Whistle Blowing vs. Blowing Whistles

I love a nice juicy workplace drama story.  And when the workplace drama also includes a sports angle then I am in the happy zone.

Submitted for your consideration - from the State University of New York at Binghamton - (courtesy of Inside Higher Ed), Coach's Exit vs. Whistle Blower's Exit.

The important details from the Inside Higher Ed piece:

The State University of New York at Binghamton announced last week that it had agreed to a $1.2 million settlement that will lead to the departure of its suspended men's basketball coach, Kevin Broadus. Under Broadus, the basketball program achieved athletic success but found itself in the middle of a controversy over the admission of academically unprepared athletes and numerous arrests of players.

One of those who blew the whistle on the basketball program, however, faces a future much less financially secure than Broadus does. Sally Dear, an adjunct since 1998 and a key source for a New York Times article last year on the scandal, received a letter Monday telling her not to expect a renewal of her teaching duties for the next semester. She currently teaches two courses and is paid $5,000 for each one. In the Times article, which angered many supporters of the Binghamton athletic program, Dear was quoted about how basketball players arrived late, left early, and disrupted class in other ways.

Nice.  The school more or less looks the other way on some questionable and possibly illegal activities associated with the basketball program in order to see some success and get some notoriety for the program.  After some time, the behaviors and violations become too egregious and well-known that eventually it all comes crashing down.  The coach, who has at least some, if not most of the blame for the mess will walk with a cool $1.2M, while one of the whistle blowers gets casually shown the door. Interesting how Binghamton can find seven figures for the coach but can't free up $10,000 for Ms. Dear to continue teaching her two courses. 

I don't know much more about the tale than the few details in the piece, but the bit that is concerning is how colleges in particular, and corporate organizations in general can come to view and value the service, contributions, and expandability of temporary or contract staff.  

Colleges use adjuncts for lots of reasons - sometimes to fill slots to teach unique or specialized courses, to backfill permanent faculty doing research or on sabbatical, or often to cut costs and improve incremental profit margins.  Kind of the same reasons that organizations engage temporary or contract staff in the corporate world. Many adjuncts will tell you that while they enjoy their work, and are committed to their discipline and their students, they fully realize their (low) place on the institutional pecking order.  

But as we heard last night on the HR Happy Hour interview with Dan Roddy of IBM, the trend towards more flexible and fluid workforces, with more representation of contract and temporary staff is not only continuing, but likely is accelerating. 

My guess is Ms. Dear has not been (effectively) dismissed because she was a whistle blower, but more likely since she was merely 'contract' staff, and therefore much more expendable. Not a big deal you might think, part of the reason that any organization employs temporary or contract staff is the ability to adapt and react to changing conditions and new opportunities much more rapidly than in the past.  In many organizations there has always been a bit of a stigma attached to the 'temps'. But I wonder in a world that seems to be barreling towards an even greater use of temporary and contract staff if we really need to think more consciously about how we have traditionally viewed these contributors.

I don't think we can continue to view and treat them as mere commodity purchases.  I don't think we can continue to cast them off for acting in a manner that is consistent with what we would expect and demand from the 'real' employees.

At SUNY Binghamton, the 'real' employee that blew a whistle for a living is walking away with a sweet exit package.  The 'fake' employee, one of the whistle blowers, now has to scramble to find a way to replace the $10,000 she won't earn this semester.

Hopefully she can land another temp gig somewhere else, and soon.

Possible reasons I won't be presenting at SHRM '11

Monday morning started early this week, in a breezy and crisp ‘autumn is pretty much over and winter will be here very soon’ kind of way.  Me, semi-staggering from the early hour and the too-much Halloween candy from the night before cobwebs managed to have a reasonably productive start to the week only to be interrupted by an unfamiliar visitor, the mail guy, who dropped off an official looking letter addressed to me.

Sort of odd, because in the short time I have been here I don’t think I had received any snail mail at all, in fact, I can’t imagine the career prospects for folks that actually still deliver snail mail in corporate campuses to be all the bright.

This letter was from SHRM, the Society for Human Resources Management.  A few months ago I, along with many of my colleagues and friends had submitted presentation proposals for next June’s SHRM Annual Conference.  In fact, I want to say I submitted the presentation for consideration about a year before it would be (theoretically) delivered, SHRM had better hope nothing significant changes in the world of work and HR for twelve months.  But I digress.

As you can tell from the post title, and from the image on the right, my proposal was rejected.  For the purposes of full disclosure, my proposal was not for a formal or traditional presentation, it was a pitch to do a live, on-site version of the HR Happy Hour show, and I offered as my ‘proof-of-performance’ the archive of 70-odd shows that we have done, highlighting some of the best episodes that featured leaders and well-known experts like Dave Ulrich and Andrew McAfee.

