I was recently helping sort through some old papers, and I came across an unexpected business challenge. The situation itself was not overly complex, but it involved managing personnel, which can be a fraught subject even in the simplest of circumstances. Specifically, it can be hard to balance your desire to do right by the company with your desire to do right by your people.

In going through these old documents, I uncovered an old case study from March of 1969 that, as it so happens, was penned by my father. Going into reading the document, I knew him to have been a fair and even-handed man who had earned a lot of respect from his employees at a major financial institution, so I was very interested to see some of his work.

The situation outlined in the brief is this: There is a woman named Carla Minetti, age 36, whose quality of work has dropped off in the past three to six months. She has been with the institution for 10 years, where she started as a bank teller before working her way to a middle management position where she managed the new tellers, most of whom were younger, married women. Carla, the brief notes, is not married.

The report also stated that Carla’s managers had posited that the cause of the drop-off in productivity could be attributed to Carla’s resentment at managing younger, married women who were more successful (one assumes that these women were “more successful” because they were married with children). 

I am proud to say that my father, at least, did not default to the above sexist assumptions. Rather, he outlined a better path to resolving the issue.

My father suggested that, since Carla had been a great employee for a decade, the company ought to make a significant effort to help her. To this end, he recommended having an interview with Carla and discussing her mental wellbeing and any potential new developments in her personal life.

From there, if it looked like a medical issue (of the physical or psychological varieties) was the cause of this new behavior, the company could explore its options with finding help for Carla so that she could go back to being the great employee that she had been.

Curiously, nobody, not even my father, suggested just talking with Carla and asking her what the issue was, and there was certainly no evidence that the manager with misogynistic assumptions did this either, which I found surprising and concerning in equal measure.

What I found reassuring, however, was the spirit behind these deliberations. At the end of the day, the company wanted to get help for their employee and resolve whatever issue she was dealing with. Yes, many parts of this could have been handled better, and the prevailing sexism of the time does color a lot of the conversation. Regardless, I can appreciate the spirit of wanting to support your people.

And as I look around today, I fear that I see less and less of that. I think that if this same situation were to happen today, yes, there would (hopefully) be fewer assumptions about a 36-year-old woman’s resentment of her married staff, but would there have even been a conversation at all? 

I think that now, the culture is more focused on fixing the issue without having any uncomfortable conversations that could end up as fodder in a discrimination lawsuit. In this sense, I found my father’s recommendations refreshing, and it made me appreciative of the many places I’ve worked where management is done largely via informal conversations.

So while the norm right now may be to fire people with sticky issues so you can get a new body in place and move on, I think there’s value in investing time and resources into taking care of your people—especially the people who have been with your company for a long time. 

In this way, while the social mores were starkly different at the time, I think that this report from 1969 has a lot of insight into how we should be approaching managing today.