His name is Caleb Rowan. Some of you know him. Most of the people in this room who work in maintenance know him considerably better than I did. He had been here since 8 the previous evening. He had found a critical hydraulic fault in the AR7 that our standard inspection protocols would not have caught.
He had repaired it, recalibrated the system and documented everything. He had fallen asleep after doing all of that because he was a human being and he had run out of runway. The room was very quiet. I walked in and I laughed at him, she said. I made a comment about personal management.
I performed it in front of the audience that was here because I had an audience and I used it and then I fired him before he finished his first sentence and I had security walk him out and I went to the other end of this hanger and told myself I had handled a situation. She paused. What I had actually done, she said, was stand in front of the people in this building and demonstrate as clearly as anything I've ever communicated to this company what I believed their work was worth, what I believed they were worth, and what I believed I owed them in the way of basic consideration before I made a decision that affected their lives. A sound in the crowd, not a word, just the small movement of people absorbing something. I had a problem, she continued.
And it wasn't about Caleb Rowan specifically. It was about how I had been running this place. I had been running it from that floor up there. She gestured toward the executive walkway above. And I had been confusing the view from up there with understanding what was happening down here.
They are not the same thing. I know that now. I didn't know it then. Or more honestly, I had decided not to look closely enough to find out. She let that sit for a moment.
I've been in this building every week since then. Most of you have seen me in the breakroom. Some of you have talked to me and some of you have decided not to. And both of those are entirely reasonable responses to someone who showed you 7 months ago what she was capable of. She looked around the room.
I'm not here to tell you that I fixed anything. I'm here because this is where it happened and these are the people it happened in front of and I owe you a direct accounting, not a memo, not a policy statement. This. She turned finally and looked toward the back of the room. Caleb was standing where she'd seen him.