Get the pitchforks.
We haven’t progressed much since Salem. When something goes wrong, most of us waste little time deciding who’s at fault so we can “hold them accountable.” And nowhere is this better-developed than the cable-news commentariat, where, no matter what bad news is being discussed, someone complains that nobody lost their job or went to jail.
The go-to-jail branch is beyond KJR’s purview. Besides, when a corporation commits a felony it can’t be put in jail, nor is it often clear that some individual within the company committed the felony, let alone which one.
Moving on to the importance of firing someone …
When something goes wrong, whether it’s an offshore oil rig blowing up, veterans waiting too long for medical care, or falsified metrics about how long veterans are waiting for medical care, asking who’s at fault means making two false assumptions.
The first is that firing someone for being the root cause will put everyone else on notice that failure has consequences … that the threat of punishment will deter failure.
But it won’t, for a bunch of reasons, like:
- Very few people come to work every day planning to find yet another way to screw things up, so there’s nothing to deter in the first place.
- The person who gets punished is only rarely the source of the problem. More likely, they’re just a scapegoat who lacked the political savvy to keep his or her head down to let some other poor sap take the fall.
All that will be deterred is visibility. Mostly, employees will learn to keep their heads down and their mouths shut.
- The person doing the firing is probably the person who hired the person they’re firing, which means the terminator screwed up worse than the terminee, and will probably screw up the same way again when replacing the dear departed. What is it that will be deterred, exactly?
So the value of deterrence is the first false assumption. The second is that the root cause of the problem was that someone was at fault in the first place.
You could, I suppose, make the case that no matter what goes wrong, someone was in a position to prevent it and failed to do so. When, for example, the asteroid hit the earth 65 million years ago or so, just before the last few dinosaurs expired, one probably looked at his fellow reptiles and said, “It’s those danged T-Rexes! If they’d only invented rockets and Bruce Willis we wouldn’t be in this mess!”
But really, it’s much more useful to ask what went wrong. When you do you’ll learn what you need to change to make sure the same thing doesn’t go wrong over and over again.
Sometimes, what went wrong was that someone was sitting in the wrong chair — that the person responsible for whatever it was had the wrong attitude, aptitudes, skills, and knowledge to make things work the way they’re supposed to.
If this describes your situation, you should move that person to a different chair — one in which they’re more likely to be successful. If you don’t have any chairs like that, you might have to terminate the employee, who will then, one hopes, find the right chair in a different organization.
You do need the right people in the right chairs. But this isn’t holding anyone accountable. It’s effective staffing — a very different matter. And oh, by the way, managers who find themselves having to do this frequently might ask themselves what they’re doing wrong when it comes to hiring people.
Which is why I give President Obama and General Shinseki credit. There was no mention of holding anyone accountable and no suggestion that Shinseki was being punished. Both agreed the VA needs new, distraction-free leadership. The president complimented Shinseki for his decades of service, as he should have.
General Shinseki has, in his career, proven himself to be immensely capable in a variety of roles. At the VA he demonstrated that turning around a giant bloated bureaucracy isn’t one of them.
And that’s what the VA needs right now. We can hope that when Obama proposes and the Senate confirms Shinseki’s replacement, this is what everyone will be focused on.
Probably, it won’t, because when it comes to public officials, just about everyone, from politicians to the talking heads to, for that matter, the voting public cares more about policy than competence.
What they ignore is that without competence, the chance of following the best policy is unlikely, while with it the chance of implementing policy is greatly enhanced.
Bob,
The only problem I have with this is that I don’t really believe that anyone really is going to try to change how the VA operates at all.
It all seems like too many in the administration want this to just go away. How much do you want to bet that 3 weeks from now questions about the VA from the press will be met with “thats old news” and “Shinseki’s resigned, the problem will be solved”?
I do not agree that regular staff who created and filled the hidden lists (they had to know they were doing wrong, they made “hidden” lists) should be allowed to keep their jobs. I think a good business corollary to this would be if staff at different company sites were actively cooking the books at each site. There’s no corporation that wouldn’t fire all of the staff that took part in doing that.
Whoever comes in to head the VA now, will need to find those that were unethical and/or criminal and root them out of the organization. I don’t have confidence that would happen.
Not so sure on the private sector firings front. This is, after all, a metrics scandal, not a care scandal. Very few corporations would fire everyone involved if the IT operations manager forced employees to fudge the data used to report service level performance.
Other than the New York Times, nobody even seems to care that the VA, in spite of massive budget increases, hasn’t increased its medical staff in proportion. And as Congress is, from what I’ve read, up to its eyeballs in requiring the service level reporting and setting it up so failing to meet the service levels led to personal consequences, I agree that Congress is unlikely to allow the metrics problem to get fixed.
In fact, I read one report that Shinseki testified to Congress that the metrics system was a source of the problem, for all the good it did him.
