Gold medal winner for incompetence has to be awarded to the Los Angeles city managers

I just can not help linking the following two articles in the Los Angeles Daily News together and asking: Why wouldn’t we look at city managers any differently than the management of any other big organization?

In the first article, “No one has any time for queries,” found at: http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20950~2656993,00.html or http://www.dailynews.com/cda/article/print/0,1674,200~20950~2656993,00.html, Ken Lloyd, an Encino-based management consultant and author of "Be the Boss Your Employees Deserve," describes a closed-company-environment that keeps employees in the dark. As a result of this environment, employees consider themselves ineffective and incompetent. In this “company” situation, Lloyd does not waste any time awarding the gold medal for the “no-win” environment to management concluding, “This type of treatment puts a real dent in employee attitudes, commitment and performance.” Lloyd nails the more forward-thinking question, the question I believe we should all be asking about our present leadership in Los Angeles …

“There is, however, a larger question to ask yourself: as you look down the road, what kind of a future can you envision in a company [L.A. City government] that treats people [citizens] like this?”

Lloyd’s insight and direction seem so simple and clear. Naively, I think everybody would agree this is a no-win situation for Los Angeles and we should waste no time in taking action to change it. Of course political decisions are not that easy, especially under a leadership environment steeped in denial and accustomed to using PR firms adept at spinning the situation. If it were a marketing environment, we would say “perception is everything.” It would be as simple as: We don’t like it. We don't buy it.

However, we have somehow allowed Hahn and his surrogates to replace a simple matter of choice with a legal deliberative process. Case in point, the second Daily News article is “Hahn's outrage, Mayor's denial strategy on his scandal fails truth test," found at: http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20951~2656997,00.html or http://www.dailynews.com/cda/article/print/0,1674,200~20951~2656997,00.html. Albeit cleverly spun, Hahn has us all twisted up with a purposefully misplaced legal standard. If we get caught up in it, we are at a real disadvantage. The Mayor does not have to be proven guilty in a court of law beyond a shadow of a doubt to be voted out of office. That high-level legal-standard is only used when a society considers taking away a citizen's rights. Nobody has to "prove" a thing. It does not apply to a widely-held notion that the mayor has become a liability to his office and a handicap to the City of Los Angeles.

There are several eligible mayoral candidates on display and a choice has to be made in March. Pretend these mayoral candidates are bottles of headache pain relievers for a moment. One has a very tarnished wrapper, it looks like it has been tampered with, and the manufacturer is currently under investigation by the Feds. Are you having any trouble setting this bottle aside? No! It was easy to set this one aside, wasn’t it? You didn’t feel you had to prove to the manufacturer that product was defective, did you? No. Absolutely not!

Let us not, as a society, give more credit to denial than fact or perception. The facts are what they are. We make decisions based on perception for a reason. Perception includes cognitive comparisons, situational analysis, and judgment. We are taught from a early age to be cautious, alert, and aware of the warning signs for a reason – to pre-empt calamity.