Documentation Done Right

As it turns out the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in the last two years of public service are what to say to correct unacceptable employee behavior and how to document it. Our City’s insurance pool provides trainings for supervisors in how to maintain supervisor’s files and how to conduct progressive discipline.

 The trainings are developed and conducted by an attorney who represented both employees and municipalities in wrongful termination suits. She’s seen it all over the years – the good, the bad, and the ugly – so she knows what she’s talking about.

 The first training I went to focused heavily on what an entry in a supervisor’s file should look like. The main elements were: 1) be brief, 2) always include date, persons present, and what was said, 3) Use descriptive words, not conclusions, and 4) Never insert personal opinions.

 Using descriptive words and not inserting personal opinions appear to be the most challenging for supervisors. Concluding that someone isn’t a “team player” or that they have some other character flaw is where most of us jump to. It may take some retraining of our thinking to be able to describe the actual events that occurred.

 Since our employment attorney had so many examples of bad supervisor notes, she shared a few with us:

 1.  May 6. I counseled Brian this morning about needing to be a team player. He isn’t acting like one. He said he would try to do better. (No year. No description of unacceptable behavior / event. No specific remedy.

2.   May 6, 2008. Spoke to Brian re 15 minutes late for work. His lame excuse this time: a flat tire. Last time it was his psycho wife. Better not happen again. (Personal opinion. Not sure if employee was told that behavior was unacceptable or the consequences for it happening again.)

 A better example:

 May 6, 2008

This morning Brian was 15 minutes late for work. This is the second time in 2 weeks (the first time it was 10 minutes.) I called him into my office to talk to him about it. I told him being late was unacceptable, as it forced others to cover for him. I also told him this was the second time in 2 weeks and if it happened again he may be looking at discipline. He said he understood, that he had a flat tire this morning, and his wife needed him the last time. He said he would see to it that it did not happen again.

 The details of “what was said” are the subject of a whole series of other trainings since they are typically disciplinary in nature, but you get the idea.

 I’ve shared this documentation method with friends who are not supervisors as well since being able to describe behavior and documenting it can be useful in other situations. In a municipality near ours, for example, an employee has been able to prove that her supervisor retaliated against her because of notes that she has taken since the day he started as her boss.

What if we had to vote?

In Australia, voting is compulsory. Since 1924, Australians have been required by their government to show up at polling booths or face fines. Not showing up to the polls also means that your vote automatically goes to the minority party.

For advocates of this law (and there are about 20 countries who vote this way) it’s touted as a way to get more people out to vote. A higher percentage of people voting means government is theoretically more representative of the people. One of the other stated benefits of compulsory voting is that when citizens are required to vote, they are more likely to educate themselves about the issues.

 I’d like to believe that Americans would be more inclined to educate themselves if faced with compulsory voting, but I wonder. I mean, it isn’t that people don’t have a lot of information. They listen to talk shows and watch Fox news and read all the emails that get sent their way. They really know a lot about the whereabouts of President Obama’s birth certificate, for instance. Being full of such knowledge, they join the Tea Party and carry photos of President Obama with Hitler moustaches while simultaneously calling him a Socialist.

 An “educated” populace isn’t necessarily the same thing as an “informed” one. It depends on who’s doing the informing and what kind of information it is. These posters illustrate my point. The Nazi’s called themselves the National Socialist Party, but they were Fascists. Fascists are about as right-wing as you can get. So, if you want to call someone a socialist, the facial hair of choice should be a pointy beard like Lenin, right? Someone didn’t get a basic political science lecture somewhere along the line. 

 The most important thing that we voters need to know when choosing a legislator is “How effective will this person be at getting my favored legislation passed?” Being an effective legislator has nothing to do with what religion you are or who you’ve slept with. Educating one’s self about how a particular legislator voted is relatively easy – you look at the voting record. The harder part of being informed is understanding the real effect of legislation.

 Our education system could be a source for that. Journalism could too. Unfortunately, both of these institutions have their flaws. Educators are constantly asked to do more with less. News organizations are in the business of selling information and it’s easier to do that when it’s sensational. A long list of how a particular legislator voted isn’t very exciting.

 One other obstacle to citizen education is ourselves. Do we really want to be informed? Or do we really just want to hear the things that support what we already believe?

