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I just finished reading a horror story, made all the worse because it is a true story involving failure to protect nuclear weapons secrets, lost management—and indirectly, me.

The story is told in a new book, Implosion at Los Alamos: How Crime, Corruption and Cover-Ups Jeopardize America’s Nuclear Weapons Secrets, by Glenn Walp, Ph.D. Walp’s credentials are impeccable: former head of the Pennsylvania State Police, a master’s in criminal psychology and doctorate in human services, national police awards, and national media appearances. The latter were mostly about one other job he held: Office Leader of the Office of Security Inquiries at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the home of the atomic bomb. Walp did not hold the job long. He did it too well.

The Lab hired him as part of an agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy, which oversees it, to professionalize the Lab’s criminal investigations. Almost immediately upon arriving, he began to uncover massive problems. Walp details how employees’ refusal to follow equipment management procedures left many items missing and untraceable, including computer equipment that might have held nuclear secrets. A mini-Mafia ran free at one facility, buying spy equipment with federal money and protected by a thug who threatened potential whistleblowers with violence. Walp describes rampant abuses of a system that allowed any Lab employee to purchase items at various stores by showing a Lab badge. From another source, I know that one year, more Leatherman tools were bought than there were employees at the Lab. Walp criticizes an internal delivery system that dropped off packages, including high-cost equipment, in open areas without anyone signing for them. He points out numerous lapses regarding both nuclear weapons information and “special nuclear materials,” raising the very real specter of terrorists getting at least enough of the latter to create a “dirty bomb”—a regular bomb that would irradiate people it didn’t kill outright.

The most shocking discovery was that upper managers had known about these problems for years. Furthermore, when Walp tried to do his job, those same managers began interfering with his investigations. When he tried to call in the FBI, he almost immediately received pushback from above. Eventually the chief lawyer at the Lab inserted himself between Walp and the FBI, to the point that Walp warned him of violating “obstruction of justice” laws. Every incident of missing computer memory devices brought the standard Lab refrain that no classified material was compromised, even though there was no way to be sure. The constant message was that Walp’s first loyalty must be to the Lab and the University of California, which had managed the Lab from the start, in 1943. Protecting the UC contract clearly was more important to top managers than protecting U.S. property or nuclear secrets. Walp and others had to resort to DOE’s formal whistleblower process. Despite the extra protections this gave them and outstanding written performance appraisals, Walp and an associate were fired because they “did not fit” with the Lab’s culture. They were quickly escorted off the property by armed guards. The “Mafia” don and his thug had only been placed on administrative leave initially (though they eventually went to prison).

All of this has been corroborated, by DOE and FBI investigators, many journalists, public interest groups, and the U.S. Congress. As a result, two Lab directors in a row and some managers were fired. Walp was rehired as a UC consultant and won a $1 million settlement for his firing, clearly retaliation for his whistleblowing.

I wish I could report things are much better, but they are not. The Lab was forced to team with defense contractor Bechtel and compete for the contract for the first time in 2005. Unbelievably, they won. No surprise, then, that Walp lays out yet more problems and continuing Lab denials through 2009.

One exchange in the book leapt out at me. Walp is talking to his boss. “Glenn, have you ever worked for a corporation before?, Falcon responded. It’s much different working for a corporation than it is for a government or for a governor, continued Falcon. The lab has a certain corporate philosophy and certain corporate rules that the employee must abide by…” Walp himself misses the massive problem with this statement. Los Alamos Lab is not a corporation! It is a federally owned facility managed at the time by a state government entity. This is the most egregious example of management denial I have ever read.

I was relieved the see, however, that Walp did not criticize the Lab’s written procedures for managing equipment (called “personal property”), but the failure to follow them. “Relieved” because, I wrote them.

The lab hired me as a contractor in 1994 to rewrite their equipment management manual. (I had my best-ever boss, Peggy Durbin, who sent me Implosion after I saw it in the world’s funniest business newsletter. She writes it for the bookstore in Los Alamos she co-owns now. You should sign up.) Realizing instantly the manual was an antiquated mess, I started over from scratch. When it became clear the only way to do this quickly was to get four groups of stakeholders working more efficiently, I requested permission to create self-directed work teams (SDWTs). It worked. Within a few months, we had a 350-page draft. In two years, these dedicated people had raised the property management system’s rating by outside auditors from failing to “Outstanding.” Four of the people I served are named, favorably, in Walp’s book.

However, I saw the rampant cultural problems he mentions, especially after I became a manager. My introduction of “management by walking around” was taken by many employees as micro-managing because they weren’t accustomed to any oversight. Most people in our group were treasures, but a significant number would have been fired by private industry years earlier. Upper managers gave little material support to best practices, clearly more interested in smooth sailing. The property SDWTs lost their empowerment. I heard the refrain about protecting the UC contract often. After three years in management I had enough, and I started TeamTrainers.

