Sure, the city’s attorneys will continue to battle Bell in court. But he has only nine months left. His lawyers certainly have enough delaying tactics in their arsenal to keep him on the payroll until September. Still, the city’s attorneys should continue to fight every motion, every petition for continuance. You can’t give Bell any basis for claiming that the city admits he was right.

That’s why you don’t want to make a big deal of these last nine months. Let people forget about Alfred Bell. Next September, his friend on the Zenith City Tribune may write a retirement column, but you want that to be anticlimactic. You want Bell to leave city government with a whimper, not a bang.

You do, however, want city employees to remember that you fought Alfred Bell. And you want them to remember that you kept fighting to the end. You want city employees to learn an important “Bell-Case Lesson”: Zenith City is prepared to discipline — and, if necessary, terminate — obnoxious goof-offs.

Within this Bell-Case Lesson lies, of course, a subsidiary one: If you are close to retirement, you can manage to hold off the city. You can’t prevent people from learning this too. But you can focus attention on your lesson so that when city employees think of the Bell Case, they will remember the city’s determination, not Bell’s delaying tactics.

SYMBOLIZING SUCCESS

You could take to informally calling the “warning form” the “Bell form.” But this might suggest to supervisors that they should only fill out a warning form when an employee has committed an egregious offense. In fact, however, you want city supervisors to use the warning form much more frequently than that — obviously not for every little mistake, but certainly for significant errors that, themselves, would never warrant termination.

(Indeed, given the uneven use of both the commendation and warning forms, you may need to give the city’s supervisors some training, so that they understand the kinds of actions that deserve a commendation and the kinds that deserve a warning.)

You could, however, begin calling the city’s termination procedure, the “Bell Procedure.” You could prepare a detailed memo to city supervisors outlining precisely the steps in the Bell Procedure, along with specific examples for each step drawn from a realistic though certainly “hypothetical” case of a goof-off in, say, the parks department. Maybe you can’t write “he Bell Procedure” at the top of this memo. But if you title it “The Official Zenith City Procedure of Progressive Discipline and Termination,” it will take little more than a few hints before people start calling it “The Bell Procedure.” What’s the alternative? “TOZCPOPDAT”?

You want to convert the Bell case into a metaphor — one that symbolizes both the city’s new determination to discipline goof-offs and terminate miscreants, and its willingness to praise outstanding employees and even just downright effective ones.

Agree or disagree? If you think you have a better way to deal with this month's Manager's Choice dilemma, or would like to expand on Bob Behn's approach, share your thoughts with other readers here. Send your solution to mailbox@governing.com. Please include your name, location, government or business title or job description, and a daytime phone number (for verification purposes).