Dr Google

A big thanks to @UNISONNews for sending me this link to a TED talk by Clive Boddy about Bullying and Corporate Psycopaths. His statistics are interesting, but there is an inherent danger in identifying corporate psychopaths at work. And it might not be what you expect.

Labelling your bully can be rewarding, but only up to a point. Attributing the psychopath label can be a bit academic. If you’re being tormented at work for 8 hours a day, whether you're working with a psychopath, sociopath or someone who sits somewhere on an autistic spectrum is pretty irrelevant. At first, having read a number of on-line articles, I believed my bully to be a sociopath. Later, I wondered whether he might be on the Asperger's spectrum. Later, I realised the arrogance of this. I diagnosed someone I hardly knew, with a complete lack of medical or psychological training.

Labelling people is easy to do, but much less easy to prove. Clive Boddy points out in the TED talk, “Psychopaths have absolutely no conscience”. But how on earth do we know for sure that someone has absolutely no conscience? We often don’t see these people outside the work environment, let alone have a glimpse into their psyche.

We’re often encouraged to diagnose our bullying colleagues, but as I point out in, Bullied by the Boss (Amazon, 2012):

“Stereotyping and labelling bullies is dangerous because it reinforces the very egocentric bias that allows bullying to happen in the first place. We tell ourselves they are inherently bad people and we are inherently good. Isn’t that the very thinking that [my bully] adopted? He believed he was an all-round better, more worthwhile and valuable person than I was. 

“We can’t dehumanise people who dehumanise people and expect a positive result. I can’t help being reminded that, whilst these experts’ Orwellian ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’ philosophy is understandable, it puts us at risk of adopting the same behaviour we claim to abhor”.

Perhaps it's human nature to search for labels in an attempt to undertstand a predicament which is patently unfair and makes no sense. But it's always going to be more helpful to look at what we can do to get out of a situation, rather than put our faith in any diagnosis from Dr Google.

Very best
BBTB

Friend or Foe?

The Christmas holidays can be a strange time.

Former colleagues seem prone to getting in touch and it’s amazing how many times I bumped into them in the January sales. 

It’s easy to imagine that everyone is imbued with festive cheer. That was until a former secretary contacted me to wish me Happy Christmas and fill me in on exactly how much my old firm still curse me. I put a brave face on, of course. But it was sad to learn that a previous friend had altered her opinion of me. She’d bought the HR propaganda.

I was disappointed.

Days later, trudging down the High Street, someone shouted my name. It was a former solicitor from the same firm as my former friend. She could have been judgemental. I wouldn’t have blamed her at all, but she was happy to let bygones be bygones. She hugged me and wished me Merry Christmas.

Sometimes, the people you trust most who let you down and in the all-too-rare cases where you do find an ally in the workplace, it’s often the person whom you least suspect. People are unpredictable. 

That’s why it’s more important to have supportive friends and family outside work. They won’t succumb to office politics. Their pay packet isn’t threatened because of the bullying you’re going through. 

Then friends you have in work are simply a bonus.

Very best wishes

BBTB

Delivery Driver

On Tuesday, I attended a mini-conference on workplace bullying. Some academic had written a book. The reviews gave me a giggle:
 

The book “has captured the subtleties of a sensitive and complex workplace issue without being reductionist”. And it "expands disciplinary boundaries beyond micro-level insights towards multi-level contextual influence."

Having turned up early, I had a chat with the academic author/speaker. I told him about my book. ‘Self help?’ he said, in a pretty unpleasant kind of way. His book was serious. It did have a price tag of £55.00, if that’s anything to go by.   

The research itself wasn’t bad. His team had found that ill treatment (we’re not to call it ‘workplace bullying’ anymore because he likes the phrase ‘ill treatment’) is more regularly found in medium sized organisations with established HR and lots of policies and procedures. The more policies and procedures, it seems, the more workplace bullying is likely to occur. It’s what we suspected, but at least now we have proof.

A guy behind me asked if the speaker if he campaigned or raised awareness. ‘Urgh, no’ he replied. ‘And on the odd occasion I have to, it’s reluctant’.

That’s the problem with these academics. They’re all about the process and nothing about the product. He’s completed his big survey. I guess he's now looking forward to the next big survey he’s commissioned to undertake with taxpayer’s money. 

It’s the thrill of the chase, but how sad for those being bullied at work. All that money spent to put a jigsaw of information together. And once the jigsaw is complete, it’s dismantled and put back in the box unless someone else knows what to do with it. And few do. Workplace bullying is not a pretty picture.

My first question at the end was about these big companies where dignity at work and bullying and harassment polices exist only as a legal buffer or to pad out some tender document. Someone from the government was encouraging in that it was all about delivery now. Companies would soon have to show they were actually making a difference to the workplace bullying statistics if they are tendering for government contracts. It’s a start then.

But I still feel like they’re overlooking these academics, their research and their surveys in this delivery. Shouldn’t they be first in line to deliver? After all – they claim to be the experts. If you’re going to diagnose something, you should at least try and treat it or cure it. 

Only when they do will I agree that they're the experts.

Very best

BBTB