On 25 Jun 96 Rol Fessenden wrote -
> Michael, building on an earlier response of mine, you wrote a very
> interesting posting on values. Philosophically, I agree with your
> perspective. Values co-exist in networks, not as individual entities. I
> would even go further, and say that even once we have identified a value
> -- say love of the environment -- we still do not know what that means
> when professed by different people. Again, we need to understand the
> whole context to understand the contained meaning in the phrase, "love of
> the environment".
>
> Having agreed with you, I now check in with my feelings, and they tell me
> that my values are in conflict. I FEEL conflicted because my value of
> loving other people conflicts with my value of protecting my organization
> from a destructive person (for example).
Rol, I don't doubt that you feel that a conflict exists, but does it
really? For purposes of discussion, let's ignore your organization and
only analyze "loving other people".
Assuming that the person is in fact destructive and disruptive, the effect
on other people wil be to demoralize and disrupt them over time. The boss
may be able to mitigate the damage by making them know that he's aware of
the problem, doing something about it and asking them to put up with the
difficulty during the correction period. But what if there is no
correction? Does permanently allowing the disruptive person to do damage
to others meet the test of loving people? Or is it the opposite of loving?
I would contend that 3-6 months is enough to ask anyone to put up with a
disruptive person who cannot seem to change. I would also contend that
beyond 3-6 months is also destructive of the disruptive person as well. If
you and your organization cannot effectively help, it is time to let the
person go somewhere else and try again. You are not doing them a favor
keeping them around, only allowing them to put off addressing the issue.
Don't think for one minute that the disruptive person is living the good
life. They are in some sort of nightmare and being "enabled" by a boss is
destructive of them and their loved ones, not helpful.
So I don't see your conflict! In fact, it seems to me that everyone will
be better off if this person is caused to move on to a new place where
they may be able to change or get better help. I actually believe that 9
months is the maximum time which should be spent on helping a person who
is not positively responding, but then I believe that the aid should be
first class and I do have a definition of that for every such case.
I have left out a lot of details, but I hope that you got my thread.
Regards, Joan
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Joan Pomo The Finest Tools for Managing People
Simonton Associates Based on the book
jpomo@gate.net "How to Unleash the Power of People"
--"jpomo@gate.net" <jpomo@gate.net>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>