I want to Detroit to succeed. I really do. The more voices of clarity on the mayor’s wrong doing the better. It seems that not saying anything is speaking volumes.

I also was impressed today that Mike Cox was willing to step out and condemn the Mayor with strong language and suggest he resign. Even though Mr. Cox is from a differing party, he was often accused of being close to the Mayor with ties to Mike Duggan. He knew that if he spoke it would cause people to revisit and recall his own past personal indiscretions and question how thorough his “urban legend” investigation of the Mayor’s party really was. Yet, he stood up and said what he believed.

Thanks for listening.

Thanks for weighing in with your views - passionately held and well expressed. You make the point well. And it’s good to have things spoken clearly, not whispered.

Let me take some issue with your position. Like so many who hold views strongly, you pit your moral views of leadership against what can only be to you weakness, or political timidity, or political cronyism. That works well rhetorically, but I don’t think it shows the same kind of judgment that you are calling for. Be fair and weigh the moral - a tough leader’s stand - agains the moral - weighing legal rights and political processes. For instance, you pit the need for “moral strength” against what you take to be my wife being “weak” in not dethroning a mayor. Yet at the same time, you fault her for “playing a tough game of ‘dare’” with the DNC. So, is she weak or too bold?

Are leaders clearly one or the other? My obvious bias will show, but she was very tough with the legislature, and in the end got a package that has kept the state afloat. Many criticized her for not getting the horses to drink the water, but guess what in the end, they did (after a half-day shutdown) and the deal was pretty good for Michigan. Should she have caved to the Republican opposition months earlier? I don’t think that would have been strong or good leadership. Likewise she and Carl Levin have said “enough” to a broken electoral system. As in most strategic chess games they couldn’t predict how all the other actors would play their cards. They took a bold move -as the marines would do - but they couldn’t control outcomes. To my mind, the general attack on Jennifer as “weak” is itself a little weak.

I appreciate your recognition that we bust our tails to run a high-integrity ship, and the “they’re all McNamara cronies” rhetoric - which was way-exaggerated when it comes to HIS team, seems pretty tired here. The Governor and the Mayor have not always seen eye-to-eye; neither is beholden to the other.

So, as to the substance, John, it’s a tough tight-rope and sometimes issues have to ripen before they’re ready for resolution. FDR took a very long time before he led us into WWII. Lincoln tried many things before he went to war. In Detroit you have a long-disenfranchised group of people who don’t want to be told what to do. They are adults. They have a city council, voters, and vibrant media discussion. One might ascribe fear (of being unpopular) to Jennifer’s allowing the political and legal process to work itself out - the prosecutor is trying to do her job and will come forth in two weeks with her decision. Or one might say she is respecting the system and the voters. Frankly, I think it’s the latter.

I actually admired the way Governor Spitzer stepped down. He said he has stood for high principles and now must measure himself against them. That was impressive. If the mayor really has the city’s best interests in mind, he has got to pay attention to the tremendous drag on our system that you speak so clearly.

I hope he will find his own moral high ground. Account for himself, first to himself. And then to the citizens. Meanwhile, we all have work of our own to do.

Again, although this is not primarily a political blogspace, I do appreciate your encouraging me and my bride/governor to listen to all whispers and cries and lead with our best selves.

Peace,

Dan

It took New Yorkers three days to clean up their mess and send the dirty rotten scoundrel to the curb. Why must Detroiters continue to endure this sideshow? I implore the Governor for the good of Detroiters, Metro-Detroiters, and Michiganders to step up, grab the leadership bull by the horns, and end the madness. Remove this mayor from office.

We are again a laughingstock on the national news because of the State of the City speech (Mr. Mayor felt the need to use poor language that we buried in Detroit last year. He chose to point the finger at everyone but himself. The good work that he has done has been crumbling due to the mistakes and arrogance he has wrapped himself in. Please help us clean this mess up by removing one of your political brothers who has gone astray.

This week in Reading, we learned about “whispers.” Silence though, from the Governor is not always golden. A leader knows when to talk and strike.

Thanks so much for your feedback. We’d love to send you one of our leadership reads to recognize Reading Month! Could you please email me your contact information at annarkohn@gmail.com, and we’ll show you your options!

Thanks for reading and leading with your best self!

