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.
Steve is a former EEOC trial attorney and management law firm partner. His Atlanta-based company, ELI, provides “a variety of programs and services that teach professional workplace conduct, helping our clients translate their values into behaviors, increase employee contribution, build respectful and inclusive cultures, and reduce legal and ethical risk.”
He also writes a blog that gets into a lot of legal issues in the workplace, and I found this blog post he wrote this week to be especially insightful given the explosion in social networking and modern communications. I’m happy to share it with you because readers tell us that they always need good workforce legal information, so take a read on this and let me know what you think:
“I’ve wondered when it would happen—for years there have been stories of athletes, proxies for other celebrities, who say and do what they want while their behavior is ignored, minimized or attributed to ‘locker room’ humor or conduct. But the doors of locker rooms, operating rooms, broadcasting booths and boardroom suites are wide open these days; conduct that used to be tolerated in the bastions of such resident ‘untouchables’ is now falling prey to general workplace standards, publicity, business harm and personal penalties.
“Also, ESPN suspended Bob Griese for making on-air disparaging comments about a Latino racecar driver. Almost before I’d finished reading that online scoop, another story broke about Larry Johnson, a Kansas City Chiefs running back who used a homophobic slur on Twitter and while addressing reporters. At the time of this writing, Johnson has been told to stay away from the team while the NFL and the Chiefs complete their investigation.
“What’s happening here is that the transparency of modern communications is preventing such behavior, no matter who the offender, from being swept under the rug, or bed, as the case may be. So the message is simple and direct, not just for those at the middle and bottom but also for organizational leaders and ‘high’ performers.
“As we have taught in Civil Treatment, ‘Guard your words and actions.’ The more public your role, the more cautious you must be. There is no invincibility when conduct is outrageous, unprofessional and uncivil. What’s increasingly obvious is that the issue involving such conduct is not simply legal risk. ESPN’s brand has been harmed by its broadcasters’ actions, and the careers of those involved have been tarnished if not ruined, in Phillips’ case.
“Whether lawsuits are filed and ultimately dismissed or settled is almost secondary. Business and irrevocable personal harm has been done, and all of it could have been avoided if standards of professionalism and behavior had been in place and understood and applied by everyone, at all levels.”
Yes, I’ve heard people prattle on about how it’s unrealistic to think that people won’t get involved with others they work with given how much time they spend on the job. And yes, I also know that just about everyone can point to an office romance that ended up in marriage and true love.
Those things DO happen and I have seen them too, but in my long experience as a boss and manager, the office romances that ended well are few and far between. In fact, I can count the ones that worked out on the fingers of one hand.
“ESPN [baseball] analyst Steve Phillips had a fling with a 22-year-old production assistant,” according to the New York Post, “who, after being dumped, taunted his wife with ‘Fatal Attraction’-like phone calls and a letter that bragged about her sexcapades with Phillips while taking pot shots at their ‘loveless marriage.’ ”
Phillips is a former general manager of the New York Mets who, according to the Post, “admitted having multiple affairs with women while working for the Mets.” Yes, he’s got a track record for fishing in the company pond, and it caused him problems back when he was a baseball executive too.
The current “developments come 11 years after Phillips took a brief leave of absence as the Mets’ GM after admitting to having sex with a team employee, Rosa Rodriguez, who sued him for sexual harassment, a case later settled out of court.”
I won’t go into the details of Phillips’ latest workplace sex scandal (the New York Post does a great job of that), but in the end, it not only got Phillips suspended for a week by ESPN, but he “is now being sued for divorce by his 40-year-old wife, the mother of his four sons,” the newspaper added. In addition, Phillips has deeded the family’s five-bedroom, multimillion-dollar home to his wife as well.
How many stories like the ones surrounding Steve Phillips and David Letterman do we have to hear before the light bulb goes on and people realize that sexual relationships with co-workers are fraught with peril and not worth the trouble and collateral damage they can cause for the rest of the workplace, and the families on the outside too?
And here’s the irony in all of this: You don’t get to be a Major League Baseball general manager, or network analyst, or famous late-night talk show host, unless you have a lot of skill and talent. Both Phillips and Letterman are smart guys who, somehow, outsmarted themselves and ended up doing some dumb things.
