Ignorance is No Excuse for Bad Leadership

When it comes to CEOs, ignorance of the culture in your workplace is unacceptable. Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer recently came to the defense of Uber’s Travis Kalanick saying that she didn’t think Kalanick knew about the toxic culture at his company: “I just don’t think he knew. When your company scales that quickly, it’s hard,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle.

This is like Donald Trump defending Vladimir Putin. To say that Kalanick didn’t know about toxic culture puts him in the same league as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and his infamous comment in the New York Times expose on his workplace’s culture: “That’s not the Amazon I know.” Mayer’s defense of Kalanick as a “great leader” reflects the general attitude of organizational leaders today—their only concern is shareholders and they just don’t care about their workplace culture and, by extension, their employees.

Andrew Faas is the author of From Bully to Bull’s-Eye: Move Your Organization Out of the Line of Fire. 

Photo credit: Observer

What to Do When Your Boss Asks You to Compromise Your Ethics

Employees being asked to act immorally by their boss have become far too common. The dilemma is—what to do? And how to do you weigh the price that whistleblowers usually have to pay such as lack of advancement, alienation and even reprisal? Daniel Victor in the New York Times’ Smarter Living column explored this question recently and based on my research forFrom Bully to Bull’s-Eye: Move Your Organization Out of the Line of Fire, I disagree with some of the advice he offers.

I agree with Victor that employees should first make sure that they didn’t misunderstand their supervisor’s request. There are times when things are poorly stated and it’s imperative that this isn’t misinterpreted. But let’s say that the request was crystal clear—what do you do next?

 First, determine if this request restricted to just this manager in this department, or is it something being enacted throughout the organization? Second, forego human resources, which in my experience is usually part of the problem, and send an anonymous note to the audit committee of the Board of Directors apprising them of an ethics issue and request an investigation. In your note indicate that if there is no response within a set limit of time you will seek external recourse with legal representation, the media, or both.

Under no circumstances would I recommend following Victor’s advice to expose the situation internally—this could be fraught with danger. Had the employees who went from victim to villain at Wells Fargo exposed the scandal in the manner I advocate, their story would have had a far happier ending.

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Why Organizations Fail

It does little good to relive Donald Trump’s latest offensive tweets (after all, you never know what he’ll send out at 3 a.m.). The truth is that Trump doesn’t use Twitter to communicate; he uses it to cyberbully a nation. The results have been toxic—respect for America is down around the world, he’s sowed seeds of doubt about the nation’s electoral process, civil servants, courts, and, of course, the media. According to Ezra Klein on Vox: “Six months into his term, Trump’s policy achievements are few and thin, but he has coarsened our politics, shown the power of shamelessness, undermined our faith in each other and ourselves, modeled behavior we would punish children for exhibiting, and implicated all of us in the running fiasco of his presidency. He has diminished the country he promised to make great.”

Trump’s bullying tactics cannot be denied. Charles M. Blow took it a step further in an op-ed in the New York Times, when he pointed out that Trump’s ongoing rants reveal exactly how he defiles the office of president.  “Rather than rising to the honor of the office, Trump has lowered the office with his whiny, fragile, vindictive pettiness. The presidency has been hijacked.

What Trump is doing to America goes on every day in organizations led by bully bosses. What really jumps out for me is how insecure they really are, hiding behind a dangerous veneer of abrasiveness. Their biggest fear is being exposed as frauds who prey on people's fear—using hate as a weapon.

Andrew Faas is the author of From Bully to Bull’s-Eye: Move Your Organization Out of the Line of Fire

Illustration credit: BIGSTOCK 

From Canada’s National Symbol to Canada’s National Shame: The RCMP

There comes a time when a dysfunctional police force puts the very people they have sworn to serve and protect in danger. For the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, it’s gone beyond even that—the officers in the ranks and their support staff are suffering from decades of bullying, abuse, harassment and reprisals against whistleblowers. Under this regime, the very notion of upholding the law has become a national disgrace—and a danger to national security. It’s time to completely remake the RCMP.