In any event, I agree with you, although not entirely for the reasons you state. The problem is unlikely to get solved because reviving a massive bureaucracy is very, very hard to do. More efforts fail than succeed.
Why can’t we put a corporation in jail? The Supreme Court ruled that a corporation is a person, didn’t they? 😉
Seriously? this is your thought?
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Which is why I give President Obama and General Shinseki credit. There was no mention of holding anyone accountable and no suggestion that Shinseki was being punished. Both agreed the VA needs new, distraction-free leadership. The president complimented Shinseki for his decades of service, as he should have.”
I am sure the families of the vets that died under this “so called” leadership will find comfort in that. Yep no accountability is the right action – I SO disagree and frankly this is the problem in this country – no one wants to be held accountable, especially this president and his minions ( whatever happened with Benghazi?) again no one was punished for giving a stand down order.
http://www.legion.org/documents/legion/pdf/va_epidemic.pdf
Yes, this is my thought. People at all levels fail sometimes. When Obama appointed Shinseki to head the VA, I didn’t hear any of the talking heads say, “He’s appointing that worthless putz? What the hell is he thinking?!?!?”
Shinseki was, so far as anyone could tell, a good choice.
Shinseki used the techniques that had worked well for him in the past. They didn’t work for him here. When he discovered people were massaging the data he started to take steps, but by then the situation had blown up and the focus shifted to him as a leader. That’s the distraction part. So he made the choice to step down, because he understood the distraction would prevent him from doing what he needed to do. I’m guessing, and this is just a guess, he also knew he wasn’t the right person for the job.
So yes, I stand by what I said. That people died because Shinseki failed to revivify a sluggish bureaucracy is very sad. You don’t, it appears, seem to understand that the data-faking didn’t kill anyone. What caused the deaths was insufficient capacity. Everyone seeking care got it just as soon as a caregiver became available.
And seriously … Benghazi? I think you’re listing to Fox News too much and every other source of information too little.
your response doesnt address the lists that were found that kept people from getting treatment. As far as Benghazi, you dont need to go to fox news to hear a whistleblower (who they tried to keep quiet) going before congress explaining that they asked for help and got none, or the generals that were told to stand down… dont hang everything on fox or bush – it is what is is, and regardless of scandal – pick one (they are growing daily) none of these people are being held accountable, whistleblowing did no good anyway when you have an administration that could care less of what congress thinks – so much for checks and balances.
I think the biggest mistake Shensiki made was not resigning when he initially found out how bad it was. The VA has been like this for decades. Shinseki did what most military people (and many of us) would do, try to find a way to fix the problem without fully understanding it or knowing the extent of the problem. Politics aside, the VA is a huge vessel that will not turn on a dime. I also doubt that Congress would allocate funds to really “fix it” should they be needed so whoever takes over will already be behind the game when they start. In my opinion.
I have usually disagreed with you on “holding people accountable” (we have different definitions of what that means), but I agree with you in the examples in this article. Congressional hearings always seem to focus on narrowing highly complex/nuanced situations down to mistakes made by one person. (Now, if you look at something like the South Korean ferry disaster, I think it is easier to talk about holding an individual accountable.)
Thanks. And I trust you understand that when there’s actual malfeasance involved I take a very different position on the subject. As a general rule I do think criminals should be punished for their crimes.
Although even there, it’s worth asking the question of what our goals are – what do we do if we have to choose between punishing a perpetrator and preventing a recurrence, assuming there are situations where it’s one or the other.
Harry’s comment about how long this has been going on, got me to thinking that there may be some element of classicism in play here. For as long as I’ve been alive, both Democrats and Republicans has espoused support our vets, yet neither party has been able to make it happen over the course of a half century or more.
Since there doesn’t seem to be substantial graft involved, but a rather a persisting ineffectiveness, I have to wonder if there is some kind of unconscious guilt or shame at play, whose manifestation is mutating, but persisting dysfunction.
Like dealing with racism and sexism, whoever is leading the institution has to implement appropriate tracking mechanisms, as has been done successfully in the Army or United Parcel Service, among many other organizations.
With these kinds of generations-long discriminations, the “perps” are quite unconscious of the true motives and effects of their actions.
Of course they should be fired. They lied to get bonuses. I call that fraud. If they had lied about how many miles they drove to get more reimbursement on an expense report, there would be no question. What’s the difference?
The deception DID effectively deny care. We have been hearing for years about waits and a consequent lack of available care at the VA. And the (false) numbers have been used to refute those charges. Had the wait times and backlogs been reported accurately it is very likely that changes would have been make years ago.
The fact that a system/culture encourages a lack of integrity does not remove the individual burden to act with integrity, and does not remove the burden of the organization to get rid of people who don’t.
Fixing the culture STARTS with firing those who lied. I WANT an organizational culture where the consequences of lying are severe. And make no bones about it .. these people LIED.