On Monday, the security chief of the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia was charged with obstruction of justice and lying to investigators. You can read all about it here. This was the mine where 29 people died in an explosion in 2010.
If these things are true, and they probably are, he deserves to be punished severely. No matter how strongly the company disavows it though, they are very implicated this. Of course, they will all claim to not have known anything about this, the guy was acting totally against company policy, etc. Whether that's true or not, I cannot say. However, even if you truly didn't know, that doesn't get the company and its leadership off the hook. As I've heard lawyers say before it's not just "Did you know?" but rather "if you knew or shown have known."
A speaker in a session I attended yesterday made the point that leaders need to keep their ears to the ground so they are aware of what's happening in their organization. What I've seen far more often is they go a step farther and completely bury their heads in the sand. That way they can't see or hear about any problems, so they get to avoid dealing with them. This is not healthy leadership. It can be poisonous to your organization. It's like a cut on your hand. The best thing to do is treat it initially. If not, it can become infected and require intense medical intervention. It's the same with companies. Often issues caught early can be resolved by dialogue between the involved parties. If you don't fix it early, it can escalate and require massive intervention of the legal (and extremely expensive) variety.
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