Source MSNBC.com Credit: Getty Pictures
By now, you undoubtedly know that Shirley Sherrod is an ex – but likely soon to be current, mid level offical in the United States Department of Agriculture. She was recently fired by someone, maybe the Secretary of Agriculture, Thomas Vilsack. Just to put this into context, the USDA has a budget of $149 Billion. That is about the same amount as the 2009 annual revenue at GM.
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The short version is that Ms Sherrod gave a speech to a local NAACP group in which she told a story from 24 years prior. The point of the story and the speech was that she was tempted to indulge her racist feelings and provide, “less than the full force” of her position to help a white farmer save his family farm. The full speech is inspiring. A blog and then cable television programs publicized a short, edited clip which portrayed Ms Sherrod as being a racist. She is not and is in fact pretty obviously, quite the opposite. In the rush of the media furor over the clip and its deceptive indications, Ms Sherrod was contact by her superiors. As she tells it, she was driving several hours back to her office from across the State of Georgia. She was called multiple times but was not making progress satisfactory to her manager. So, on the third or fourth phone call she was asked to pull over and she was asked to submit her resignation via text message. She was allegedly told, because tonight you are going to be on [the] Glenn Beck [show].
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In a turn of events as sweet as a Georgia peach, the next day the tape of the full speech was aired, the farmer came out to declare that Ms Sherrod in fact did help him save the family farm, and has been a dear family friend for 20 + years. The message of the full speech (that we are all capable of overcomming bias and that we need to look beyond race in matters of economic and social justice) was revealed.
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Since then, Ms Sherrod has been offered reinstatement in a new, unique position by the Secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture; she has been apologized to by Robert Gibbs, the Press Secretary for the President of the United States, from the Secretary’s podium in the press briefing room at the White House; and, main stream media have rushed to resurrect their own journalistic credibility telling her side of the story after having told the accurate story of the original disingenuous smear.
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So… where the hell was the Human Resources leadership in this fiasco? Probably nowhere. This was about politics and managing the media reaction to what smelled like a great story – dead on proof that there really is deep seeded bias and that this administration is somehow racist. I will leave the sociology and political science to others.
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It seems from the outside that there were several fundamental HR errors here -
- Most obviously, a critical decision was made without looking at the full body of information. There was a full speech, but only the clip was viewed. In hindsight, that is an obvious error. However, if only the clip was shown, where a woman makes a credible testament to her own racist thoughts and actions, might you have reached a conclusion about her? I know that I might have. I think I have made that mistake – rushing to judgement based on what appears to be incontrovertible evidence.
- Apparently no one asked Ms Sherrod what happened. Have you ever been approached by a manager, a security department, corporate counsel, a customer, told a story about an employee and then reached a conclusion before speaking to the employee? I have. It is easy to extend the general trust that we have in our co-workers and in authority. Generally speaking, that trust is probably well placed. However, there is no better means to establish a framework for your investigation, than the simple play ground rule of hearing both sides. Note that I don’t say to establish a conclusion – that is really a bit down the road, the best gift of two sides is getting the proper context for real investigation and subsequent determination of a conclusion.
- Here is the tough one. It is exhilarating to make the grand, snap decision. See the evidence of racism – bang – “she’s outta here!” It feels like bold moralistic leadership. Snap decision can be leadership – however you better be damn sure that you are correct in the decision. Know that the decision is unassailable. Better yet, ask yourself a question, who is the audience to whom I am showing my boldness? It gives context to evaluate where the boldness is in fact leadership, or, if it is mere show boating. I have no idea what the motivation was here. I do know that it backfired tremendously. Typically, HR is enhanced by bold communication of throughly deliberated decisions, as opposed to snap decisions themselves.
- One unknown here, in fact is, was HR part of this process or, did general executive management make this decision “alone”. For all I know, there is someone in HR at USDA that stood on a table and shouted that this lack of process would lead to undue risk. I don’t know. I do know that our job is to bring decisions to the center of reason because that is the essence of our professional standing. Professionals do their job against established standards, even when others want to rush because it seems expedient.
- Finally, don’t do HR in public. HR makes for bad theatre. People’s careers, their reputations, their livelihoods, deserve sincere, professional practice. When HR is done for public consumption, bad policy and bad decision can find their way into the process too quickly.
