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You might have heard it discussed.
Last week Kenny Williams, the President of Major League Baseball's Chicago White Sox, had a conversation with player Adam Laroche and asked him not to bring his 14 year-old son around the clubhouse so much.
Adam Laroche responded by taking his ball and going home. Literally. His response was to retire from baseball rather than adhering to Williams' wishes.
This set off a firestorm in the baseball cosmos; players yelling, defending; talking heads pontificating; every Joe in a bar arguing.
Here I'm going to leave the central theme of the argument alone except to say that I've had family friendly positions where my kids had the freedom to visit me at work from time to time, but they were not sitting under my desk all day. With very few exceptions this just doesn't happen in professional work places. Most everyone that has a job gets that.
My real concern is this: Why was the President having this conversation with the employee? There were two people (levels) between the two, the GM, Rick Hahn and the manager, Robin Ventura.
In analyzing this scenario there are only three possibilities.
First, is that Williams simply took it upon himself to bypass everyone without discussing it with them. If so, it's a bad choice. The chain of command needs to be honored on the way up and on the way down. If that's what happened he kicked Hahn's and especially Ventura's knees out from under them.
Let me be clear, the President has a right to do it, it's just not very smart if he wants his manager to be respected by those who answer directly to him.
A second possibility is that he discussed it with Ventura and Ventura disagreed, but Williams decided that the conversation needed to be had anyway. In that scenario he'd still be overstepping his bounds. But this time it would be Ventura's fault.
The leadership team needs to be in lockstep when it comes to policy and even if a manager disagrees with the president his job is to carry out the decisions of his higher ups. The exception is if he's being asked to do something immoral, illegal or unsafe. It is not immoral, illegal or unsafe to ask an employee to limit their child's presence in the work place.
If Ventura disagreed and refused to carry out the wishes of the president and the president had to step in then, by Ventura's silence, Williams is undermined and the management team is revealed as divided and dysfunctional.
Employees can't follow multiple voices any more than a hiker can take two trails at once. How easy is it to follow a conversation in which multiple people are saying different things at the same time? That's freaky nightmare stuff.
The last possibility is that they talked and agreed, but Ventura chose to let Williams play the heavy. That's an awful choice too.
It's the job of every manager to enforce the policies of the company with their direct reports. If someone else has to do it then that manager is not the real manager. He's weak and emasculated. His respect from his employees gutted.
Interestingly, I wrote about Ventura in this space when he was first hired in 2011. He was hired as the nice guy "good cop." Soon they hired Mark Parent as his bench coach to be the "bad cop." Ventura would be the buddy and Parent the disciplinarian.
I wrote how ridiculous the "good cop, bad cop" philosophy is and how each leader has a responsibility to strengthen their weaknesses and be "whole leaders."
Here's part of what I wrote then:
"If Ventura is the good cop, then he must learn the bad. And if Parent is the bad cop, he's got to learn the good. The compassionate leader must learn strength and how to hold people accountable. The strong leader must learn empathy and listening skills.
"In other words, no leader is allowed to be just half of a leader. We have a responsibility to grow right out of our comfort zones into well rounded leaders who can handle any eventuality reasonably well."
The soft touch of Ventura gets ultra-exposed now that the bad cop, Mark Parent, was fired over this past winter.
If Ventura didn't take the opportunity to grow as a leader in the meantime, to find the wherewithal to take a strong hand with his team when he needs to, he will not be able to hold his clubhouse.
If either of the last two scenarios are true, then this is a possible sign that he can't.
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