"Texas Lawyer" Discusses Employment Law Lessons Drawn From Politics
First, thanks to our readers for your patience during our suspension of posts while we addressed some technical issues (I lost some key data, recovered it but it took days to finish the task).
We normally don’t comment on politics but we came across a very interesting post by Michael P. Masanka, a Texas attorney (“Employment Law Lessons From the Presidential Campaign”). We saw the story on Law.com but the byline is from Texas Lawyer.
The presidential campaign is one of those events or happenings with which we are so much saturated that we begin to see in them whatever it is we are predisposed to see. Luckily, the author was predisposed to see in the recent campaign some interesting and useful insights for his area of practice, employment law.
Mr. Maasanka draws six lessons and each is interestingly presented and illustrated with appropriate anecdotes from the campaign and selected cases. I refer the reader to the post for most of the lessons but one, in particular, caught my attention. The lesson is “Pick a narrative and stick with it -- Don't pile.” The lesson is illustrated with a litigation case as follows:
Employers who go with clarity stand a better chance of coming out on top. I was working on an appeal of a case where the employer, at trial, opened with, "We fired the plaintiff, because he was a poor performer," but the employer ended it with, "Not only was he a poor performer but he may have stolen from the company as well." Too big a shift.
As is often the case in this blog, we would like to take the same lesson, draw it back and apply it well before the employer winds up in litigation. We think the lesson applies in day-to-day management whether of employees or the business in general. A good story and clarity build credibility which comes in handy when delivering a message about performance - - long before performance has become an issue in litigation.
