Sometime's They Don't Learn...

Sometime we just don't learn.  Usually we don't learn chasing a dollar or some other victory while compromising the foundation of our organization.

I am speaking right now of course about Penn State and their decision to hire James Franklin to be their next football coach. While they claimed to leave "no stone unturned" and conducted a "thorough" background check, it only takes a few milliseconds to find alarming allegations about his role in possibly covering up a rape while he was at Vanderbilt University.

I hate to be the one to tell you Penn State, but you all just had a sexual assault scandal of epic proportions a very few years ago and now you want to go in this direction?  Are you sure THIS is the direction you want to run in?  To hire a coach who is allegedly involved with the cover up of a rape less than a year ago?

It would seem self evident that this might be a bad choice on the direction to go, but Penn State marches on.  It apparently did not even bother them about comments he made on a local radio show about not hiring assistant coaches until looking their wives over.  This is 2014, right?

In the meantime, a petition was started by a university professor to not consider Franklin.  Obviously, it was ignored.  Perhaps it was ignored because according to one report it had gathered less than three hundred signatures, but does it really need more than one?

I know I have had bosses who remarked regularly about other employees wives and nothing was done about it.  Again and again the organization would protect them because they were a supervisor and would relocate the offended party to another shift or another location rather than fix the problem.  It would seem to be a pattern when a supervisor makes comments about one of his employees wives regularly and then has one of his employees relocated to another location because his urges would seem uncontrollable and the organizational management chooses to do nothing about it.

Similarly, what is the use in HR policies that frown upon interoffice relationships when HR does not follow through when they are complained about?  While these issues do not raise themselves to issues of rape or sexual assault, they do show an unfortunate pattern of groups repeating the same behavior and then surprised when their work environments are not as productive as they could be.  How do we expect employees - be it at our local worksites or in college football - to win championships and do great things for their company when they have these distractions going on?

It reminds me of the old saying: "you only make a mistake once, after that it is a choice."