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Good People Who Care (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

4 min read

Mark Corallo’s resignation as the media spokesman for President Donald Trump’s personal legal team was reported as a routine Washington news story back in July. Inside baseball stuff. His name was not familiar to me, although he is apparently a crisis communications veteran who had worked under Attorney General John Ashcroft during the George W. Bush administration.

He quit after just a few weeks on the job. The small stories that appeared at the time suggested he didn’t need the money enough to put up with the infighting. Sounds about right. 

Then Michael Wolff’s controversial book “Fire & Fury: Inside the Trump White House” was published — earlier than originally announced to take marketing advantage of the president’s meltdown over a particularly unflattering excerpt. And, assuming it’s not one of the details Wolff got wrong in a book that appears to have gotten the big picture right, it seems that Corallo resigned for a much more specific reason: 

He thought the president and other advisers, huddled on Air Force One to craft a misleading explanation for a meeting his son set up with Russian operatives offering political dirt, were likely obstructing justice.

This anecdote didn’t create a firestorm of presidential tweets, as did the section of the book in which Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign manager and later chief political strategist, was quoted as saying that the meeting with the Russians was likely treasonous. But Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s most conservative columnist, took note, giving Corallo the title of “distinguished person of the week” because he “wouldn’t join in Trump’s skulduggery.”

Rubin wondered in print why more White House staffers cited in Wolff’s book hadn’t quit on principle. Then, parenthetically, might have answered her own question: “[S]adly, with this president, the best and brightest and most morally grounded people did not go work in the White House in the first place.”

In point of fact, the Trump White House has had unusually high turnover. The Wall Street Journal, using data collected by the Brookings Institution, reported late last month that 21 of 61 senior officials had already left the fledgling administration, a rate that was twice as high as the next-highest turnover during a president’s first year. 

Maybe some of them left on principle, but not the big names. Michael Flynn, the national security adviser whom President Obama had specifically advised Trump not to hire, was fired for lying to the vice president — and has since pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Sean Spicer. Reince Priebus. Anthony Scaramucci, whose vulgar description of Bannon may have been closer to correct than I gave him credit for at the time. 

Bannon doesn’t seem to have done anything principled in his entire, miserable life.

I mentioned The Wall Street Journal’s story about White House turnover on Twitter, and an Arkansas business executive responded. The turnover rate doesn’t matter, he said, as long as they are good people who care.

Clearly, the turnover rate is nothing like the most disturbing news out of the White House. But it did surprise me that a businessman would dismiss so cavalierly a worrisome metric like a very high turnover rate — twice that of Reagan, five times that of George W. Bush. Especially since Donald Trump’s primary qualification for the presidency was supposedly his business savvy. 

Most business executives I know at least give lip service to the importance of staffing, and I’ve never heard one opine that good people are plentiful and interchangeable. On the contrary, good people are hard to find and keeping them is vital. 

Turnover varies by industry, but a much higher rate than the norm is a symptom of something. Either good people aren’t being hired in the first place or there’s a reason good hires don’t stay. 

Unusually low turnover can also be unhealthy. It can mean hiring mistakes — and everyone makes those from time to time — are allowed to stay on when they should be eased out, making room for better hires. But unusually high turnover is never a sign of a well-managed, well-functioning workplace, especially when a manager hasn’t inherited someone else’s hiring mistakes.


Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.
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