Teams Blog

After all the U.S. media focus on schoolyard bullies in recent years, I’m glad to see a growing awareness of what those playground pugilists may grow up to be: abusive bosses. Prof. David Yamada and a growing chorus of researchers are out to change that by making workplace emotional abuse illegal in the Unites States. Among a host of other good reasons, Yamada wants to save lives.

He is a law professor at Suffolk Univ. in Boston and director of The New Workplace Institute. According to a version of his proposed law introduced in the Massachusetts State Senate last year, “Between 37 and 59 percent of employees directly experience health-endangering workplace bullying, abuse, and harassment, and this mistreatment is approximately four times more prevalent than sexual harassment alone.” Posts on his blog, Minding the Workplace, report on two suicides apparently resulting from this kind of abuse. One describes the recent death of an academic journal editor after alleged bullying by his boss, detailed by The Hook, a weekly newspaper.

Versions of Yamada’s bill have been introduced in 15 states and passed by two senates. Though that’s as far as they have gotten, I think it’s likely the United States will eventually catch up to countries like France and Sweden that have national laws against workplace bullies.

Yamada described the law in a speech at the Univ. of Augsburg back in April. The law would make it illegal for an employer to “subject an employee to an abusive work environment” with conduct such as “derogatory remarks, insults, and epithets; verbal or physical conduct of a threatening, intimidating, or humiliating nature; the sabotage or undermining of an employee’s work performance; or attempts to exploit an employee’s known psychological or physical vulnerability.” To break the law, the bully must have intended “to cause pain, injury, or distress” and have caused mental or physical damage. Though aimed at repeated abuse, it says a single very bad example could be enough.

If this language sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because much of it is taken directly from sexual harassment laws. Because of those you may think bullying is already illegal, but Yamada makes the case that existing laws do not cover general abuse. For example, if the insults mentioned above related to your gender or religion, they might break anti-discrimination laws. Otherwise, almost anything goes legally.

Managers should note that as with discrimination laws, not only the abuser but also his or her employer could be sued if this law passed in your state. A court could order an employer to take a number of actions including firing the bully, and paying back pay to a victim who quits because of the abuse. Employers would have some protections, again modeled on sexual harassment law. If the employer tried to fix the problem, or had a system to address it that the victim did not use, that would be a valid defense. Damages for emotional distress would be limited to $25,000, and punitive damages would not be allowed. The law also would include defenses to protect the employer from false claims, for example from a worker fired for other, valid reasons.

I suspect some readers will come up with reasonable objections along the lines of employer rights and the idea that the victim could just quit. I understand the thinking, but recognize the exact same arguments were made against sexual harassment laws 20 years ago and racial discrimination laws 50 years ago.

How sad that we have to even consider resorting to laws to make some managers play nice. I recall sitting stunned in a Seattle Chamber of Commerce committee meeting some years ago after the head of a builder’s association argued against better workplace safety rules because “nobody wants their people to get hurt.” His argument was logical, based not only on moral grounds but financial ones. I was stunned because there is massive evidence that wanting to save money in the short term regularly stops employers from investing in long-term savings through problem prevention. As evidence I present recent mining disasters, BP’s little problem in the Gulf of Mexico, and thousands of other citations in the public record. Please forgive this blatant plug, but my teamwork training and coaching services could save almost every business team in the United States many times more money than my services cost, yet I have room for more clients.

If you are a manager and know of someone causing strife on your staff, you already have a host of reasons to confront the behavior. Yamada writes, “there is strong consensus that bullying and related behaviors can be very costly for employers. These factors include:

• “Reduced productivity
• “Reduced employee loyalty
• “Increased absenteeism and related costs of medical premiums, workers’ compensation, and disability payments
• “Increase attrition and related costs of hiring and training
• “Greater risk of employee lawsuits, even in the absence of specific legal protections…”

The day is probably coming when ignoring the problem becomes yet another way to beg for a lawsuit. More importantly, any ethics book will tell you ignoring it is wrong, especially when suicide is a possible outcome.

Are you the type of person who gets people upset but believes “in telling the truth straight out, and if they can’t handle it, that’s their problem?” Or who enjoys insult humor and practical jokes at work? Or curses a lot more than your co-workers do? As with sexual harassment, it doesn’t matter whether you think your behavior is abusive. What matters is whether the other person does. Start looking inside yourself now, because you don’t want a judge doing it for you later.

Action Item: If you’re not sure whether you or someone you manage is abusive, or what to do about it, drop me a line or give me a call: 1-919-414-8939.

Sources: The following sources (and more) are all available free on “David Yamada’s ‘Papers’” page:

• “Crafting an American Legal Response to Workplace Bullying: The Healthy Workplace Bill”
• “Is There a ‘Business Case’ for Workplace Bullying Legislation?”
• “Massachusetts Senate Bill No. 699″ (2009-10 Session)
• “Workplace Bullying and American Employment Law: A Ten-Year Progress
  Report and Assessment”

After five months of writing informational posts, I hope you will do me the honor of reading a marketing one. I’ll keep it brief.