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Careers, livelihoods and reputations – the ones you save may be your own.
Frank Roche also got this way right at KnowHR
14 Comments, Comment or Ping
Zoiks…I got up this morning and banged out “Where in the hell was HR?” about this. Your analysis is even better…wish I had seen it first. Going to link to this on my original story.
July 22nd, 2010
Frank – thanks for the link. I will do the same. This should be the object of a workshop at the annual SHRM fest. This is one the short list for ‘Worst HR Performance of the Year” come December.
July 22nd, 2010
Bill, this is exactly the kind of case study SHRM should tackle. Stop with the “place at the table” stuff and move to making ethical and strong decisions for HR leaders. As you said, this would have saved a lot of embarrassment and consternation. And it would have preserved an upstanding lady’s dignity for a life well lived.
July 22nd, 2010
i’m wondering how much bullet #4 played out here. who hasn’t seen HR ignored or not even consulted? and honestly, if managers were truly steeped in how to handle people issues, getting “re-certification training” as is required in many other professions, perhaps they wouldn’t need to consult HR. they’d know how to handle situations like these themselves.
f
July 22nd, 2010
Agreed, this is so obvious that it really should not have required any new, dramatic HR involvement. Should have been in the DNA of the organizaiton.
July 22nd, 2010
Well, the Sherrod events did not happen as you described them.
From Lloyd Grove:
” (Andrew) Breitbart, for his part, told me that when he posted the original redacted video Monday on his BigGovernment.com blog, he didn’t realize that it had been severely edited to distort Sherrod’s message of racial conciliation into the opposite of its intended meaning.
“[Breitbart's source] told me about this back in early April—he said ‘I just heard a really sensitive speech, where this lady recounts this story and the entire audience affirms it,’ ” Breitbart said about the unidentified man who provided the video of Sherrod’s March 27 speech, adding that he can’t explain the highly selective editing. “I don’t know this person. I can’t divine what that person’s motivation was. I don’t know.”
In the full video—which Breitbart has since posted as well—Sherrod tells NAACP members about her experience decades ago as a case-worker for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund helping a financially strapped white farmer, and how she overcame her own prejudices to embrace the notion that whites and blacks share common interests and problems. “When I made that commitment, I was making that commitment to black people and to black people only,” Sherrod tells the crowd. “But [with God’s grace] you realize that the struggle is really about poor people.”
I asked Breitbart if he regretted posting the redacted video: Wouldn’t the full context of Sherrod’s words be considered exculpatory? “’Exculpatory’ is in the eye of the beholder,” Breitbart answered. He stoutly defended his redacted video, claiming that the audience’s approving response to Sherrod’s confession—of initially not wanting to help the white farmer more than minimally necessary—demonstrates that the NAACP is guilty of the same racially charged attitudes for which the civil-rights organization recently slammed Tea Party activists.
“It shows that there’s a double standard and hypocrisy,” Breitbart said. “The fact that they made it about her, and not about the double standard, showed that their hands were caught in the cookie jar…They threw her under the bus…The message to the NAACP is that two can play at this game.”
Breitbart accuses the NAACP and others of dividing the country along racial lines by inventing confrontations that he insists just never happened (notably the notorious n-word epithets that Tea Partiers allegedly shouted at black congressmen on the Capitol steps during the health-care debate).”
Here is the link for the FULL post of Mr. Grove’s article (for anyone who wants to see the full article): http://bit.ly/9W84MI
Ms. Sherrod did overcome her racist tendencies. However she still sees the world through glasses that filter for race. See http://bit.ly/aN0kDc and http://biggovernment.com/publius/2010/07/23/sherrod-blasts-fox-news-as-racist/
For the record, Fox News did NOT even mention Sherrod until she had already been fired.
Your comments re: HR here are right on target. I, too, as a Recruiter, have been the victim of a rush to judgment. I have had hiring managers believe a lie told to them by a candidate (that the candidate was NOT told by me information crucial to the position they were interviewing for) even though the hiring manager knew me and the candidate was a complete stranger. It sometimes seems that HR is supposed to mess up; it’s expected, so HR must prove their innocence first to be believed.
My speculation in this Sherrod affair is that HR was not involved in this except to be the messenger (perhaps).
