Please Put Them On

Two different IG reports describing similar conditions but very different results recently came to Madam's attention.  Both reported semi-absentee consular management, but in one this absenteeism had created chaos, open cruelty, crying in the rest rooms and possible resignations while the other had caused first tour officers to band together to produce quality products on their own.

What was the difference?  What crucial management behaviors allowed ELOs to soldier on in one case, while forcing them to offer up one another for human sacrifice in the other?

Madam contends that there was no difference that mattered.  No one made the out-of-control ELOs rip at one anothers' jugulars; no one allowed the Little Ship Steered From the Engine Room to stay reasonably on course.  To work and behave as they did were the choices of the officers themselves.

While management in the Lord of the Flies-like post received a well-deserved trouncing from the OIG (as did that of the Little Ship, but far more lightly), in the end it was still the officers' own responsibility to implement the training they had received, use the FAM as it was written, and behave civilly and adult-ly to one another, to consular customers, and to the local staff exactly as their mothers probably once had taught them.  WTF did their parents pay for college educations for, if these children reverted to savagery at the first opportunity?  And what do these reversions imply for the children's professional futures?  One shivers to anticipate a DCM who found the Flies posting to his or her liking, and is carrying those lessons to a position of power.

Does Madam even have to write a conclusion here?  How about this?