That’s why I welcome Bartz’s challenge to a longstanding management task that long ago seemed to outlive its usefulness—the annual performance review.
“If I had my way I wouldn’t do annual reviews,” she told The New York Times, “[especially] if I felt that everybody would be more honest about positive and negative feedback along the way. I think the annual review process is so antiquated. I almost would rather ask each employee to tell us if they’ve had a meaningful conversation with their manager this quarter. Yes or no. And if they say no, they ought to have one. I don’t even need to know what it is. But if you viewed it as meaningful, then that’s all that counts.”
I’m with Bartz on this one. I am not a fan of the annual review process, mainly because of the focus on the “process.” The discussion with the employee isn’t the problem, but rather, what you must go through to get to that stage—the inflexible forms, the manual process and the lack of a good follow-up system that makes the evaluation truly meaningful.
I might feel differently if I had access to some slick software that automates the process—and I’m told by my HR vice president that it is coming in 2010—but in the meantime, it’s more about the process than it is about the communication with the worker.
The solution that Carol Bartz suggests—an ongoing process of discussion, review and coaching with the employee—makes a lot of sense but also takes a lot of time. That’s in short supply for a lot of managers as they cope with the effects of the Big, Bad Recession, but I think that Bartz has the right idea.
A just-in-time system for regular employee feedback might go a long way toward helping keep workers engaged as we all struggle with an economic environment that makes it tough to keep workers’ heads in the game.
“People should understand that they will learn more from a bad manager than a good manager,” she told the Times. “They tend to get into a cycle where they’re so frustrated that they aren’t paying attention actually to what’s happening to them. When you have a good manager things go so well that you don’t even know why it’s going well because it just feels fine. When you have a bad manager you have to look at what’s irritating you and say: ‘Would I do that? Would I make those choices? Would I talk to me that way? How would I do this?’ When people come to me and say, ‘I can’t work for so-and-so anymore,’ I say, ‘Well, what have you learned from so-and-so?’ People want to take a bad situation and say, ‘Oh, it’s bad.’ No, no. You have to deal with what you’re dealt.”
That’s the trick in life, isn’t it—“to deal with what you’re dealt.” Those are words of wisdom that all managers need to live by, in good times and in bad, because they are the very essence of what it takes to be a successful and effective manager.
Close readers of this blog know that I have a low threshold for “news” or “trends” that seem to be generated by the clueless and brain-dead practitioners of America’s public relations profession solely to promote the latest book or expertise of some windbag “expert” they have as a client.
They are not a problem for 99 percent of the working world and simply are a case of creating a bogus workplace issue that—surprise!—there just happens to be some expert who can help solve.
This would all be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that there are equally brain-dead media types, primarily engaged in the broadcasting profession, who play into this hype and regurgitate the nonsense that these PR handlers and their “experts” are spewing. They help to perpetuate this cycle that focuses on silliness rather than really honest-to-goodness workplace issues.
And that gets me to my latest rant about something called National Boss Day. It’s apparently coming up Friday, October 16, although as Wikipedia rightly says (and readers note, I’ll probably never put that in a sentence again), “The holiday has been the source of some controversy and criticism in the United States, where it is often mocked as a Hallmark Holiday.”
I’ve had a couple of press releases today touting either workplace surveys pegged to National Boss Day or some manner of workplace expertise about how to deal with a boss that spins off the event.
Here’s my take: National Boss Day is a put-on, a fraud, a silly and senseless “event” that one would expect to find in a Monty Python sketch, an episode of The Office or a Dilbert cartoon. And in all cases, the mention of such an event should simply be to mock the pretentiousness of such BS.
Why do we need National Boss Day anyway? As a longtime boss, the last thing I want is for anyone working for me to engage in such nonsense because it seems to elevate being a boss for no other reason than because a boss has power and authority.
In my world, great bosses are honored for the good they do and the respect and loyalty they generate among those who work with them, not because someone concocted some fake day that people are expected to remember.
So, just remember this when you read or hear some dumb “news” story on Friday about National Boss Day. When you do, smile for a second and perhaps take a moment to wonder, “What kind of real news am I missing because some idiot editor fell prey to this PR crap about National Boss Day?”
When that happens, think of me and remember, I warned you here first.
= Member Only
