Blue board unmitigated disaster

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/08/2013 (4491 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

They are no longer the team that can’t hire a GM but now the team that can’t fire one.

Another day and another calamity in the once-rich but now desultory existence of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

The club’s board of directors, which is unqualified to be in on such a decision in the first place, is incapable of receiving a confidential report recommending the firing of its GM without leaking to the media.

As a result, at the time of this writing, Bombers GM Joe Mack was fully aware of CEO Garth Buchko’s desire to fire him but was still without any official decision.

It gets better. The board is not scheduled to meet until Wednesday and somehow expected this news to not hit the streets in the interim.

Now after its ham-fisted handling of the issue, it would be unconscionable for the board not to meet immediately and hand down its decision in swift fashion. Today at the latest.

Buchko made a recommendation to the board of directors at some point last week, and rather than call an emergency meeting and vote on the issue, the inexplicable decision was made by the board to wait for more than a week to finalize the issue.

And now it’s out and the club finds itself having to make this decision in a very public manner.

Mack should be fired. But not this way. It’s uncivilized. But classic Bomber-ese and what we’ve come to expect from this organization in recent years.

They haven’t made many good decisions and they haven’t produced many good results. The Bombers are a broken organization, and despite the fact it needs to happen, firing Mack won’t fix the franchise’s deep structural ills.

A sports franchise with a board involved in day-to-day operations rather than governance and an inexperienced football executive at the helm is on course for in-fighting and poor decisions. The Bombers should be a case study in how not to operate.

It’s impossible to expect success from this model. Failure, as we have been witness to, is inevitable.

Real change can’t be effected until the board removes itself from the operation of the club and sticks to the broader vision of the organization.

Boards don’t decide how many water bottles should be purchased and what football personnel should be released. They hire qualified people and then get out of the way to let them do their jobs. Doesn’t matter if it’s building buses, printing newspapers or fielding a football team. It’s the tried and true business model.

The Bombers board members, most of them successful in their own businesses, fully know this. But a small number of them want to control the football team as if it is their own.

This is what you get when a provincial treasure becomes the personal plaything of a few powerful fans.

It needs to stop. Board chairman Brock Bulbuck understands this, but he’s fighting an uphill battle with some of his colleagues.

“Those are decisions of management,” said Bulbuck when asked by the Free Press this spring about the board’s involvement in football decisions. “The board’s job is to oversee management to ensure management has given careful consideration to all of the elements that go into making that decision.

“But ultimately, the operational decisions are decisions that need to be left to management. But in the community I have people come up to me when the team goes through challenging times and say, ‘Are you guys going to fire the coach?’ And I explain to them that really isn’t the role of the board.”

Except it is. Which is the genesis of all this organization’s problems.

Buchko hasn’t covered himself in glory since taking over as CEO and he should have come to the conclusion it was time to move away from Mack last summer.

But he made a rookie mistake and got too close to his employees in football operations. Buchko is no longer a fan. He’s an executive in a results-driven business and if an employee isn’t making him look good, he’s got to go. Surely, Buchko understands that now.

Tying Buchko’s hands won’t improve his record of success. If the board is unhappy with the job he is doing and no longer has faith in his decision-making abilities, they should fire him.

But they shouldn’t want to be involved in the everyday business of the club. It’s a recipe for disaster as the football fans of the Blue Bombers so clearly understand.

Buchko was man enough to admit his error, swallow his pride and select a course of action for the club. There’s no going back now. In fact, what this has now come down to is a choice between Buchko or Mack.

If Buchko’s not allowed to execute his course, the board will have played its hand and shown they have no confidence in him.

Then he’ll be faced with a decision of his own.

Stick around in a job that can’t be completed or pick a new path for himself and resign.

gary.lawless@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @garylawless