punch that sent him to the hospital.”
No one in Oakland is talking much about this incident—head coach Cable simply says, “It’s an internal issue that we are dealing with, and that’s all I’m going to say”—but the last time I checked, having one coach punch out another doesn’t make for a winning workplace culture, even in the NFL. In fact, the Chronicle points out that “any assault or battery by an NFL employee, including a head coach, could be deemed a violation of the league’s personal conduct policy and result in a fine and/or suspension.”
Yes, the NFL is a tough, violent place, and yes, the Oakland Raiders have a strange way of doing things, but having coaches resort to fisticuffs to settle their differences? That’s probably too much even for the Raiders.
It’s possible that no one will get fired over this incident, but that just speaks to the peculiar nature of the Raiders in particular and professional sports in general, because in most workplaces, putting your hands on another worker usually guarantees you a quick trip to the unemployment office, as the former CEO of Home Box Office found out.
So take it from the Management Guy, who knows a thing or two about these matters: Thumping the boss or jerk co-worker may be a workforce fantasy for many, but like most fantasies, it is one best left unfulfilled.
Here’s a question I’d love to have some hiring managers answer: Would you hire (or even consider hiring) an individual with superior talent but a troubled past who might be a game-changer for your organization? Yes, he’s a convicted felon, but he has served his time, expressed remorse on numerous occasions, and seems generally contrite for his past actions.
Would you give this person a chance? Does talent outweigh the negative baggage, especially if the person in question has the ability to really, really help your business?
In other words, would you take a chance and hire former star pro quarterback Michael Vick?
“For Michael Vick to have any prayer of resuming his NFL career, he has to show true remorse for dogfighting, something he now admits doing as young as 8 years old,” writes Sam Farmer in the Los Angeles Times. “He made that confession recently to Wayne Pacelle, chief executive and president of the Humane Society of the United States, when Pacelle visited him at his home in Hampton, Va.”
The details of Michael Vick’s involvement in dogfighting are well-documented and abhorrent to just about anyone. And, Vick has paid a heavy price for his actions: “Although he remains on probation, Vick on Monday completed his federal dogfighting sentence, which included 18 months in prison and two more under home confinement,” the Times story points out.
“He [also] forfeited an estimated $70 million when the Atlanta Falcons released him from his 10-year, $130-million contract, [and] Vick filed for bankruptcy protection a year ago, listing $16 million in assets and $20 million in debt.”
Yes, Vick has paid the price, but his crimes clearly warranted the penalty. Ed Sayres, president and chief executive of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said it was Vick’s “barbarism that sets the crime apart,” and that Vick admitted he electrocuted and beat dogs to death after they lost fights. “This was not a one-time transgression or crime of passion—this was a multi-year pattern of behavior that demonstrates a startling lack of moral character and judgment,” Sayres said.
But whether you decide to hire Vick also comes down to something else—do you believe in redemption? Can people atone and make up for their actions? Do the Michael Vicks of the world deserve a second chance?
I believe Vick deserves another chance, and I think that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell—the guy who ultimately will make the decision—will eventually come to that conclusion too.
However, I also believe the discussion over whether Vick should get another chance is one we wouldn’t be having if he wasn’t a big-time, highly talented athlete. Is there any profession in America other than the performance-driven world of professional athletics that would consider hiring someone who served time for torturing animals?
Although I believe in the power of redemption, of serving your debt to society, and of getting another chance, I also don’t believe there is a hiring manager outside the NFL who would take a chance on a convicted felon like Vick no matter how talented or game-changing he might be.
Pro football writers are split on this.
John DeShazier in the New Orleans Times-Picayune feels that “Vick has paid enough to regain admission to the league if a team will have him,” while Mike Lopresti in USA Todaysays that “the thinking here is [that Vick] probably merits one more year of sanctions, for wanton cruelty, but I could be talked into ending his suspension now. He’s been gone two seasons. That’s forever to a professional athlete.”
For hiring managers and recruiters who like to crow that it’s all about hiring superior talent, that’s only true up to a point, because I don’t believe there is a talent manager outside of the Oakland Raiders willing to go to the boss and make a pitch for hiring a game-changing individual with off-the-board talent who also happens to have a rap sheet that includes torturing animals.
So I ask again: Would you give Michael Vick a second chance?
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