First, I have added a free service you may find useful, a Twitter account that is not about my lunch plans. As I have blogged about before, the thought techniques of “mindfulness” training can help you reduce workday stress and be more productive by focusing on the work at hand. I have started sending out one tweet most U.S. workdays to help you do so. See:

• MindfulWork Twitter Page
• More information

Second, in this economy, you probably need to do more with the people you have right now without overstressing them. My services provide that benefit, but you may not have the cash flow for them. So I have created the limited-term ”Refer or Defer Offer.” You get six-months free financing on my teamwork training and team coaching services. Plus, if you refer me to someone who can pay now, I will discount your billing by 50 cents per dollar they pay, up to half of your total bill (except for expenses). Click here for more information, and please forward this post to anyone troubled by teamwork issues.

Thank you for reading this. Now back to your regularly scheduled teamwork blogging.

—Jim

I promised a look at the science behind stress according to the textbook mentioned in my last post, Human Motivation. (Actually, I don’t make “promises,” but that’s a subject for another post.) The first point of interest is that scientists do not use the word “stress” the way most people do: as an inherently negative state. According to Dr. Robert Franken, “Stress is… viewed as set of neurological/physiological reactions that serve some ultimate adaptive purpose,” reactions including blood becoming thicker and rushing to the brain and muscles, sweating, fats being released in the bloodstream, and increased breathing rates. As you might suspect, this is what we often call a “fight or flight response,” and indeed, all of these reactions allow us to do either of those things better–or heal better if they fail. (Thicker blood contains more of the chemicals the body needs to heal and presumably bleeds out slower.)

In developed nations, the events that trigger this reaction rarely require physical action or risk injury, however. Repeated exposure to these physical changes without the ability to respond physically is blamed for the well-documented connection between what business people call stress and higher disease and death rates.

But there’s a catch. “How the individual responds to those reactions determines whether they produce feelings of distress (a negative feeling) or produce feelings of eustress (a positive feeling),” Dr. Franken wrote. Jumping from an airplane creates the fight or flight response. If you jumped out on purpose, you enjoy the response. If the plane has stopped working, you probably don’t.

This distinction is important because the internal physical reaction is actually a two-step process. First the reaction needed to arouse greater attention and deal with an immediate threat kicks in. About 10 seconds later, secondary reactions that provide more long-term energy occur, and that response takes between 15 minutes and one hour to return to normal. The diseases associated with distress, to use the more precise term, appear to come mostly from this second phase.

There can be a third phase. If the distress remains long enough, the adrenal glands that create all of the hormones in the two-phase reactions can eventually collapse, “often the precursor to death…” Franken wrote.

What I see in this is a 10-second window of opportunity to control your internal response to a stress event, which fits perfectly with what I teach as the “S-R/S-R” model. An external stimulus (“S”) creates a response (“R”) in us, but it’s not like the classic response test where you cross your legs and the doctor hits below your kneecap with a rubber hammer, creating an automatic external reaction. Instead, it is an internal response which becomes an internal stimulus for the external response. In the workplace, then, we have two opportunities to control our external responses to outside events like a harsh word from a co-worker. First, we can change our internal R such that it does not become an internal S. Second, if that doesn’t work–if we get angered by that harsh word–we can control the external R. That is, we can keep our trap shut until we calm down.

Now I know how long we have to do that before we hurt ourselves: 10 seconds, which is an eternity. Maybe that old anger-management advice about counting to 10 has a scientific basis after all.

Comment

Last night I delivered a talk on “The Mindful Way of Working” for the first time, sort of. I qualify the statement because I have guided people in meditation and mindfulness for a few years now, and have taught some of the techniques for decades as a martial artist. But I had not taught these practices in a business context, a meeting of the IS Committee of the North Carolina Project Management Institute (NCPMI). Part of the reason is I didn’t want people to think I was pushing my religion, Zen Buddhism. So I probably went overboard in making the point Buddhist practice is compatible with any other religion (my “sangha” in Seattle was founded by devout Catholics) and meditation is used by Protestant ministers, Moslems, Hindus and secular humanists, among others. Another point of discomfort for me is that the topic strays far from my primary practice of using scientific findings to support group work.

But I decided to offer the course anyway, primarily to expand my marketing possibilities, I will admit. Of course, I also could have done that by offering team–building games despite there being no scientific backing that they provide any return on investment (ROI). There is little research on productivity or other benefits from mindfulness in the workplace yet, but there is significant research on the stress-reduction capabilities in medical practice. In fact, the method called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) has proven effective in a variety of settings, and the few studies in the business world are encouraging as well.

For the class and my Zen practice, I say “mindfulness at its most practical level is simply keeping your mind on what is going on in this moment. As in meditation, you try to focus your mind on one thing and let all extraneous thoughts go on their way. For example, if at work you are writing a report and you think, ‘I need to pick up some bread,’ don’t go on to making out your grocery list in your head. Put your mind back on your writing.” Purists will rightly argue there is a lot more to it, and I touched on aspects such as recognizing automatic thoughts for what they are and noticing the impact of certain physical sensations on our emotions and relationships.

What it boils down to is self-control, perhaps the most critical skill to business success. We all have to do things we don’t want to in order to accomplish routine tasks, act professionally with colleagues we don’t like, guide employees to do things we think should be obvious to anyone, and so on. Mindfulness, and the meditation practice that supports it the way working out supports athletic performance, are powerful options to achieve that self-control.

The class participants seemed either to get it or not know what to make of it, and either response is fine with me. But I know they stayed very engaged throughout the class and walked out with a choice of new tools to help their working or personal lives. To me, that makes overcoming my fears worth the risks.

Comment