As the dust slowly starts to settle from the National Football League scandal that saw huge and unprecedented penalties and sanctions dropped on the New Orleans Saints, here’s the one thing that I want to know: does the punishment — and it was severe punishment — actually fit the crime?
I ask this, as all HR professionals and talent managers should, because it is a relevant question in any workplace that doles out discipline and punishes employees. When is the punishment just? When is it too much? And when does the way we punish people simply become part of how we cover up for our corporate culture that may be what actually created the problem in the first place?
In case you have been sleeping under a rock and missed it, here’s what I’m talking about, courtesy of the online magazine Slate:
In the first few hours after commissioner Roger Goodell’s gavel thudded down on the New Orleans Saints, the headlines have been about punishment. The sentence Goodell has imposed for the franchise’s cash-for-cart-offs scheme is extraordinarily severe: a $500,000 fine for the team, the loss of two second-round draft picks, and lengthy suspensions without pay for assistant coach Joe Vitt (six games), general manager Mickey Loomis (eight games), head coach Sean Payton (a full season and the loss of his $7.5 million salary), and former Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams (at least a full season, maybe more). The scope of the penalty, however, is nowhere near as fascinating as the crime and the subsequent cover-up. The NFL’s latest report on the bounty scandal lays bare a willfully stupid cabal that broke the rules for no good reason, and — when given an opportunity to fess up — quadrupled down on its initial idiocy.”
Yes, the Saints had a bonus system to reward their players for hurting key players on other teams, and the coaches lied to league investigators and covered up the scheme when asked about it. The “bounty” system to reward for hurting other players is clearly against the league rules, and the cover-up, well, it’s usually the cover-up that’s the biggest problem. Just look at what happened to Richard Nixon and a little cover-up called Watergate to see what I mean.
So I get all of that, but still, I’m troubled by the notion that a league that has been built on (somewhat) controlled violence and the human lust for gladiator-like combat should penalize a coach (the Saints Sean Payton) by suspending him for a year and fining him his $7.5 million salary for simply channeling the NFL’s clear appeal a little better than most.
Does the punishment fit the crime?
I don’t think so — cover-up or not — because it is essentially punishing the New Orleans Saints coaching staff and management for being too good at their job and going too far to appeal to fulfill the NFL’s corporate goals. Sam Mellinger of the Kansas City Star hit this square on the head when he wrote:
This is Roger Goodell’s chance to fill out that suit and comb his hair straight and stand in front of television cameras to preach that the NFL isn’t a bunch of barbarians. He will convince some of you with this rhetoric, that teams placing bounties on opposing players is not only news but unacceptable behavior worthy of perhaps the stiffest penalties in league history.
The NFL commissioner desperately wants you to believe he’s sincere on this. …
Because the more you do, the more you will realize that Goodell’s NFL is — directly or otherwise — complicit in the life-altering and possibly illegal violence that just cost Payton and Williams their reputations and millions of dollars.
The more you think about this, the more you will see Goodell’s emphasis of player safety as a shell game. He wants you to listen to his tough talk and wow at the big suspensions without noticing he pushed for an 18-game regular season or his embarrassingly slow track record of recognizing football’s connection with head injuries. …
This point should be obvious, but Goodell and many others who are expressing outsized outrage about this apparently don’t realize: the NFL’s culture is defined by violence, and we’re all complicit. …
And — here’s what will never change — the players themselves are getting rich because they not only accept the violence but embrace it.”
Crime and punishment; the Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote a classic novel about it. We’re intrigued by it, revel in it, and often demand it when we believe that the guilty are going to get away with their crime.
But what do we do when we punish people — employees — for being too good at their job and perhaps going too far in an attempt to succeed in it? What do we do when our management and leadership is part of the problem, as well as our overarching corporate culture?
And if nothing else, I’d LOVE to hear what the NFL’s chief people officer thinks about all of this, because this is the kind of no-win issue that sends HR pros screaming into the night.
Of course, there’s more than crime and punishment in the news this week. Here are some HR and workplace-related items you may have missed. This is TLNT’s weekly round-up of news, trends, and insights from the world of talent management. I do it so you don’t have to.