The form letter I received informing me of the rejection offered nothing specific about why the session was rejected - my theory - the folks that evaluated the session had never heard of the show; but a close read of the text does offer some clues as to perhaps why the HR Happy Hour show will not be on the program at SHRM ‘11.

Possible reason 1 - ‘We strive to offer a balanced program of educational sessions’

Likelihood - Thinking no, as I can’t imagine there were any other ‘live radio show’ sessions pitched.  So including the HR Happy Hour could not have ‘unbalanced’ anything.  In fact, something like the show would have been a good counterweight to the 13 sessions given by lawyers.

Possible reason 2 - ‘(we) select proposals that best fit the overall programming framework of the conference’

Likelihood - Pretty high I think.  Assuming that the ‘overall programming framework’ doesn’t include ‘different’, ‘unique’, or ‘innovative’.  Can anyone actually describe this framework anyway? But this had to be the main reason for the snub.  The Happy Hour show just does not fit the typical and expected template.  And I do believe that SHRM does know what its members want.

Possible reason 3 - ‘Please understand that we receive many proposals with several on the same topic’

Likelihood - On the ‘many proposals’ part - sure; on the ‘several on the same topic’ - no way.  No one else is crazy enough to keep organizing, producing, and presenting a weekly show on HR and Workforce topics.  Maybe I should take that as a sign there really isn’t much of an audience for this sort of thing.

The end result is that the HR Happy Hour show will not be broadcasting from SHRM ‘11 next June, at least not as part of the ‘official’ proceedings.  I am not trying to whine and complain about being rejected, I quite honestly did not put that much effort into the submission, but I did want to let listeners of the show (all seven of you) know what was going on.  From experience broadcasting from several prior events, I have come to the conclusion the only way to reach anyone outside the core audience is to get on the 'official' conference program. Whether or not that will ever happen is another story.

Regardless, after writing this piece, and processing all the information, I actually think I figured out where I went wrong.  Instead of pitching a live HR Happy Hour show, the pitch should have been ‘HR Professor Steve Boese will interview a panel of legal and communications experts on the perils of unfettered access to internet radio in the workplace’.

I bet that would have matched the overall programming framework.

Builder or Custodian

In the world of big-time college athletics success on the field or court often results in ancillary benefits to the institution in the form of increased donations, an uptick in applications for admission, and in the case of so-called ‘Cinderella’ type schools that have not been traditionally strong, a surge in awareness and name recognition for the school to a wider audience.

In the college ‘money’ sports of (American) football and Men’s Basketball, a successful season or two, or a deep run in championship competition can be a springboard of opportunity for coaches at these smaller schools to make the jump to a larger school (and substantially raise their compensation), and can also create exposure for players at these small schools that perhaps might lead to a shot at professional contracts in the NFL or NBA.

Not unlike many industries or even geographies, there is a kind of hierarchy in college athletics; schools ‘know’ their place in the hierarchy by virtue of their level of competition, the conference and peer institutions that they choose to organize and affiliate with, and this hierarchy guides and influences the players they can recruit, and the quality and experience of the coaches they can employ.  Schools (and fans, alumni, students, etc.) all know their ‘place’ in the hierarchy, and while their is occasionally some institutions that ‘climb’ the ladder to higher levels of affiliation and competition, most of the upward mobility is personal, e.g., a successful coach at a lower level of competition gets a similar job at a bigger, top-flight school.

Last spring Butler University, a liberal-arts school with less that 5,000 students made a remarkable run to the Championship game of Men’s College Basketball, only to lose by two points to perennial power Duke, 61-59.  Butler’s coach Brad Stevens, was purported to be a candidate for several ‘bigger’ jobs (he stayed), and star player Gordon Hayward was seen as a potential NBA star (he left, and now plays for the Utah Jazz).  The movement of coaches and players from these small school successes is not really news anymore, and not terribly interesting (even to me).  

But another piece of employee transition news from Butler caught my attention over the weekend - the surprise resignation of Butler’s President Bobby Fong to take the over the same position at even smaller Ursinus College (I had to look it up too), a school of about 1,700 students located in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. Fong has been President of Butler for 10 years, a period that has been marked by rising enrollments, a successful $150M fundraising campaign, and capped off last spring by the exciting run to the Men’s Basketball Final Four and the Championship game.

If Fong were a player or coach on the basketball team, we’d expect his next move to be ‘up’; to take over at a big school like Michigan or South Carolina.  But to drop down to a tiny, off the map school like Ursinus?  In sports, this would be considered a step back, a career hiccup, or even the first step on the road to obscurity.  But look a bit closer and we see that what matters to Fong is the job he will be doing, not necessarily who he will be doing it for.  After 10 years of building up Butler, Fong wanted to start all over again the process in an environment where he would have that opportunity.  The money quote from Fong - “"You always want to be able to help an institution improve, and I tend to be a builder. I am not a custodian."