Anna

The owner of the first company played a lot of games with people. It was traumatic to work for the man, because the company always seemed in chaos. What I slowly figured out was that it was the owner who kept things in chaos to put pressure on employees to work harder. That caused a lot of stress. One method he used was by speaking “confidentially” to me about other employees. He would say things that would make me angry with other employees, or make me not want to talk with them, or to have conflicts with them. Then one day I got to thinking that this was a lot of conflict and chaos going on. So I broke his rule of not telling other people what he was telling me.

I told an employee I was not getting a long with what “Bob” had told me about them. And then that employee shared a similar story about what Bob had told him about me. The stories were so in conflict and so convoluted that we saw what Bob was doing to us. We went into Bob’s office and talked about it. The result was Bob got better at playing games.

As to Jennifer Granholm and Carl Levin taking a risk on the date of the Michigan primary . . . We will see how that comes out in the wash. The right thing may be done for the wrong reasons. Or maybe for the right reasons. Was it worth the gamble? Maybe we will learn a few things during the convention.

Mark John Hunter

“Whispering” really is not an issue to be disputed but to be managed and I believe your column captured that essence.

Like the rest of us you “have been blown away”. It is amazing we have a state in this horrible condition along with its biggest city which has been a wasteland for decades now and it seems like nothing is being done about it.

Drastic times call for drastic maesures. Who will laed us?!

Once upon a time…

…more years ago than I want to mention, I was invited to move from a job in the Human Resources department to one in the Information Technology department. This seemed odd, for I had little technical knowledge of either PCs or server technologies. A new director in HR was busy cleaning house, and though I recognized a potential trap was being sprung, I knew it was time to leave. I leapt at the opportunity and never looked back. However, there was an immediate and enduring problem: No one in my new department would spend any time with me or even talk civilly with me (other than my new supervisor). I felt like a pariah, and the more I tried to befriend my new colleagues, the more distant they became. My supervisor was not forthcoming with anything that could help.

Was it my manner of dress, or my attitude, or my involvement with the Employee Assistance Program? Did I have B.O. or spinach in my teeth?

Comment was not forthcoming.

Then a budget purge occurred, and my supervisor — a long time employee, well-liked by most of her co-workers, was laid off. The budget sword missed me for some reason. My co-workers banded together for comfort and strength - but I was excluded and now treated as something of a super-pariah.

Our unit had no supervisor, and no funds were available for one, so we formed a self-managed team. The first step in the process was a cleansing meeting. We rented a space at a local restaurant (so we could have lunch and munchies), locked ourselves in and started clearing the air. Item one on the agenda was…me.

With terrible trepidation as my companion, I went to beard the lions in their den. I think they may have originally planned a lynching, but in the meantime a member of the team received a message from our immediate past supervisor. She had been prevented from sharing a few important tidbits about my situation.

My invitation to the new department was designed to put me into an unfamiliar environment where I had no skills to survive. I assume I was expected to grow frustrated and quit. As it turned out, I have a talent for breaking software - a good talent for a computer analyst.

The staff assumed (I don’t know if there was any help arriving at this assumption) that I had forced my way into their IT department, at full salary, with no apparent duties and no apparent computer-related skills. I replaced an old colleague who was (interestingly enough) invited to move to HR. I think they traded “problems.”

What the staff saw was an un-tested, un-talented upstart forcing his way into their world — probably by pulling strings with the administration. I just assumed that they hated me or that I smelled bad or something. This situation lasted for more than a year and I truly was on the fence about leaving my job to save my sanity. All of this was because of what they were whispering to each other and because of the gag placed in my supervisor’s mouth by upper management.

The lesson I took from this: It is a wise move to occasionally lock your team in a quiet room, provide plenty of time and plenty of good food, and free them up to “clear the air.” True, our situation was extreme - if we could’t make the self-managed team idea work, our division would be disbanded and positions distributed within other divisions that still had supervisors. But the catharsis from that cleansing meeting powered our determination to make the team work.

By the way, the self-managed team idea eventually collapsed — mainly because other division supervisors didn’t like dealing with individual team members. They preferred a colleague at their own level. However, by the time a new supervisor was chosen, there were funds to pay for a boss - and we stayed together for a while longer.

I found that my odor improved with the others and I lived there, happily ever-after until the next budget crunch, when my job disappeared.