“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” – Archbishop Desmond Tutu
This past weekend I took the freshly updated Youth Protection Training for Boy Scouts of America, a requirement for all their adult leaders. It was superb.
And I found myself thinking of a recent article I wrote about the need to apply the Boy Scout Law in the business world, and how I was seeing yet another part of the expectations for the Boy Scouts that it’s high time we apply in the workplace as well.
It was the session on bullying that really hit home. The BSA’s bullying web page begins this way: “The idea that a Scout should treat others as he or she wants to be treated—a Scout is kind—is woven throughout the programs and literature of the Boy Scouts of America.”
Why should we expect any less than that in our workplaces?
And yet we do, particularly when it comes to leadership behaviors. The BSA defines bullying as:
- Verbal – name calling, teasing, belittling
- Social – spreading rumors, leaving the target out of activities, breaking up or manipulating friendships
- Physical – hitting, pushing, shoving, physical coercion
- Group – intimidating, ostracizing
- Criminal – injury, assault, sexual aggression
- Cyber bullying – using digital technology (social media, mobile phones, computers, etc.) for any of the above
In my own workplaces, I’ve personally experienced four of the six categories of bullying listed above. Now, I’ve worked in manufacturing my whole career, and I’ve been in places where rough behavior was unfortunately sometimes tolerated at lower levels. But that being said, the most pervasive and destructive forms of the bullying I’ve endured have been from managers and above. Some of it has been simply outrageous, from my long-ago immediate supervisor who doctored dates on an e-mail to try to frame me for regulatory commitments he’d made then missed, to a Fortune 500 VP who targeted me for retribution for taking notes in a meeting where other participants criticized his group’s performance on a project. (!!!) But most of it’s been just rotten behaviors when times get tough or things don’t go the way they’d hoped.
The problem is that bad behavior that’s no longer tolerated at lower levels is allowed and excused for senior leaders and executives. As I’ve written many times, the recent firestorm of sexual harassment accusations is just the tip of the iceberg of a much bigger problem of atrocious behavior. Not only are there all those other areas of abuse listed above, but it’s also a problem that includes both sexes.
Please understand I’m talking about a minority of leaders who routinely behave this way. (And everyone stumbles every so often; this isn’t aimed at “fixing humanity” either.) But it’s the same way with kids; it never was anywhere close to a majority of them who were bullies in the past, and now we’re focused on not allowing even the small minority to terrorize other children. My BSA Youth Protection Training made clear that we in the Scouting community simply will not tolerate bullying of any kind.
Again, then why should we tolerate such behavior in our workplaces? Shouldn’t we have at least the same expectations for acceptable behavior and treatment of others for our business leaders as we have for our children?
I think there are several problems involved. One is the attitude that adults should be able to take care of themselves. And that attitude is just as wrong in general bullying and mistreatment as it is in sexual harassment. First, leaders and those with power should be held to a higher standard, not a lower one. And it’s obtuse beyond measure to miss that lots of people will think twice about pushing back against misbehaving leaders who hold their livelihood in their hands. And finally, as my BSA training pointed out, too often mistreated people blame themselves for their treatment, thinking they somehow deserve it.
Another problem is the lack of accountability for those who are supposed to enforce the rules. I believe it’s a very rare situation where an abusive leader who’s been around for years is in any way an unknown quantity for anyone around him or her, and yet neither leaders at higher levels nor HR is aware of the abuse? It’s awfully hard to believe, and yet if we take the sexual harassment epidemic as a bellwether, there has been no discussion that I’m aware of as to how to fix that breakdown. If you’re in HR or a high-level leadership spot and you enforce rules less stringently for your executives and upper managers, you’re a big root cause.
And the final problem is lack of courage and responsibility in peers. If one of your fellow leaders is a bully, are you calling it out? Are you first pointing out to that individual that the behavior is unacceptable, then escalating it to higher levels and HR if it’s not corrected? Because, if not, that’s another way we get those rare abusers who believe the rules and laws don’t apply to them: when those around them always take the easy path and look the other way.
Bullying by leaders in the workplace should be less acceptable than bullying by children. Yet it isn’t, not by a long shot. And it’s high time we fix that. As with our Boy Scouts, it simply should not be tolerated.