Blue Ocean Strategy News - How Fair Process Could Have Saved Alberto Gonzales

Blue Ocean Strategy News - How Fair Process Could Have Saved Alberto Gonzales

What did Alberto Gonzales do wrong as a leader and manager? Take your pick -- there are many good choices. But I’m going to focus on one mistake that I haven’t read about elsewhere in the voluminous press about his shortcomings. He didn’t employ “fair process” with the knowledge workers he oversaw.

Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, now best known for their “blue ocean strategy” work, wrote about fair process in 2003. They argued that knowledge workers are particularly conscious of whether a fair, rational process is being used to evaluate employees and their work. Knowledge workers, they explained, don’t want equality of outcomes, but they do want to be judged fairly and equitably.

U.S. attorneys are presumably knowledge workers, and pretty high-level ones at that. But they were hardly managed with a fair process by Gonzales and his Justice Department colleagues. Several attorneys had received highly laudatory performance evaluations by their peers, but were fired anyway. They were told that their jobs were to enforce the law for everyone, but were then evaluated on their enforcement of laws against Democrats. Even though they were loyal Republicans, they were told to go away and shut up. Monica Goodling, Gonzales’ young henchwoman, admitted before Congress that she crossed the line into politically-oriented questioning and evaluation of the attorneys, even though it’s against the law.

Of course, Gonzales has been loyal to his boss, and he probably thought his upward relationship was all that mattered. His resignation today, at last, suggests that he was wrong. He was given plenty of chances to explain himself, but the more he talked, the worse he looked. Months of fact-finding and testimony have revealed that he and his office mistreated the knowledge workers beneath him. Unlike the U.S. attorneys he fired, at least Gonzales got some semblance of a fair process.