I’ve been following the toxic culture at the RCMP for more than a decade. In my book, From Bully to Bull’s-Eye: Move Your Organization Out of the Line of Fire, I discuss how the RCMP typifies a dictatorial culture and the damage they are doing to their officers and the public. I’m not alone in my concerns. CBC News ran a report today calling for civilian governance of the police force. The sad truth is that the millions of dollars spent thus far settling harassment suits, and on evaluations and investigations, haven’t changed the dictatorial culture of the RCMP one iota. In fact, things have actually gotten worse. This brings little hope to people working in toxic workplaces. If the full force of the Canadian government, independent commissions and academic scholars can’t improve things—what hope does the average person have when it comes to bullying in the workplace?

As I’ve written before, in order to reform the police the force needs to be taken apart and rebuilt. The recommendations to the RCMP to add civilian governance is a good start, but it requires nothing less than a total transformation from A to Z. Adding a civilian police commissioner is nothing more than applying a band-aid on a sucking chest wound. It might shield our eyes from the ugliness for a time, but it does nothing to save the patient.

Illustration credit: Greg Perry/Toronto Star

Why Suicides in the Workplace are Increasing

A report last week in Canada about a suicide at an IBM office was a sobering reminder of the recent rise in people who take their own lives at work. While little is known about the tragedy in Markham, Ontario, even one workplace suicide is too many.

We don’t do nearly enough to prevent adult bullying in the workplace—which I believe is even more common than school bullying,  given that as many as 120,000 deaths per year are attributable to workplace stress. I’ve written extensively on this subject in my posts and in my book, From Bully to Bull’s-Eye: Move Your Organization Out of the Line of Fire. This is an issue that needs to be brought into the light of day so that treatment and prevention can be discussed, but far too often the stigma surrounding such a death makes such conversation impossible.

Whatever has encouraged the suicide numbers to rise in the workplace, it’s an issue that requires all of us to step out of our role as bystander or witness and become activists for our colleagues. When I was a senior executive, I personally intervened several times when a person was in dire need of help. Ignoring the signs because of your personal discomfort won’t make the problem go away. Think of it like a potential heart attack—if a friend was having chest pains, you would get them to an emergency room because to fail to do so could have deadly consequences. It’s the same with someone who may be thinking about taking their own life. Two excellent resources to reach out to for help are:

·       National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 800.273.8255

·       The Trevor Project Lifeline: 866.488.7386

It’s important to understand how bullying plays into rates of depression and suicide. When people are going through trauma, especially when it’s in a setting where distress is viewed as weakness, they are cut off from the support they need to cope. This is why the Faas Foundation is working with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence to ascertain how people feel at work and how the tools of emotional intelligence can prevent such tragedies. Unfortunately, when I discuss this with members of the business community they are often skeptical. They don’t yet realize how feelings drive organizational behavior—but I believe this will be the key to a psychologically healthy, safe and fair workplace for everyone.

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Bridgewater Associates: Radical Transparency or The Emperor has No Clothes?

Just how radical is the “transparency” at Bridgewater Associates? The huge hedge fund gathered quite a bit of negative press after an employee filed a complaint with the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities about the firm’s culture of constant video surveillance and recording all meetings. Matters were further compounded by a filing by the National Labor Relations Board, which revealed some of the behind-the-scenes workings of the firm, which seemed to include a fair amount of humiliation and occasional harassment.

At the New Work Summit conference sponsored by the New York Times, Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio described the culture of his organization as being like a nudist camp: “…it’s very awkward. There has to be getting over the emotional reaction,” he said.

As an expert in cultural transformations in the workplace, I see a cutthroat culture where employees have license to discredit one another as one is pitted against the other. If the New York Times statement that one-third of their hires leave within two years is accurate, they either do a terrible job of hiring people or it’s a horrible job—or perhaps both.

Adam Grant in his book, The Originals, highlights Bridgewater as having a “commitment” culture where “the secret is promoting original ideas.” This is great in theory but has a dark side when applied without parameters that reinforce civility.  As I discuss in my book, From Bully to Bull’s-Eye: Move Your Organization Out of the Line of Fire, employees’ behavior is rooted in the workplace culture that surrounds them. As Oscar Wilde said, it’s the prisons, not the prisoners, which need reformation.

I’ve written recently about how Uber CEO Travis Kalanick who reeling under allegations needs to change the way he leads. The behavior of his firm reflects the culture he created. This is true of all CEOs, although sadly neither Kalanick nor Dalio seem to grasp this.

Photo credit: Business Insider