First it was children in the air traffic control center, then yesterday, I heard about CAPT Holly Graf, the Navy Commander who had to be relieved of her command for creating a hostile work environment aboard her ship. As different as the two events are, I see a theme. Well, I'm always looking for 'themes' and connections, perhaps that's why I see them. To my mind what's going on here isn't just bad judgment or bad behavior, it's bad behavior in environments where bad behavior has traditionally been ignored or justified, so bad behavior goes from mildly bad to egregious, over a period of time.
Investigations are just beginning in the case of the 'Baby on the phone' case at New York's JFK airport, but the report is already out on CAPT Graf and it isn't good. It says in part, that "[T]he evidence shows" that Graf violated Navy regulations "by demeaning, humiliating, publicly belittling and verbally assaulting ... subordinates while in command of Cowpens". It goes on to say that "[h]er actions exceeded the firm methods needed to succeed or even thrive and [that] her harsh language and profanity were rarely followed with any instruction." (follow link below for full report on TIME.com) Interesting.
Sometimes I really have to wonder who's minding the store. Who is the authority or standard bearer for management behavior, because some of the things that happen are clearly happening under the 'watchful' eye of a blind leader. In the case of CAPT Graf, was the good CAPT even being managed? I certainly appreciate that the Navy is not a commercial business and so different rules apply, but terrorizing staff - whether they be sailors or salesmen - has, I think, been conclusively proven to have negative rather than positive effects on morale and productivity. It would seem to me that if ever there was an organization where we would want morale to be high, it would be the Armed Services....but I could be wrong. Why would one want there to be high morale in the Armed Services? We're only asking them to go out and put their lives on the line. I suppose you could do that while not trusting the people around you or your commander, but I don't know that we would particularly like the outcome if soldiers and sailors went to 'work' with a mindset of "I'll just have to take care of myself since I can't trust these people to have my back".
When it comes to the children in the Air Traffic Control center at JFK, one of the busiest airports in the US if not the world, I have to ask what the decision-makers were thinking. Were they thinking? And if there was some thought process, could you please let us know what it was? Instead of just firing the father and the supervisor, which should occur post haste, I would want to hear what was going on in their heads as they made the choices that brought us these events. My guess is that once the first child had come in on Day 1, the second child insisted on coming in on Day 2. This means that a SERIES of choices had to be made, by both the father and the supervisor for two different sets of approvals (one would hope). What were those choices? Did the safety of the traveling public ever factor into the equation? It is all well and good to dismiss the staff for egregious misconduct, but without identifying where the thinking broke down, this kind of poor judgment is likely to affect us, the traveling public, again.
A less important and yet not unimportant factor in the JFK ATC story, is the question of what other AT Controllers were doing and thinking, when these children were being allowed to transmit instructions. Were they muttering amongst themselves? Were they obviously annoyed or concerned? Or were they simply quietly horrified but saying to themselves, "Let me mind my own business. Don't start nothing, won't be nothing"? Were they, Heaven forbid, not in the least bit concerned? What is the organizational culture around safety? Is there a safety-consciousness code that these behaviors should have offended? And if there isn't, why isn't there? They are in the life and death business where the tolerance for mistakes in the work they do is fairly small. One wrong call and well, bad, bad things happen. So that said, what's the safety culture and did someone on duty on either of those days, go to the supervisor and point out that this behavior was grossly inappropriate? In that line of work, as in so many others, the minute people stop feeling responsible for each other we're in deep trouble. If there was no sense of "this is a problem" then that too needs to be investigated and appropriate actions taken to change attitudes.
It's easy enough to send a couple of people home, remove someone from command and think that the problem is fixed. In reality however, today's problem is usually a symptom of a underlying pathology. That pathology - whether it is an organizational culture blind to the practice of organizational terrorism or momentary dumb think in management - needs to be unearthed and effectively treated. Without efforts being taken to find and treat the root causes of these strange and dangerous behaviors, the next headline will be about the numbers of dead on account of some entirely preventable accident.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1969602-2,00.html#ixzz0hbESTCfz
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