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.
Here’s one of them, and a question that every manager has to come to terms with: How much managing does a manager actually do?
In my view, anyone who is a manager is probably always managing at some level, but I am talking more about the outward signs of management and how aggressively you control your employees, or how much leeway your staff gets to work and make decisions on their own.
Yes, how you approach this has a lot to do with your personal outlook on life, but it also speaks to a lot of other factors—experience, confidence, the industry you work in and/or the type of work you do, and sometimes, company culture. For example, I once worked for a large media company that believed in aggressively managing everything and was top-down driven.
This worked pretty well for them most of the time, but it meant that managers were micromanaged from above so they in turn micromanaged those below them. That doesn’t make for the happiest working environment, I quickly found.
This leads to the question that I don’t think enough managers ask themselves: Should I overmanage or undermanage, and why do I do it that way?
I’ve known lots of managers and executives who, like Joe Girardi, seemed to be more focused on showing off how smart they were rather than doing the right thing by their staff, and that’s certainly an occupational hazard when it comes to managing.
But here’s the thing—managing is also about leading, about coaching, about nurturing, about helping your people to do their absolute best. Some do it with a lot of drama, but in my book, the best managers do it quietly, without a lot of fanfare, and without feeling the need to draw attention to themselves.
Each has their own unique style, but each is also focused on one critical thing: helping their people so that they have the freedom and the opportunity to do their very best. In short, it’s not about overmanaging or undermanaging, but rather, about supportive managing that lets people reach their full potential for the good of the entire organization.
If that’s what you’re doing as a manager, well, congratulations, because you’re doing it right. If that’s NOT how you’re doing it, well, you had better step back and take a good look at yourself and figure out how you can be more like Warren Buffett than Joe Girardi.
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?
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.
I love David Letterman. His late-night talk show is clearly the best of the bunch, and in my mind, he’s followed along in the footsteps of his mentor, the great late-night king, Johnny Carson.
It’s clear to me that David Letterman, highly paid late-night comedian and CBS talk show star, never heard (or conveniently forgot) one of the most basic managerial rules of all—don’t fish off the company pier.
Although many of the details are sketchy, there’s nothing that says what Letterman did was anything but consensual. One CBS Radio report I heard said Letterman was having sex with female staffers in his office, and as bad as that sounds, it’s still legal for consenting adults to engage in such behavior should they choose to do so.
That’s what catches me up, however. Why would any thinking, rational person—particularly someone of Letterman’s stature—choose to put themselves in a compromising position like that?
“While Letterman seems to be in no immediate risk of losing either his family or his job (ratings from last night’s telecast will likely be stratospheric), his troubles may not be over,” Time magazine says. “Having sex with people who were his employees or whom he managed could leave him, or CBS, open to a sexual-harassment lawsuit. It’s certain the comedian has given the network’s lawyers plenty of reasons to be up at night.”
Bosses getting involved with those who work for them is a trend that’s probably as old as the workplace itself. However, it’s fraught with peril and, in my long experience, is almost never worth the risk.
In fact, if you looked at this as a smart businessperson and examined the risk-reward potential, or the ROI of such a relationship, you probably wouldn’t get involved in such a deal at any level. But, that’s applying rational thinking to something that’s clearly an irrational decision.
Letterman has had a lot of drama and bad stuff to deal with in his life, but this is one that wasn’t foisted upon him; it’s trouble that’s self-inflicted. Even if the foiled extortion attempt turns out to be the worst of it, he’s left his many fans wondering just how someone who seems so smart and snappy on the surface can engage in such foolish (and some would say terribly bad) behavior when the office door is closed?
As someone who makes his living skewering other people and joking about their foibles, Letterman’s now going to become the punch line for a lot of manager and workplace jokes.
Who wants to be that guy? No manager that I know of. Yet Letterman, the guy who has publicly reveled in zinging Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer and many others for their sexual high jinks, is now going to become the poster boy for bosses behaving badly. That’s called karma, I believe.
And the jokes and zingers about this have already started. As Time magazine solemnly notes: “Letterman has also probably given truckloads of material to other comedians—or even his own writers. Let’s just say he may come to regret calling his company Worldwide Pants.”
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