How not to manage

LITTLE ROCK — BY NOW Ron Mathieu, manager of Little Rock’s national airport, has apologized to just about everybody in sight and maybe quite a few folks who aren’t. And he needed to.

It seems Mr. Mathieu let $40,000 in airport funds wind up with his son’s private school. The sum was in payment for an advertisement on the school’s football field. Naturally enough, controversy ensued. And what should have been a happy occasion-the groundbreaking for the first phase of a $53-million renovation and expansion of the airport-was overshadowed by the debate over Ron Mathieu’s role in steering public funds to his boy’s private school.

It should have been a celebratory occasion. Instead the mood was more embarrassed,uncomfortable, and awkward. Speakers kept making slips, and knowing looks were exchanged.

The upshot: Ron Mathieu now has offered his apologies to the airport commission, the public, his family, the newspaper that broke the story-the Arkansas Times-and just about everybody else. He can be forgiven, but what he did isn’t likely to be forgotten. Certainly not by his bosses, who are commissioners responsible to the public for a public facility. And who, much to their credit, acted like it in this embarrassing case. As for the school, it’s now agreed to return the money at the commission’s behest.

In short, nobody was comfortable with Ron Mathieu’s $40,000 adventure and its result. Especially, surely, Ron Mathieu.

Mr. Mathieu may not have made the formal decision to put up a sign advertising the national airport’s website at the school. Not technically. A subordinate’s name may have been on the actual contract. But he let it happen on his watch. With his approval. And the responsibility ultimately was his.

And yet that wasn’t Mr. Mathieu’s big mistake. His big mistake was not being candid about the $40,000 advertisement when one of the commissioners asked him about it. He finessed the inquiry instead of answering it directly. Now that’s serious.

The moral of this sad story: Never blindside the boss.

Whether or not the airport’s manager properly distanced himself from the decision to advertise at the school can be debated. That he kept the details of the deal from a commissioner who asked about it was his real, undebatable mistake.

Bosses can live with a mistake by their employee. What riles them is not being told about it. That way lies a pink slip.

Ron Mathieu violated Rule No. 1 of executive survival: Don’t play games with the boss. If you’ve messed up, don’t try to hide it.

Or as Mr. Mathieu put it, “I made a number of errors in judgment during this process.” And how. But keeping his superiors in the dark was the most serious one. Bosses can agree or disagree with an employee’s conduct, but they can’t-and shouldn’t-tolerate not being accurately and fully informed about it.

Ron Mathieu doubtless has learned a lot from this experience; so can any executive who reads about it.