By Stephen D. Bruce, PHR
Editor, HR Daily Advisor
What’s the most costly mistake manages and supervisors make? We found out at BLR’s Advanced Employment Issues Symposium (AEIS), where three top employment law attorneys took on the toughest questions of the appreciative audience.
Participating panelists, all members of the Employers Counsel Network, were Molly DiBianca of Young Conaway Stargatt & Taylor in Wilmington, Delaware; Audra Hamilton, who practices law in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Jonathan Mook of DiMuroGinsberg in Alexandria, Virginia.
Jumping to a Decision
Jumping to a premature conclusion is the most common and most potentially expensive mistake that she sees, said DiBianca. Managers believe that people are taking advantage of them and they think, “We’ll nip this in the bud.” That’s an emotional response and that makes for poor decisions. Manager and supervisors must learn to step back. Of course, that’s easy to say and hard to do, DiBianca admits.
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Say, for example, says Hamilton, that someone in the department says something negative, and a discipline or termination decision is made there at the department level. The decision is being made without considering plusses and minuses throughout the organization. You have to delay your action while you and others consider the organization-side consequences of what you are doing.
There’s also the question of how you’ll fare in court when you have to defend the action. Hamilton suggested that before taking action, you and your managers ask yourselves, “Would I feel comfortable justifying this action to a jury?”
Remember, says Mook, it’s likely to be years from now when this claim plays out in court. You’re going to have to recreate the environment for the jurors. Many of the key players will probably have left the company. And the jury is going to be asking, why did you terminate this person who had cancer? Was that a reasonable action under the circumstances?
When that time comes, will you be able to convince the jury that it was a reasonable act?
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What Can You Do
What can employers do to prevent off-the-cuff decisions?
Train, train, train. All supervisors and managers need to know what the boundaries are for decision-making about serious discipline and termination. In your training and in your policies, you should make it clear that managers should never make such decisions on their own.
Point out that there’s often an appearance of discrimination or retaliation even if none actually existed. The timing of an action (e.g., firing just after the person visited EEOC) may look suspicious, even if there was another, unrelated reason for the termination.
And then, there are factors which individual managers may not be in a position to know, for example, whether the person just filed a complaint or lawsuit, or asked for an accommodation. In addition, individual managers can’t evaluate whether their contemplated action is consistent with previous actions taken in similar circumstances in other departments.
Jumping to action before considering the consequences—the number one mistake managers make. Please use the comments link below to share a story about your “favorite” manager who acted impulsively and in so doing cost the company a lot more than was necessary.
Hernandez/Lopez v.Hillsides–A knee-jerk reaction by an executive director without even considering having a conversation with his HR director (me) about putting a hidden camera in a private office to catch whoever was accessing pornography from a computer in that office. Six figures later, we prevailed, but it was a very expensive (and completely unnecessary) route to take. Had he talked to me first, I would have told him 1) to have all employees sign a statement about being videotaped on campus 2) do NOT, under any circumstances, put a hidden camera in a private office occupied by 2 women. Nuff said.