This post has been painful. I still love the Lab, both for many of the people and for much of the work it does. Walp praises the Lab’s science, which helps prevent the spread of nuclear materials, ensures U.S. weapons still serve as a deterrent, and has led research in a surprising array of topics from computer modeling to alternative energy sources to quantum physics.

I want to call the leaders in the book “blind,” but that would be an insult to blind people. “Lost managers” is a better term. They lost sight of who they really worked for. They lost sight of the real source of damage to the Lab, greater than PR problems. Some of them lost their jobs over it. If you as a manager make any effort to squelch reports of ethical violations, policy violations, and especially legal violations, you may be a lost manager. Let this book help you find your way, lest you destroy what you are trying to protect—even if it’s only your own backside.

Source: Walp, G. (2010) Implosion at Los Alamos: How Crime, Corruption and Cover-Ups Jeopardize America’s Nuclear Weapons Secrets. Justice Publishing, LLC: Gold Canyon, Ariz. (received from Otowi Station Bookstore).

The benefits of empowered teamwork are one subset of the benefits of Agile software development. Having served as a project manager in an Agile company, I have seen this firsthand, but a talk by an “Agilista” last night confirmed my belief.

If you know about Agile, you might want to skip down three paragraphs as I explain it to newcomers. Traditional “waterfall” methods start a software project with an attempt to capture everything the end user needs to do and estimate the time and money needed. Once that information is approved, next comes design of the software. Then the software is created (“coded”). Next comes the testing phase, during which mistakes (“bugs”) are fixed until the client accepts the software. Finally comes rollout of the product. Each step flows downward into the next, hence the “waterfall” allusion.

In Agile, an initial set of requirements is collected and prioritized by a “product owner” working with the client. These are broken into small chunks, feature by feature, and captured in a “product backlog.” The product owner, a facilitator, and the other team members take a short period to do some initial design work. Then they decide how many of the features they can finish within a pre-selected time, usually two to four weeks. In perhaps the best known Agile method, the period is a “Scrum” and the facilitator is a “Scrum Master.” Once the team decides what to do, that set cannot be changed short of an emergency. The team then does a mini-waterfall of sorts, finishing the selected set of features to the degree they could be released to the customer (whether or not they are right then). After a demo and lessons-learned review, they repeat the whole process with the next set of features, starting the next business day. They’re done with the whole thing when the customer says they’re done.

At a meeting of the local chapter of the Association of IT Professionals, Robert Galen spoke on “Mature Agile Teams–Sixteen Essential Patterns.” Galen is director of research and development at iContact, an e-mail marketing company, and also has his own Agile consulting practice. Along with making me feel better about two points over which I parted ways with the aforementioned company–for those keeping score, I was right on one and half-right on the other–he provided a number of points about teamwork that work in any environment.

One of his 16 “patterns” was “Truly Collaborative Work.” Examples on his slide included, “Developers willingly engage in Testing.” This is not common in waterfall projects, and I have witnessed how it improves quality and cooperation. Another point was, “Members help each other out.” Science has shown that “organizational citizenship behaviors” improve team performance. “Listening to each other; mutual respect” appeared as well. In poorly performing teams, people listen at each other, listening but not really hearing (hence my Active Listening class).

“Behaving Like a Team” was another of Galen’s patterns. I especially liked his point about “Providing each other congruent feedback.” Agile promotes a practice I suggest for all teams in my teamwork book, daily “stand-up” meetings. These are conducted literally standing up, for a maximum of 15 minutes. Each member reports on only three things: what I did in the prior work day, what I plan on doing the next day, and any blocks I’ve run into. The last item becomes a top-priority action item for the facilitator. Galen said members of effective teams also participate in “Passionate debate.” He added “conflict,” but I later suggested the word “confrontation.” The scientific evidence shows that conflict of any type harms teams, but members must be willing to confront each other to make better decisions. Galen also said members will spend personal time together and succeed or fail “as a team.”

The research literature supports the use of self-managed or self-directed teams in most circumstances. Under his pattern, ”Quality on all fronts,” Galen said Agile teams are “Self-inspecting; self-policing; self-learning.”

He did an excellent job of defining the role of the supervisor of a self-managed team. My oft-repeated summary is, ”Tell the team what direction you need it to go, give it its boundaries, and get out of the way.” Then you fall in behind, making sure the team has the resources it needs and nudging it to stay on course. A previous speaker last night had a great analogy. Josh Anderson, Agile Coach at Teradata, likened this to raising the bumpers when you take kids bowling, so their balls stay out of the gutters. Galen’s related pattern was “Saying NO as a Leader.” He emphasized that managers can’t just walk away from the team, and added in bullet points:

• “Sometimes direction is required.”
• “Courage to tell it like it is.”
• “Behind the scenes, 1:1 Coaching…”

Finally, he emphasized, members’ first loyalty must be to the team. This made me uncomfortable, because plenty of teams have failed by focusing too much on themselves. But Agile’s emphasis on including at each step the customer’s representative (the product owner), and often the customer, is a perfect way to align team cohesion with business goals.