Super line, and one that reveals much about Fong as a leader, and that can also help anyone better understand and assess potential career moves.  Sometimes moving ‘up’ only means you get a nicer office to sit in while you simply look after things and try not to screw up. Sometimes you have to take a step ‘down’ in order to keep building.

Good luck at Ursinus President Fong, and if you make the Final Four again, I will demand an NCAA investigation.

At the time, it seemed perfectly logical

Last night on the HR Happy Hour show, 'HR Horror Stories II', I shared a tale from one of my college summer jobs, as a landscaper in a large cemetery.  The details of the story are kind of interesting if not all that important, suffice to say that we, (not me personally, mind you, I was kept at a safe distance from this sort of thing), had managed to 'place' a couple of recent arrivals to our facility in the wrong plots, and they needed to be 'swapped'.flickr - casch52

In case you (and I hope this is most of you), have not had a close encounter with the process of digging, positioning, leveling, and backfilling burials, to effect this 'swap' would require several hours of work, varying in intensity from not too hard, (operating the backhoe), to pretty hard, (raising, transporting, and replacing the coffins).  It was not a normal kind of activity for us, in the two summers I worked there this was the one and only occurrence of such a situation.

So in the morning we got the order that essentially read - 'Dig up Person A.  Dig up Person B. Put Person A where Person B was, and vice versa'.  And get this all done by 4:00PM, because no way we are paying overtime to any of you goofballs.'

Ok, I added the 'Goofballs' bit.

You would think that it would be the kind of hard, tedious, and unappealing task that the staff would try to avoid, as most of our days consisted of driving around on riding lawn mowers.  When the supervisor asked the seasonal help for volunteers to assist the 'real' staff, I stepped up, figuring I had six more weeks of riding around on the mower before I went back to college, and a day of exhuming and re-interring bodies seemed sort of appealing by comparison.

I hopped in one of the pickup trucks accompanied by one of the long-time, permanent cemetery workers who immediately shared his excitement and enthusiasm that he was assigned this duty, and he continued on to congratulate me on volunteering for the job, as it would be 'the best deal I had all summer'. I sort of thought the guy was a little weird to begin with, so the comment did not phase me too much, and I figured that at the very least the whole exercise would make for a good story. I suppose I was right as here I am telling it again after more that 20 years.

When we arrived at the plot of 'Person A' rather than call up the heavy equipment, and proceed the (likely nasty) process of exhumation, I was instructed to hop out of the truck, and grab the little plastic sign that served as a temporary marker (the permanent gravestone had not yet been placed), and get back in.  We then drove the short distance (none of the permanent staff walked anywhere when they could drive), where I snatched the temporary plastic marker from the site of 'Person B', and replaced it with the one for 'Person A'.  We completed our version of the exhumation/re-internment by putting the marker for 'B' on the original site of 'A'.

Yep, instead of actually digging up and re-burying, we simply switched the temporary markers that had been placed on the sites.  We saved ourselves several hours of hard work, were able to slack off for the rest of the day, (the staff were incredibly adept at hiding and doing nothing), and for the families/customers of 'A' and 'B', when they next came to the cemetery and saw the recently upturned soil and the temporary marker with the 'right' name, they were happy that the error had been 'corrected'. In a way we made it right, without actually doing the right thing.

As I look back, I am not especially proud of the story, I can rationalize it by saying I was just a 19 year old kid on a summer job and was trying to not make too many waves and get into trouble with the permanent crew. We should have moved Persons A and B like we were instructed. But thinking about it now, did it really matter that we didn't actually move them?

The only people that truly cared, the families, were convinced that we had actually executed the switch. The owners of the cemetery only cared that the customers were happy, which they were. The workers drove off to hide and sleep in their trucks for most of the day.

If Person A and Person B were unhappy, they sure weren't talking.

So if everyone ended up happy, why do I still feel a little guilty?

Shuffling to Buffalo

Today I have the great honor of presenting at the Buffalo-Niagara Human Resource Organization's annual event, HR Strategies on the Road to Recovery.

My session is about collaboration tools and technologies, what they are, how they can be applied in organizations to foster increased innovation, and how HR leaders and professionals might go about assessing and deploying these kinds of technologies.

I also have lots of unrelated images in my slides, and a dorky but neat 'Star Wars' effect on one of them.

I sent out a few tweets in the last couple of weeks about the event, mainly to try and discover if anyone in my extended network would be there today, and I was met with silence.  So either I am not that popular in Buffalo (likely), or the Greater Buffalo community is not all that dialed in to Twitter (probably), or the community there is passively ignoring me, (possibly).

At any rate, I have embedded the presentation below, apologies in advance for the crude nature of the design, pretty soon I am going to just start doing these 'Jimmy The Greek' style.

BNHRA - October 27, 2010 - Steve Boese

View more presentations from steveboese.

If you do see me in Buffalo be sure to say hello.