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This month’s dilemma | Readers’ responses | Previous dilemmas
Fight — and Fight Hard
To: The Commissioner of the West Dakota Department of Vocational Rehabilitation
From: Bob Behn
Date: February 2001
Re: Grief and the Grievance Process
Yes, you face a lose-lose situation. Yes, you may well lose your battle with Clemma Rogers over her latest grievance. But you will lose even more if you fail to contest her odious behavior. So fight — and fight hard.
Option 1: Drop Your Charges
 Your legal counsel, Robbie Frankson, may well be right. You may lose. Indeed, simply extrapolating from past experience, it certainly looks like you will lose. Rogers knows how to make the system work to her advantage. And for whatever reason, you haven’t been able to match her mastery of the system.
You are not the commissioner of the Department of Clemma Rogers’ Grievances. You run the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation — an agency that provides services on which a large number of the state’s citizens depend. Every day, you face a variety of essential policy, management, leadership and strategic challenges. Legislators, stakeholder advocates, journalists and the governor — to say nothing of the parents, spouses and friends of your clients — all want a piece of your time. For the last month, the House Finance Committee has been scrutinizing your budget, and, since before you became commissioner, the federal court has been doing the same to a couple of your programs. And coping with Rogers’s misdeeds seems to be a second, full-time job. So, you haven’t been able devote the time necessary to get rid of her — time that (in hindsight) appears would have been worthwhile.
So maybe you should give up. Fighting her grievance will take a lot of time. Even if you were to win, the opportunity cost (in terms of other tasks neglected) would be high. And you knew, even before Frankson told you, that you probably won’t win. The obvious option is simply to surrender to reality.
Option 2: Fight to the Bitter End
A second possibility is to fight this aggressively. After all, Rogers has been destroying the morale and effectiveness of your department for years. She has taken on the entire department. And while your policy initiatives and managerial reforms have improved your department’s effectiveness and reputation, Rogers antics have been a noticeable setback.
Moreover, Rogers has not just taken on the department and everyone in it. She has taken on you personally. Everyone working a Voc Rehab knows that Rogers looks for an opportunity to file a grievance — a grievance aimed directly at you. And she had certainly adopted a take-no-prisoners strategy. She’s taken after you with every weapon she has.
So, you don’t have much of a choice. You have to fight back. And if you are going to fight, you can’t be squeamish about it. You have to really fight.
Option 3: Appear to Fight
But giving up or fighting to the bitter end look like phoney choices. Isn’t there something else — something in between these two extremes?
Of course, there is. You are not required to choose between unconditional surrender and a kamikaze death. You could put up a decent fight — but avoid putting any real resources into the battle. Make a good showing. Demonstrate your willingness to defend the good name of the department and its many outstanding employees. But accept reality up front. Don’t allocate much time — yours or your staff’s — to developing or implementing a sophisticated legal strategy. Instead, go through the motions. But don’t expect to win anything but the respect and appreciation of your beleaguered staff.
Fight and Fight Hard
You can’t fool your immediate staff. They’ll see that you’re just going through the motions. They’ll know that you aren’t really trying to discipline Rogers. Thus, soon your whole department will know this too. Appearing to fight is no more of an acceptable option than giving up or fighting to the death.
No. You have to really fight. You don’t have to fight to the death. You don’t have to ignore the budget battle in the legislature, or the danger that the federal judge might appoint a special master, or the legitimate concerns of stakeholders, parents, spouses and citizens. But you do have to take Rogers’ grievance seriously.
After all, everyone in your department is watching. They don’t like Rogers any more than you do. Indeed, many of them have to deal with her on a daily basis — much more frequently than you. They don’t want to be around her. Many fear her. And they believe — and I think correctly — that she has single-handedly degraded the public’s perception of the department. When they say that they work for the Department of Rehabilitation Services, people respond with: “Isn’t that the place where what’s-her-name works?” Everyone in West Dakota seems to know about what’s-her-name.
You can’t give up. You can’t just go through the motions. You don’t have to launch nuclear war, but for the reputation of your department, you do have to fight. More important, for the reputation of the many decent people in your department, you do have to fight — and fight hard.
To see responses posted by other readers, click here.
Copyright © 2001, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, City & State and Governing.com are trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc.
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