Fired For Emails

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Pennsylvania's attorney general says four of her employees have been fired and 11 suspended without pay for involvement in a pornographic emails scandal that also prompted a state Supreme Court justice to step down.

Attorney General Kathleen Kane (above) said Wednesday two others face possible termination.

Kane has said emails containing explicit material and pornographic photos and videos surfaced during an examination of how prosecutors handled the Jerry Sandusky child abuse case. She promised the review while running for office in 2012.

Gerald Arthur "Jerry" Sandusky (born January 26, 1944) is a retired American football coach and convicted serial child molester. 

Sandusky served as an assistant coach for his entire career,  at Penn State University under Joe Paterno (from 1969 to 1999). He received Assistant Coach of the Year awards in 1986 and 1999. 

 In 1977, Sandusky founded The Second Mile, a non-profit charity serving Pennsylvania underprivileged and at-risk youth.  After Sandusky retired as assistant coach at Penn State, he continued working with The Second Mile at Penn State, maintaining an office at Penn State until 2011.

In 2011, following a two-year grand jury investigation, Sandusky was arrested and charged with 52 counts of sexual abuse of young boys over a 15-year period from 1994 to 2009. He met his molestation victims through The Second Mile, who were children participating in the organization, and several of them testified against Sandusky in his sexual abuse trial. 

Four of the charges were subsequently dropped. On June 22, 2012, Sandusky was found guilty on 45 of the 48 remaining charges. Sandusky was sentenced on October 9, 2012 to 30 to 60 years in prison—at his age, effectively a life sentence.

She had previously disclosed the participation of several former employees of the office, leading at least four to leave public jobs elsewhere in state and local government.

Justice Seamus McCaffery retired last month after his role in receiving and sending the emails was made public.

Move Like Superman

 

According to Jack and Suzy Welch (above), you should move like lightening when you sense you've made a hiring mistake.

Hiring great people is brutally hard. New managers are lucky to get it right half the time. And executives with decades of experience will tell you that they make the right calls 75% of the time at best.

The problem is, the stakes are so high. Never has it been so important to field a team with the best players. Every smart idea matters. Every ounce of passion makes a difference. You cannot have a black hole in your organization where a star should be.

So that's the first reason you need to face up to hiring mistakes quickly. Sure, maybe one individual's poor performance won't sink the company. But when your "mistakes" aren't doing their jobs, it invariably puts a strain on the whole team and makes work harder for everyone else. So resentment toward the underperformers — and toward you for hiring them — builds up.

But the real reason most managers don't act is that they fear looking stupid and worry that admitting they made a hiring mistake is career suicide. In any good organization, that logic is exactly backward. Any company worth its salt will reward managers when they acknowledge they've hired wrong and swiftly repair the damage. They get more positive buzz for the operational improvements that occur when the right person is finally in place.

When you have a big, crucial job opening to fill, it's just too easy to fall in love with a shiny new candidate who is on his best behavior, telling you exactly what you want to hear and looking like the answer to all your prayers. That's why you can never hire alone. Make sure a team coolly analyzes the candidate's credentials and conducts interviews.

The second instinct you have to fight is what we call the "recommendation reflex," in which managers rationalize away negative references with excuses like: "Well, our job is different." You should seek out your own references to call, not just the ones provided by the candidate, and force yourself to listen to what they have to tell you even if it ruins the pretty picture you are painting in your head.

Finally, fight the impulse to do all the talking. Yes, you want to sell your job, but not at all costs. In interviews, ask candidates about their last job — and then shut up for a good, long while. As they describe what they liked and what they didn't, you will likely hear much of what you really need to know about fit.