“Why is everyone in this place a moron?” When that is the first sentence in a scheduled 90 minute productivity review with your boss, you know you have a long day ahead. The situation around this blurt of “one-size-fits-all” judgment statement starts actually rather innocently. We had been asked to jump on a project whereby six hundred people needed to be hired for a call center in the lovely state of Colorado.  Now, for you who do not live, sleep, eat, and breathe recruiting (which hopefully is most of you), that equates to the finding, interviewing, screening, and assessing of at least four thousand potential applicants with the hope that around one in four of them will be right for the job and one in two of those will survive the weeks of training necessary to do the job.  Oh and of course it needed to be done in about six weeks – THANK YOU SALES GUYS FOR THAT COMMITMENT!

The project gets done; seven thousand resumes turn into about four thousand interviews, turn into about one thousand people starting training and POOF! six hundred people open the production floor.  A job well done.

Until…

I will call him George, because quite frankly he was the kind of employee that you have to constantly scream “Watch out for that tree!” every time he wanders into a conversation. A good and productive worker who, when not on the phones helping a person learn how to send a naked picture of themselves to their new girl friend with their cell phone, would wander into random managers’ offices with an idea as to how to make the company billions of dollars. Except today, it was my boss and the Director of the facility who had the wonderful opportunity to be graced by George’s wisdom. In fact, as I am now so blessed to discover, this particular idea happened to be what George thought to be his absolute best idea.  Thanks, George!

The idea was simple, find out who liked to smoke pot, hire them, and encourage them to partake in their smoking habit before they come to work. In George’s mind this would reduce stress on the floor, expand employee creativity, and make the company look hip and progressive. To prove his theory (I think – because I can’t rationalize any other reason), George took it upon himself to be stoned when he presented the idea to the operations director for the facility. It could have been worse; George had planned to ask the question during the “All Company” celebration Q&A with the CEO.   Thanks, George!

George had a minor conviction on his background for possession of a controlled substance, he also had a website extolling the virtues of cannabis, but in the city of Denver… well, who doesn’t? Our background screening process did not eliminate a person with misdemeanor substance abuse, nor did we at that time dredge the web for extra information on candidates.  Furthermore, one kook out of a thousand new hires equates to one tenth of one percent in the “maybe we should not have hired him” category.  But that is not why I am telling you this story.

The real problem was my boss.

We have all played the game Whack-A-Mole, where a plastic critter will pop his head out of one of ten holes and your job is to reflexively beat the snot out of the poor creature. The game’s only value from a management development perspective is to teach you to assume that all moles should be whacked the moment you see them and whoever created the game is a moron.

This manager had greatly adopted the Whack-A-Mole system of management whereby, if I had allowed George to be hired, then all the people I hired had to be “George.” In his eyes, every one of the six hundred people hired were now officially unqualified to be working for the company. My recruiters had filled the floor with highly creative, aggressive, pot smoking, visionaries whose extensive criminal records should be turned into the FBI, a Keith Richard’s fan club, or at least forwarded to FOX’s reality show division.

So now with this newly created management impression, every manager, supervisor, HR representative and recruiter is sent scrambling to identify if any other person in this six hundred seat call center might have something in their past which could indicate that they might be equally compromised in their daily job. It was a huge waste of energy, effort, and time because the true bottom line was George, for all of his crazy ideas, was a damn good phone tech. His performance scores were excellent and his customer satisfaction was about 20% higher than normal. The center itself had significantly good performance scores and supervisors and teams were well ahead of their productivity goals.

Nature gave us reflexes for a reason.  A dinosaur wants to bite you in half; you take a jump to the left.  A thorn bush sticks you in the leg; you take a step to the right.  But we don’t nuke the dinosaurs and burn every bush in a hundred yard radius.  AND, after our reflexes keep us out of danger (because that is what they are for), we realize that the dinosaur is just a big funny shaped rock and the bush didn’t attack us, we stepped into it.  Reacting without the facts is exactly what we do when we play Whack-A-Mole. Hey! There is a mole…. hurry, whack it! Reacting reflexively to protect yourself is fine. If you are outside shooting hoops, take the foul; if you are rounding a dark corner while playing Halo 3 and something moves, shoot; if you are at a town hall meeting talking to your congressman, run screaming from the room. That’s ok… it’s expected. Thinking that everyone who likes Jimmy Buffet is a pothead is whacked. (DISCLAIMER: Grateful Dead Fans excluded from analogy…they ARE all potheads)

George was the poor mole who gave every other mole a bad name. But George was not the only casualty of this game. After this exercise, where every person in a management role had to jump through hoops because of this incident, they came to realize that the Director was dead wrong. It hurt the Director’s credibility and his ability to manage. It also eliminated the willingness of other people to speak candidly and openly about ideas and issues, all from fear of being the next mole.

I don’t know what happened to George.  He is still in Denver, so I imagine he is just fine. The call center director is now in Kentucky, I am sure there are no odd folks there……..

Copyright © 2010 Mike Baumgartner | HR | Consulting | Coach |  Human Resources | Search - CEO, Worklife Survival Center LLC