The fix was in for Mr. Fix-It

Whenever somebody hires you to come in and fix a problem, chances are pretty good that they don't really know what's wrong. Otherwise, they would've fixed it already.

It's a sad fact of life in middle management: stuck between the geniuses above and the fools below. Or at least that's how the folks who hire you describe it. They are often wrong about that - and just about everything else.

I've been that new fix-it guy more than once. In my experience, it seldom turns out well, either for the problem or for the person hired to fix it.

One of my first fix-it gigs involved a place where everything was wrong: People were in slots where they didn't belong; nobody knew how to do their jobs; everybody was angry about everything. I was young and inexperienced and too arrogant to know how little I knew.

Within two months, I was the loneliest editor in the state. As people will do, I was immediately sussed as a know-nothing arriviste, a guy who had read a book or two and written some decent stories but who had not a clue how to help people do their best work.

Things improved considerably when I simply stopped paying attention to the folks who signed my checks and started fixing the problems I saw. The problems were pretty obvious after a couple of months, and they weren't anything like the ones described by the folks who hired me.

For my next gig, I was told only that I needed to make things better and that I should take some time to figure out how. After the last gig, taking time to actually identify the problem seemed like a good way of also selecting a solution.

Then my boss promptly quit.

His bosses helicoptered in with a radically different perspective of the problems and very specific ideas of what needed to be improved. They also wanted it done right away.

Needless to say, they couldn't have found the troubles with both hands and a map. By the time I decided that the newspaper's biggest barriers to success were the bureaucrats in the executive suite, I was on my way to Virginia.

Any manager in any business would look at Richard Bentley's experience in Norfolk and conclude that the former superintendent's biggest problem was an impatient School Board unable to identify the problem or the solution.

I don't know Bentley. I don't begin to understand all the problems the schools face, all the competing constituencies.

But I do know that 16 months isn't close to enough time to fix everything that has gone wrong in the Norfolk schools over the past decade. Either School Board members blew it when they hired him, or they blew it when they let him go. Either way, they blew it.

I suspect that just about everyone who has ever been a fix-it manager, everyone who has been a middle-manager, period, looks at Bentley's experience with a rueful understanding. That's the way these things go: It's never the fault of the people actually at fault.

If I mess up as a manager, the editorial section might suffer. If the School Board messes up, the education of more than 30,000 kids suffers. Big difference.

I'm lucky. My job is to continue a century-long tradition of excellence. I'm surrounded by some of the best opinion journalists in America. They make me look better than I am every day, and I return the favor primarily by working like crazy to keep the nonsense as far away as possible.

It's not complicated: Hire the best people you can find, and give them room. Help when you can, and when you're asked. That's it. Good work results.

Norfolk's public schools have all kinds of problems. There are scandals. There has been misbehavior by teachers and administrators. The School Board simply cannot explain itself, either to the public, to parents or to its employees. As a result, there's been a precipitous decline in public confidence, deserved or undeserved. Now Bentley is gone, before he had a chance to alter that trajectory but not before he was blamed for it.

He leaves with $236,540, and the knowledge that the direction of an organization isn't set by the fix-it guy. It's decided by the people who hire him. And let him leave.

Donald Luzzatto is The Pilot's editorial page editor. Email: donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.