Written by This week the New York Mets were in the news. Yes, the long suffering franchise is atop the standings in the National League East Division. But they were in the news in a less pleasant way, as The Athletic, a sports news site specializing in long-form journalism and investigative reporting, published a long and significant review of what it described as the Mets’ “rotten culture.” https://theathletic.com/2519652/2021/04/16/ive-barely-hit-on-you-inside-a-mets-culture-rotten-beyond-mickey-callaway-and-jared-porter/?article_source=search&search_query=mets%20rotten
The franchise has been awash in allegations of repeated sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination, involving several high ranking employees, on and off the field, for several months and these allegations point back several years. But the New York tabloids and sports dot.coms have landed on the story led there by The Athletic’s important reporting.
The Mets have a new owner, billionaire hedge fund founder Steve Cohen, and are anxious to turn the page on this negative recent history. Cohen’s own outside business has been the subject of a gender-based discrimination claim in recent times and it is clearly critical to Cohen that the Mets’ historic cultural issues don’t bleed over to his outside business and the wave of allegations that are currently washing over the Mets as an organization ultimately subside. Cohen has hired the law firm, WilmerHale, which has built an enviable record in helping organizations put anti-discrimination safeguards in place. Clearly Cohen is taking this situation seriously. But bringing any organization out of a toxic place, is neither an easy or quick process. It takes changes in policy, personnel, and in how people in the workplace think and behave.
Why does this matter? As someone who teaches Sports and Labor Law at the university level, this is about far more than bad behavior or ‘boys being boys’ or even cancel culture. We spend approximately one-third of our lives at work and derive a significant amount of our self-worth and overall well-being from the quality of our work relationships. If someone is lucky enough to work in or around sports, the percentage of time spent in and amount of self-image shaped by the working environment is likely to be substantially higher. The effects are even further heightened if that person is a woman pursuing the too often less traveled road of building a career in sports. There are both human and organizational tolls paid by businesses that are inattentive to the well-being of employees and the health of the working environment and having a workplace free of discrimination and harassment is a minimal expectation. This is also a minimal expectation of fans and I am a lifelong Mets’ fan (as well as someone who looks at these issues for a living).
Being the fan of a team is a unique relationship. No one fan can expect their favorite team to always be in the right, organizations are as fallible as the people in them and while the Mets’ current situation is acute they are far from alone in this, either at this moment or in the near past. But fans can and should reasonably expect their favorite team to honestly try to get things right, no different than expecting a highly paid player to hustle. There is little purpose in rooting for or even loving a team that fails to extend an honest effort or reasonable level of respect to their fans. That’s true of players and management alike, and every franchise should begin to make a reasonable effort to eliminate sexual and gender based harassment from their culture because it is the right thing to do.
So how does a franchise begin to right its culture? Here are five fairly simple and tested steps an organization can make to clean up a toxic situation, especially in professional sports.
Step One– Declaring a full-stop, organizationally, and then engaging a transparent, neutral review by competent outsiders. The organizations that stop and open themselves up historically recover from crises much more quickly than ones that try to manage through them and minimize their impact.
Step Two– That review, when it’s complete, needs to be made public and subject to the scrutiny of the media and the light of day. Living up to the external scrutiny is an additional assurance of cultural compliance.
Step Three– The organization commits to implementing the recommendations of that review. And then hires and staffs to match these recommendations.
Step Four– The organization reinforces the independence and structure of organizational safeguards including human resources, counsel and ombuds roles. These roles when independent and hardened have the ability to save organizations from repeating missteps and pro franchises tend to be too lightly, often far too lightly, staffed in these areas as a matter of normal course.
Step Five– Leagues need to have real consequences for non-compliance or even worse, the willful failure, to comply. Leagues have exposure legally regarding the work environment of their individual franchises, because of the way league employees and the employees of other franchises interact with each other, and the leagues need to enforce these consequences for the good of all the franchises.