Fort Hood: Earth to Employers

I’ve previously done my share of posts on employment lessons to be learned from the Ft. Hood tragedy. One of the posts specifically dealt with performance review lessons. With the ongoing scrutiny of the Ft. Hood shootings, the recriminations against the Army for not firing Major Nidal Hasan long before Ft. Hood are becoming other-worldly.

As I noted in my previous performance review post, there were issues raised about Major Hasan’s quality of work (professionalism and work ethic) – issues that could have led to his termination or the failure to promote him. National Public Radio obtained a copy of one of Hasan’s reviews and did a major report on it. Try as hard as we might, neither NPR nor anyone else can objectively review the Hasan situation without taking into account the allegation that he killed 13 and wounded 30 more at Ft. Hood. Everything, including performance reviews, is now colored by that event.

The NPR report includes interviews with “two leading psychiatrists” who say without hesitation that the kind of performance review received by Hasan would have derailed his career if he had applied for a job outside the Army. There are a few problems with such certain condemnation of the Army’s failure to appropriately deal with Hasan before the Ft. Hood shootings.

There was nothing in the performance review to indicate that Hasan would ever do what he actually did at Ft. Hood. Now that he’s done it, there’s no way to look at any evaluation of Hasan without reading into it massacre. Prospective employers don’t have access to an employee’s performance reviews from a previous employer, so no employer hiring Hasan would have been privy to the reviews. These “leading psychiatrists” leave the impression that psychiatry is different from other businesses when it comes to performance reviews.

I’d be shocked if psychiatrists in government and in the private sector don’t transfer colleagues with less than stellar reviews from one department to another or one affiliated practice or hospital to another. The person becomes someone else’s problem, and the confrontation and possible lawsuit over firing a doctor is avoided. I’m guessing that doctors are “passed around” much more readily than front-line supervisors.

I’ve already made clear that one lesson from Ft. Hood is that employers should pay much more attention to performance reviews than they ordinarily do. The fact is, however, that what happened with Major Hasan happens thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of times a day with all kinds of employers.

It would be nice to think that the Ft. Hood tragedy will make employers change their ways and that they will all begin to think and talk like the leading psychiatrists in the NPR report. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely. Supervisors, managers and bosses are too busy. There’s always something positive in a review, just as there was in the Hasan review featured by NPR, and that becomes a reason for keeping or transferring. The aversion to firing a high-profile or professional employee is blinding.

The Army is likely to tighten up its performance review process as a result of Ft. Hood. But for employers who live in glass houses to throw stones at the Army for the way it handled Major Hasan borders on hypocrisy. If you think I’m wrong, let some leading, independent experts in your industry review all of your employee performance reviews. When they report that a significant number of employees have reviews that should have resulted in pink slips, what will you do? Fire the employees? Decide that since the experts don’t really know these employees, they missed the good qualities that cause you to keep them around? File the report away for further study?

1. 

   ACU Frank says:

   November 23, 2009 at 5:51 pm

   I challenge anyone and everyone who reads this to tell me honestly they are NOT aware of a private sector employee who has exercised unprofessionalism, antagonism, and laziness and still kept his job.

   Our world is awash in glass houses.