Leaders Don’t Engage in Witch Hunts

When I was seven, cooties raged across the playgrounds. Efforts to combat the scourge ranged from running and touching the flagpole to sliding down the slide to escape the infected. Fortunately, some prodigy discovered a better cure. Although not FDA-approved, the recitation of “circle circle dot dot now I’ve got my cooties shot” restored formerly-infected children’s coolness, and all who beheld this ritualistic cleansing knew they were pure.

Years later, I remember standing in church, hands clasped with my neighbors, and being given the side-eye by another churchgoer when I failed to recite aloud the Lord’s Prayer. Can’t God hear me say the prayer to myself in my own thoughts?

I was never much of a singer, so I deferred to those with prettier voices to carry the church melodies to God on my behalf. Again, I was chided by others for failing to demonstrate my piousness to their satisfaction.

I can only image the damage my quiet reflections with God caused the holy roller churches I occasionally and inadvertently found myself in while vacationing.

When I left high school and moved to Austin, it was a good change. For a few years, I lived in a weird, judgement-free place that didn’t require petty genuflections of purity as a condition of friendship or social acceptance. The biggest Austin news at the time, and for you newcomers to town I kid you not, was a late road-kill tanner who wore a tiara and finished second-place in a run for City Mayor.

Sadly, the weird gradually left Austin, leaving increasingly toxic strands of politics to fill the void. This brings us to the topic of this article: witch hunts and purity tests.

Picture this – you’re a mild-mannered patrol officer who just finished taking a child abuse call and coordinating with CPS for custody of the kid. It’s a few Friday hours from the end of your shift and a peaceful weekend. You get back to your patrol car, write a report, and check your email for operational updates.

Instead of words of support, you find this email thread (courtesy of PJ Media) from an elected city council member :

If you took the time to read that, maybe you came away with the thought “how fortunate are City of Austin employees to have a former Harvard-educated professor teach them that violent insurrection is bad?”

But let’s unpack this issue a bit more because the purpose of this blog is personal improvement, and this email exchange offers excellent lessons in leadership, management, and how to avoid creating a toxic workplace environment.

Don’t subject employees to witch hunts

In current language, “witch–hunt” metaphorically means an investigation that is usually conducted with much publicity, supposedly to uncover subversive activity, disloyalty, and so on, but with the real purpose of intimidating political opponents.

Wikipedia

When you have no evidence or even a complaint that employees engaged in any wrongdoing yet demand that they be investigated anyway to prove they aren’t criminals, that’s a witch hunt.

As a manager, if you tell your employees that they need to be told that a violent coup to overthrown the US government is bad, they will know you have a low opinion of their intelligence.

If you tell your employees that they should be subject to baseless investigations to prove they aren’t criminals, they will know you have a low opinion of them as people.

This goes especially when the one group of employees that happened to not endorse your re-election is the one group you are now targeting for a witch hunt. I doubt retribution is the underlying reason to select that one group for a witch hunt, but it’s bad form either way.

As a rule, any demand for a witch hunt always reflects poorly on the accuser, not the accused. Don’t engage in witch hunts.

Don’t be biased towards employees

The capitol rioters came from all walks of life, including teachers, real estate brokers, business owners, members of the military, an Olympic athlete, police officers, a mayoral candidate, a current lawmaker, a CEO of a large company, firefighters, medical staff, and countless other backgrounds. All of these backgrounds are represented by the 13,500 employees and 40 departments of the City of Austin.

If you are a manager of these 13,500 people, and you selectively target one department and one group of people out of all the other departments and groups of people for a witch hunt, again with no evidence or reason for belief of wrongdoing whatsoever, the bias will be clear for all to see.

I’ve had enough jobs to have experienced many a poor manager. As long as my coworkers were equally being treated poorly, I didn’t take it personally. Every manager has differing levels of management and interpersonal skills, and I like to think I’m professional enough to work through the problems. It was when one employee was being singled out for poor treatment that I had an issue.

Don’t give employees impossible tasks

Make no mistake, the “proactive investigation” task Alter is trying to give the Chief is an impossible task. APD has something like 2,000 sworn and non-sworn employees. APD is also currently disbanding units and reassigning people to patrol to maintain basic operations.

There are nowhere near enough investigators to reasonably investigate 2,000 people. You would need a team of probably 50 detectives to accomplish this task in any reasonable amount of time. Where would those 50 investigators come from? Should the department pause child abuse or robbery investigations to send those detectives to ask 2,000 people to prove they didn’t commit a crime that no one accused them of doing?

So that leaves one option: a superficial investigation.

What would that look like in reality? One option would be to email 2,000 employees a survey asking if they took part in the insurrection. “Hi Jane. Did you attempt to overthrow the government? Please select yes or no so we can send your response to the FBI for followup. Thanks!“

Another option would be to ask supervisors to investigate their subordinates based on no evidence or complaint. “Hey, uh, Jane, I know you’re a great member of this shift, but do you mind if I dig through your personal phone, bank records, and call your spouse to show whether or not you are a violent anarchist nutcase?”

No matter what the results of a superficial investigation turns up, the result will not pass Alter or any political skeptic’s purity test. What is a purity test?

Don’t subject employees to purity tests

A purity test is a self-graded survey that assesses the participants’ supposed degree of innocence in worldly matters (sex, drugs, deceit, and other activities assumed to be vices)

Wikipedia

Current political discussions, especially those surrounding policing, are a cruel trench of identity politics, virtue signalling, and purity tests where productive conversation goes to die. And that’s the positive view of it.

But let’s talk about purity tests. If you have a social media account, you’ve seen purity tests in action. Here how they go:

1. Person A makes a statement about a topic A.
2. Person B quizzes them about their purity in agreement on topic B.
3. Person A addresses their position on topic B.
4. Person B grades person A’s quiz result.

Again, this being modern times, there is a zero percent chance you will pass any public purity test for any reason. There is a negative chance of passing any purity test if it regards policing. Here is an example:

Any sensible person is well-aware of the futility of trying to pass a political purity test, so it comes as no surprise the Chief’s reluctance to engage in one. Any attempt by APD to tell the community that their superficial investigation found no wrongdoing would be roundly rejected by the people Alter claims to want to see APD win over. APD Clears Self of Wrongdoing would be the headline, and Paul Harvey wouldn’t have to tell you the rest of that story to know how it will read.

And here’s the real issue with purity tests – if you need for people around you to proactively reassure you that they aren’t an insurrectionist in order for you to have faith in them as a human, those people are not the issue.

Know when to apologize

If you find yourself managing people who are long-time experts in a field you have no experience with, you should trust their explanations for why something can’t be done to your expectation.

If they explained to you over a phone call why a task cannot be done as well as explained that an ongoing FBI process that will solve the issue, your next move should not be to CC a bunch of other people in a followup email to double down on a demand to do something that they have already explained cannot be done, and then hit them yet again with a third email to try to squeeze some token victory out of that. If you do that, there is certainty that you are the source of workplace toxicity.

The correct course of action after the first phone call should have been to say “ok, I understand the FBI is already investigating this, there is not evidence to suggest any wrongdoing, and there is no way to thoroughly complete such an enormous investigation. Can you please simply send out an email reminding people where we stand on the topic of insurrection?”

I’d bet the anti-insurrection reminder email would have been forthcoming without the accompanying drama.

If you want to hold a leadership role, be responsible for your actions. If you needlessly aggravate 2,000 people over a biased request for an impossible task, an apology is in order. I’d bet those 2,000 workers are professionals who would put this issue behind them.