Two studies on lawsuits against businesses caught my eye recently. For one, business researchers used public records to determine how many lawsuits were filed against companies before and after mergers through acquisition, and how many of those suits got to the point of a court making a judgment that the firm did something wrong (not related to the merger). They looked at 576 U.S. firms acquired in 1987, including public and private firms and both foreign and U.S. buyers. With the help of law students, they categorized and counted judgments that found the company liable in six categories: “personal injury, product liability, other torts, labor disputes, environmental violations, and contract disputes.” On average, the number of negative judgments jumped 50% over pre-acquisition levels. The result did not appear to be offset by any decrease in judgments against the acquiring firm (published in Organization Science, Vol. 20, No. 1, p. 206). M&A candidates, be advised.

Then a newsletter from the Society for Human Resources hit my Inbox with a report on the annual Workplace Class Action Litigation Report from law firm Seyfarth Shaw LLP, based in Chicago. It concluded that “workplace class actions filed against employers and the monetary risk they pose to companies has increased exponentially over the past six years,” according to the article in HR Week (Jan. 19, 2010). The report was based on class- and collective-action filings in federal and state courts in 2009.

Not surprisingly given the recession, unpaid wages and 401(k) losses were significant contributors. Wage-and-hour litigation topped all workplace class actions. However, the article says, “As layoffs increased, displaced workers also filed more age discrimination and Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification lawsuits.” Meanwhile, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) stepped up its actions “and secured $294.1 million in settlements for allegedly injured victims of job bias.” Both the EEOC and Department of Labor have added significant staff, the report says, so the firm sees more coming.

Each of these studies indicate companies were not paying attention to warning signs raised by employees, especially during stressful events like mergers and force reductions. It’s one thing to dismiss one person as having “attitude problems” instead of really trying to understand them. But to ignore so many people that they file, and win, a class-action lawsuit indicates an enterprise-wide “hear no evil” problem. Many wage-and-hour suits are brought after repeated complaints by multiple employees. Even product liability cases often result after people inside the company raised red flags and were ignored by upper managers.

I asked Ralph DiLeone, managing partner at The DiLeone Law Group in Raleigh, NC, for his thoughts. ”Planning for these events and paying attention to warning signs is critical. We recommend our clients hold an annual meeting with us and a few other of their trusted professionals… when we discuss any employee situations, questions and issues,” he wrote. He added two warnings: “Don’t just rely on ‘my neighbor said’ on these issues. Don’t wait, as the consequences can be dire!”

Where’s there’s smoke, there’s fire. If you hear similar complaints from more than one employee, listen. If you don’t hear any complaints from any employee, arrange for an anonymous job satisfaction survey to make sure. And these studies indicate that in either case, if you’re a business owner, you better add a reputable lawyer like Ralph to your business team.

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Today I taught my “Active Listening Skills” class to the newest set of volunteers at Hospice of Wake County, as I do pro bono every month. (Not tooting my own horn—I just don’t want you to think I am charging a wonderful nonprofit like Hospice!)  It’s great fun to work with people who very much want to be there and want to do well, which is not always the case when training in businesses. After the opening demonstration of the skill, I always ask what is hard about active listening. One of the gentlemen made the point, as someone usually does, that it is hard to resist coming up with a response in your head even though the other person is still talking. This is one of the hardest parts of the skill, especially when the person is saying something you don’t like or you are feeling rushed.

But as I pointed out to the group, this is a great way to both waste time and create an argument. I told them there have been plenty of times when I was working with grpus where one person was responding to something the other person didn’t say! Ususally this happens when some is setting up a counterargument by expressing the opposite position from the point they want to make. The other person comes up with their own counterargument and jumps in. Person A intends to say, “There are those who would argue that the starts are the light of the heavans seen through pinpricks in the hard shell of the sky, but we know they are really distant gaseous bodies like the sun.” But person B only hears the part before the comma, and jumps in with, “Are you kidding? That idea was disproved in the Middle Ages!” That the problem is located in Person B’s head is even more obvious when they actually let Person A finish the sentence but still respond only the ifrst half, which I hear happening much more foten than you might expect. It can be amusing when you are the observer, as in my team coach role, and you suddently realize the two sides of a conflict are actually saying the same basic thing but in different words.

Clues that this is showing up in your conversations are when someone says, “What I was going to say was…” or “That’s not what I said.” When youre in a meeting, the befhavor is worsened both because their may be several people vying for talk time and because a couple of less-obvious misunderstandings liek this can lead the whole team down a dead end.

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