 I’m not convinced that compulsory voting would result in better educated citizens, but I am convinced higher standards would. Higher education standards; journalists free to tell the story instead of sell ads and challenging ourselves to understand the real impact of that little blue line on the ballot.

The Slippery Slope of Discretion

As a theoretical public administrator, one of the values that I hold dear is that day to day operations of a municipality should be politics-free. As a practicing public administrator, I know that is almost impossible. But one thing that helps is a municipal code that is so clear that there’s no room for  political influence.

 If the code says “All updates to titles 14 through 19 go before the Planning Commission” then all updates to title 14 through 19 should go before the Planning Commission. A City Council member, Mayor or City Manager who tell staff to bypass the Planning Commission while this code is in place are in danger of violating their own code and therefore putting their careers in jeopardy. If anyone notices.

 But comes a day when someone in the above group decides that it’s just too cumbersome to send every  ordinance to the Planning Commission for a recommendation and they decide to go through the legally established process of changing the part of the code that says “All updates to titles 14 through 19 shall…” They decide they want to change it to “The Director has the discretion as to which updates go to the Planning Commission.”

 While this kind of language could be seen as giving the Director “flexibility,” more often than not what it actually does is make the Director more susceptible to the political influence of people that sign her paycheck. Which is why any city attorney worth their salt would discourage it; too much room for arbitrary and capricious decision making. However, attorneys are just employees too, so after they wisely advise not to give the Director discretion, they draft the ordinance anyway.

I think we can charitably say that the Council isn’t recommending this change because they want the Director to be their political puppet. (They want her to do what they say, but “puppet” is harsh). They just don’t want to have to send every piddly little sign ordinance to the Planning Commission if it means responding more quickly to their constituents. After all, it’s the Little League for crying out loud. They want to be able to put up their signs in the right of way to recruit new members. Juvenile delinquency will go down, test scores will go up, and baseball season starts next week. Why should we make them wait for the month and a half that it will take to get through the Planning Commission and City Council meetings?

Well, maybe we shouldn’t. But then you’ve got to be able to say with a straight face that in using your discretion, you didn’t make the Neo-Nazis wait a month and a half for their requested code update, at least, not just because they’re Neo-Nazi’s. After all, Hitler’s birthday is next week.

Free to be you and me – and powerful.

How much power do you have within your organization? How comfortable are you with even thinking about how much power you have? This month in the Harvard Business Review Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer asks the same questions in his article entitled “Power Play,” and I’ve got to tell you that the article made me squirm – and take notice. Because the question of how much power I have in my organization has been on my mind a lot for the last year or so.

 I am discovering that the power to influence decisions is not, as I have thought, based on how much I know or my technical proficiency; it’s about my people skills. For instance, the Director of my department has, in his short tenure in the City where I work, become one of the most listened-to Directors by the Mayor and City Administrator not because he has many opportunities for displaying his vast knowledge of our field, but because he does things like telling funny stories about his vacation in the few minutes before a meeting starts. I think this is an example of what Pfeffer would call “using the personal touch;” one among 11 ideas he details as keys to personal power.

 Before I actually worked in an office environment and heard the term “networking” I couldn’t stand it. To me “networking” equated to pretending to be interested in people while really wondering how you could use them to advance up the corporate ladder. There’s an aspect of that whole notion that conjures up creepy ‘70’s motivational self-help along the lines of “How to pick up chicks.” My hippie upbringing had me assuming that purposely talking and meeting with specific people because you want to advance your personal agenda is wrong.

 But the first example Pfeffer uses is a woman who had a vision for breast cancer research. Her personal version of success was also advancing a good cause. She purposely influenced and networked with specific people who could help her advance her cause, and they gladly did so, presumably without feeling lied to or manipulated. How could I find fault with methods that ended up in a cause that is so worthy and successful? As I continued to read the article I could feel my hippie paradigm shifting. Maybe it’s okay to seek out and create relationships with people with the notion that they can be helpful in advancing my cause. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ghandi didn’t fight for civil rights by themselves. They made friends and influenced people.

Pfeffer acknowledges that a preoccupation with office politics makes for a generally miserable workplace, but in my experience, so does having a lot of useful ideas that never get heard. If that means a little less time at the computer and more time in my boss’s office listening to his latest fishing story, there are worse things I could do.