July 26th, 2010
I am not sure what part of the story I did not get right. My post avoids the political stuff that you comment on. My post was strictly about HR issues. In the spirit of transparency, I have put up your comment but really not sure that it is applicable to little ol’ Human Markets. Looks like the comment was prepared for perhaps a more political blog.
July 26th, 2010
Thanks for posting my comments. I’ll try to explain in more detail what I mean in those previous comments:
Your description of the Sherrod story took up nearly or even fully half of your HR post. This is understandable since better writers than me completely messed up this complex story by, among other errors, keeping it too short.
What was not accurate was your description of the Sherrod story.
A few examples:
“In the rush of the media furor over the clip and its deceptive indications, Ms Sherrod was contact by her superiors.”
The media furor you mention happened AFTER Sherrod had been asked to resign. No major news organization, not even Fox News, had even mentioned Sherrod until AFTER she had been asked to resign. Glenn Beck did NOT mention Sherrod on his show that day. The next day, Beck actually defended Sherrod and said she should be rehired.
“The message of the full speech (that we are all capable of overcomming bias and that we need to look beyond race in matters of economic and social justice) was revealed.”
You must have missed the end of Sherrod’s FULL video where she criticizes people who don’t support President Obama because he is a “black President.”
Then Sherrod shows again that she still has not quite overcome her racial biases, on CNN’s Anderson Cooper:
SHIRLEY SHERROD, FMR. GEORGIA DIRECTOR, RURAL DEVELOPMENT, USDA: I don’t think he’s [Andrew Breitbart] interested in seeing anyone get past it, because I think he’d like to get us stuck back in the times of slavery. That’s where I think he’d like to see all black people end up again. And that’s why –
ANDERSON COOPER: You think he’s a racist?
SHERROD: — I think he’s so vicious. Yes, I do. And I think that’s why he’s so vicious against a black president.
You can view the video clip within this article here: http://bit.ly/aLkKRs Do you really think Sherrod has overcome her racial biases? I don’t, at least not fully enough to be a Federal employee. She has made some progress, but she isn’t all the way there yet.
My comments that you graciously posted go into more detail on what you have in roughly the first HALF of your HR post.
Like I said in my previous post, I think your commentary in the second half of your post re: HR is dead on target.
July 27th, 2010
This is indeed well written and appropriately presented article on the role of HR in our lives – how this function moulds and shapes people’s lives – not just the careers of some select few – either downward or upward. My experience with HR turned out to be a upward once
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I started as a HR manager in a manufacturing firm. All excited about my first proper job, as my dream to recruit and nurture people with talents to build a successful corporate family was nearly come true. Having brought up in a conservative family, where women is seen as a facilitator rather than Armageddon – the role of HR really suited the prophecy of woman’s role.
As the days went by the dire fact couldn’t be hidden much longer. With in a week of my induction i realised that HR plays no role at all other than just administrative once such as to take care of payment of salary-a hidden extension of administrative staff with an elite umbrella of Personnel management !
Managers of the manufacturing company knew that i am a fighter – (survival of the fittest theory) – they gave me a choice either to fight a battle for the HR’s importance in the organisation or to become an engineer and learn manufacturing methodology and get into main stream of business. Honestly i didn’t think even for a second, i made my choice to get into the main stream and i was trained as an Industrial Engineer. It has been nearly 14 years now and i don’t regret having made the right decision. As this foundation went a long way in my life not just in advancing my career – i took assignments in many different countries, successfully managed to incorporate my ambition of giving a human-touch to corporate culture.
Even after decades, we still talk of giving importance to HR function ? In my experience though HR function should be split into administrative and facilitative wings. A facilitator can not be just a HR educated person, he or she should be part of main stream to understand the pains and gains of the people in business. It is time we stop condemning HR function as such and start realizing what role we expect our HR to play and equip accordingly.
July 30th, 2010
Human Being – I took some time with this. Thanks for the note – sorry your experience of HR has been so bad. It has been a long time, I think HR has matured as a business function. Clearly – it is not in the core of revenue generation. However, I think that whether or not HR is equal to other staff functions is a company by company issue – not a global issue.
I think that it is all driven by economics.
Bill
August 14th, 2010
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