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In Defense of Nose Picking and Boorish Behavior
Posted: 08/10/2007, 1:00 PM PT
Whenever I think that I’ve seen just about everything in the way
of management practice and behavior, I get shocked by something so outlandish,
ridiculous or just plain unbelievable that even my jaded and cynical soul is
shaken by it.This one hits close to home (more on that in a bit), and is something you
won’t see taught to MBA students anytime soon: An impassioned management defense
of an employee’s boorish behavior, and his right to embarrass the company by
picking his nose in public, on television.
It’s a little complicated to fully
explain and do it justice, so you might want to check out this link to the Los
Angeles-area blog LAObserved.com
for the full background. Essentially, the story is that a longtime
newspaper employee who was taking a buyout was accused of deliberately picking
his nose and embarrassing the publication on camera during a television
broadcast from the newspaper’s newsroom. When the television producer complained
about the on-camera nose picking and behavior of this newspaper employee during
this and other newscasts, the story was picked up by both local and national
blogs and media Web sites.
Here’s the outlandish/incredible/unbelievable
part: The supervising editor/boss of the on-camera nose-picker wrote a long,
impassioned memo defending the behavior and complaining that he was the victim
of “drive-by journalism.”
This all happened in the newsroom of a large
suburban daily newspaper in Southern California—The Orange County Register,
where I worked as an editor for nearly 12 years, departing in late 1992. I also
know the principals involved in this, both the accused nose-picker, who used to
work for me, and the editor who wrote the nose-picking defense.
While I
greatly admire any manager who goes to bat for a subordinate wrongly accused, I
still can’t believe that the defense essentially comes down to “Yes, he picked
his nose on camera and embarrassed us, but he didn’t mean to. And by the way,
being loud and boorish is just the way he is.”
Defending bad behavior is not
a sound management practice anywhere on this planet. As bad as this employee’s
behavior looks, whether he did it on purpose or not, I’d hate to be the manager
known for defending an employee’s right to pick his nose in front of a
substantial television audience.
What do you think? Send me comments at jhollon@workforce.com. I will publish as
many of them as I can.
Next Post: 5. Message in a Book List
I asked, "What does this list of the top-selling books purchased at last month's Society for Human Resource Management annual conference in Las Vegas tell you about the HR professional in the 21st century?"
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John Hollon
Workforce Management editor John Hollon is an award-winning journalist with more than 20 years' experience as a newspaper, magazine, Internet and business journal editor. He holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from California State University, Long Beach, and an MBA from Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business and Management.
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