The dirty work of IT leadership: Dealing with malfeasance

Leadership is, for the most part, gratifying. Whether it’s from building a high-performance organization, or turning one around; helping a promising employee develop, or accomplishing something your industry peers can only wish they’d achieved — succeeding in a leadership role provides a rush like no other.

But there’s another side of leadership. No, not having to deal with poor performers. With a poor performer you might at least find a role they can succeed in — an outcome that provides satisfactions of its own.

No, we’re talking about malfeasance — dealing with people who deliberately act in ways they shouldn’t, and who can cause significant damage when they do.

Here are a few common situations CIOs find themselves in — and how you might best handle them.

Episode #1: Inter-vendor rivalries

Once upon a time, a CIO wanted to establish an architecture practice, using an application portfolio rationalization (APR) exercise as the springboard.

The APR consultancy engaged to make this happen needed data managed by a different outsourcer. That outsourcer saw no reason to cooperate. Quite the opposite: By withholding access to the needed data — data that was the client’s intellectual property, managed by the outsourcer on the client’s behalf — the outsourcer could torpedo the APR consultancy’s project, picking up the pieces once it died as add-on business.

The APR consultancy’s project manager asked the client’s executive sponsor to intervene, but given the company’s internal politics, no intervention came. The project crashed and burned, the application portfolio wasn’t rationalized, and the CIO wasn’t able to institute an architecture practice.

What went wrong: There are lots of places for fingers to point and directions to point them, but high on the list is the CIO’s responsibility to establish a business culture that rejects this sort of game-playing. Because while it isn’t always recognized, in an outsourced environment vendors have an outsized role to play in ensuring their teams conform to their client’s business culture.

With a healthy business culture, no vendor would dream of withholding a client’s data from a project that needed it, and every vendor relationship manager would recognize and resist the danger of “going native” with the vendor whose relationship they manage.

Episode #2: The Hopper conundrum

At the end of the business day, a newly recruited senior developer called the head of app dev and me over to show us his latest (also earliest; also last) accomplishment. What it was: He’d installed an unsanctioned (and unpaid-for) app dev suite on his company laptop. It was, he told us proudly, far superior to the company standard.

“Pack your bags” we told him.

“But …” he sputtered,” I thought we were supposed to ask for forgiveness, not permission!”

Not having had the pleasure of a conversation with Rear Admiral Grace Hopper I can’t be certain of her intentions when she advised, “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.”

But please note that she didn’t say, “It’s better to ask forgiveness,” etc. She said easier.

And so it is. It’s also more dangerous, as any director of information security will attest.

Episode #3: Old Yeller

This was, apparently, widely known in our IT organization: One of my peers was notorious for calling one or another female staff member into his office and screaming at them for no reason.

A member of one of my teams asked me why I didn’t do anything about this. After thanking them for letting me know about the situation, I met with the CIO, who informed me that while problematic, my peer was in many ways a strong performer, whose ongoing stream of accomplishments the company would miss should they be lost. And so, HR was working with the offending manager to try to get him back on the rails, on the grounds that the company didn’t want to lose such a valuable employee.

My insight — that the company had already lost quite a few valuable employees because of this situation — wasn’t, shall we say, welcome.

But the CIO wasn’t entirely at fault. That’s because when, as a manager, you find yourself dealing with an employee who engages in unacceptable behavior of any kind, your first action is to document, not to act. Your second action should most often be informal coaching.

Informal coaching won’t, most likely, fix a situation like this one. When it doesn’t, that’s when it’s time to call on HR to take charge of the situation.

Yes, take charge. Not provide support, not offer sage advice, not counsel the offender’s hapless manager.

Take charge. If the offending employee was merely performing poorly then HR’s role would be advisory. But this isn’t poor performance. It’s malfeasance. It could land the company in court. And even if the misbehaving manager’s behavior wasn’t actionable, it could do — and was doing — considerable damage in the form of poor morale and the defection of valuable employees.

When the CIO brought the situation to HR’s attention, HR’s playbook took over. The CIO could ask for HR to intervene more aggressively, but the key word here is “ask.” Once involved it’s up to HR to do things by the numbers. It’s up to the offending employee’s manager to do things by HR’s numbers — not to improvise or figure things out as they go along.

This includes investigating the situation. Investigating in ways that bring clarity to the situation rather than muddying the waters is HR’s job. As manager of the offending employee your job is to cooperate with HR when asked and stay out of the way when not asked.

Episode #4: Recruiting

Okay, this isn’t an episode, or rather it’s a composite of any number of episodes: all the times a hiring manager has an opportunity to recognize a potential problem employee during the process of recruiting and interviewing candidates for employment.

It’s failing to ask a candidate about situations in which the bureaucracy has impeded them in achieving something they were trying to accomplish, and how they dealt with the situation.

As with so many challenges, the best way to solve a problem is to prevent it. And so, one of the best ways to prevent malfeasance is to not hire employees prone to it.