Feature Article - June 2008

Air Force accountability aims high

Where does the buck stop for leaders at your altitude?

                                                                                                                                                  by Tom Davidson

From Wall Street to West Virginia, CEOs are dropping like flies.  Even the highest-ranking leaders in the U. S. Air Force got the boot this month.  According to a Booz & Co. report just released, fewer CEOs are leaving voluntarily, but more of them are being forced out of their posts, 4.2% worldwide last year compared to a 3.8% average for this decade.  What does this bloodbath mean to leaders at other altitudes?

Recent “firings” and other euphemisms

The top financial firms in the country recently parted company with top executives at Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, and UBS to name a few.  In just the last few weeks, Lehman Brothers let two of its top executives go, and Wachovia showed its CEO the door after some high-level waffling by the board of directors. 

Academia has not been immune either.  The president of the College of William and Mary was fired just this spring after a short time in office for missteps with stakeholders.  He was not fired, per se, but his contract was “allowed to expire.”  Also, the president of West Virginia University (WVU) all but left town under a cloud of suspicion having to do with an improperly awarded master’s degree to the governor’s daughter.  While he was not fired either, he announced his resignation effective in September to “stop the dialogue.” 

Even the federal government has gotten involved in this run of accountability.  Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently asked for and received the resignations of the Air Force’s top two officials, the Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne and Air Force General Michael Moseley.  The tipping point here appeared to be nuclear-weapons mix-ups and other problems that have “been identified but not effectively addressed for over a decade.” 

The buck stops where?

Harry Truman said, “The buck stops here,” but where does it stop in these examples?  We don’t see Defense Secretary Gates resigning because of the problems in the Air Force, but if they were bad enough or he could have done something to fix it sooner and didn’t, he very well could be the next to go.  We don’t yet see the boards resigning on Wall Street, but unhappy stockholders eventually have a say in that, too.  Should CEOs be held this accountable for lesser infractions that occur below their pay grade, or does it take this magnitude of an event for the buck to reach this high? 

Every leader is responsible for what happens “on their watch,” no matter what level in the organization.  If you are in a leadership position, you have the ability to prevent problems and to respond accordingly (i.e., able to respond or response-able).  That doesn’t change.  However, the degree to which you are held accountable, does vary, and this depends on the scope of the infraction and depth of the consequence (potential or real).

In the case of the recent mortgage crisis, the scope of bad decisions and depth of consequences were as high as we’ve seen in a long time.  For the Air Force, mistakes related to nuclear weapons surely must rank at the top of the severity scale.  Also, the integrity of university system was on the line at WVU, which could be catastrophic to the organization.  Without knowing all the intricacies of each case, there is no doubt that these were major performance problems in both scope and consequence, so the removals at the highest levels were probably justified.

How does this apply to the rest of us?

While it took some time for the lesson to sink it, the same point was first driven home for me as a young supervisor.  At the time, I was responsible for wood procurement operations in central Virginia.  One of my employees was injured at a wood yard facility in Fluvanna County.  He got his hand caught in the screen door to the scale house.  Thankfully, the wound only required a few stitches, and he was fine.  But in a business like that, a pattern of small injuries means a big one is looming on the horizon.

I wasn’t fired, but I was held accountable for the injury, even though I was over 100 miles away at the time.  I was incredulous at first.  “I wasn’t there,” I said.  “There was nothing I could do if the employee couldn’t remove his hand from the door jamb before it slammed shut,” I groused.  “How am I supposed to prevent an accident like that?” I complained.

The answer was straightforward, difficult to implement and true for leaders at all levels.  I was told that it was my job to create a safe work environment and a culture of safety that would prevent accidents -- entirely.  I had been told this before, but there is a difference between knowing something and understanding it.

Thankfully, the consequences were relatively minor this time, and it did not become a pattern of behavior on my part.  If it had, I would surely have been shown the door.  If not, then my manager would have been held similarly accountable for not doing something. 

If you are in a leadership role then you are responsible for what happens on your watch and can be held accountable for consequences (potential or otherwise).  If you don’t like that, want that, or understand that, then don’t take the job.  It’s why you get “the big bucks,” right?

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