Since the murderous outrage at Fort Hood, TX last week, the mumbling has reached a crescendo about, “In view of this guy’s checkered work performance, if not confused loyalties, how could the Army have allowed him to A. Get promoted, B. Reassigned to another unit, C. Continue practicing as a psychiatrist with emotionally fragile troops, and D. Deployed to a combat role?” While the truth will eventually be known, in the meantime, we manager types would do well to lighten up on the finger pointing.
The reason is that we do a fair amount of the same stuff ourselves. In a 17 year career as an HR manager/executive, I seldom saw a terminated employee with sub-par performance reviews, but I’ve seen lots of problem employees transferred over and over, rather than having someone man-up and deal with the issue. Likewise, I’ve seen hundreds of people sent to training or executive coaching by a gutless manager who silently hopes that they will somehow come back fixed.
My hope is that, if anything good can come from the Ft. Hood episode, it might serve as a reminder of the bad things that can happen inside any organization when problems are allowed to fester, or are swept under the rug.
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A thought leader in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows
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