How to motivate a bully - not to bully - HR edition

One of the questions I get asked a lot is how to convince a bully to not bully.

The problem of bullying is my area of expertise. I take a behavioral approach. In general – convincing a bully to not bully is not something that can be done easily and even if you could convince them – it probably wouldn’t change their behavior. So what should you do instead?

There is an assumption in most anti-harassment and anti-bullying programs that is that if we could just convince the bullies to not bully – the problem would go away. That’s why most sexual harassment training programs are basically 2 hours of “don’t do it – it’s illegal.”  Obviously – that doesn’t work.

Even with a person who is motivated to change – change is hard because it’s not just a matter of wanting to change. It’s about actually changing behavior. Extinguishing unwanted behavior is the hardest of the behavioral conditioning techniques to master.

The good news is that you don’t actually need a bully to want to stop bullying to make them stop bullying.  You can train them to stop by not allowing bullying to work.  (Note: This works for most people – but not all – some are not in operant control of their behavior and they will blow out spectacularly).

Instead of trying to convince someone who doesn’t want to stop – to stop. You train the people who want them to stop – on how exactly to make the unwanted behavior stop.  Focus on helping the victims learn what they want to learn and supporting them and the bully – through the behavioral change process. This helps remove the reward for the unwanted behavior and rewards the behavior you do want.  This isn’t easy to do and any behavioral modification trainer will tell you but it can be done.

The key is for management to understand how this behavior extinction is going to play out so they can support it until the unwanted behavior is extinguished and replaced with more pro-social behavior.  AND management needs to know what to do if it turns out that person isn’t in control of their behavior – which is rare – but does happen.


PS – I just wrote about this on my blog since I keep getting calls from companies wanting me to train a problem person – but refusing to educate themselves about what needs to happen. They just want an outsider to fix this person – and really – unless they educate themselves – it’s not going to happen. http://humanisthappiness.blogspot.com/2018/10/who-should-you-train-when-you-have.html 

In the meantime, if you are finally ready to learn what actually has to happen to make bullying and harassment stop in your workplace - take my online class for HR professionals which is approved for both HRCI & SHRM recertification credits so you can educate yourself. https://humanistlearning.com/workplacebullying1/

If you are an employment lawyer - I have a CLE program for you too. https://humanistlearning.com/stop-bullying-in-the-workplace-for-lawyers/

And finally - and most importantly - hire me to do a staff training - start with your leaders and we can work our way down to line staff. And yes - you can use me for your sexual harassment training and onboarding programs.
https://humanistlearning.com/sexual-harassment-compliance-training/

Valuing Diversity

One of the first things companies need to do is understand that diversity is value. Yes – it comes with some difficulty, but the benefits outweigh those costs.

In order to have a diverse workforce, you have to value a diverse workforce. So – what value do you get with a diverse workforce? Better decision making.

All businesses are in the business of solving problems. Better problem solving leads to better solutions and better businesses.

How do we get better at problem solving? Improve our decision making/problem solving processes.

Diversity helps with this because instead of getting like minds together– to think about how to solve a problem, you bring in other viewpoints. Those other viewpoints may yield insights a homogeneous group didn’t think of and can’t think of.

Additionally, diversity helps ensure that stupid mistakes aren’t made because – more diverse experiences means more experience on how things can go oh so horribly wrong. We want that and should want that as it helps us solve problems more effectively.

Once we decide diversity is good and we value diversity specifically because of the input diverse people bring to a problem solving situation, we need to protect those diverse viewpoints so that they can be heard.

People who are used to dominating, are now being asked to collaborate and listen and take into account a diverse viewpoint in the problem solving process. This is bound to cause a reaction. Which is actually predicted to occur if we consider this a behavioral issue.

What we want is people to learn how to work together. This takes time, part of the process is extinguishing the old habits of how decisions are made in a homogeneous group and replacing those behaviors with a more collaborative model.

This is a change management problem coupled with a bullying/harassment problem. Behavioral science should be applied to help our teams adjust so that all voices are valued in the decision making process.

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To learn more about how to use behavioral science to create change - consider taking the online course: Why is Change so Hard: https://humanistlearning.com/change1/

To learn more about how to stop bullying and harassment which is used by people to dominate decision making processes - take my online course: How to End Harassment & Retaliation in the Workplace: https://humanistlearning.com/retaliation1/

Dealing with Sexual Harassment - from Hillary Clinton?

It recently came to light that Hillary Clinton did not fire a man on her 2008 staff who had harassed a young lady on her team.  Hillary responded by posting an article on Facebook about what she did and why she did it in response to what happened.  I don't want to discuss the relative merits or demerits of Hillary as a political candidate, but I do think her sharing of her thought processes and how she handled it is worth discussing from an HR/humanistic business management perspective.  So here goes.

First - her essay:

Key points:

1) She believed the alleged victim and took immediate action to make sure the accused no longer had access to this person. She also gave the victim a better job - promoted her.
2) She demoted the person accused but did not fire him. She did ensure that his access to other people and women in particular was limited.  She says she took this route because as far as she knew it was an isolated incident and she believed in giving him a second chance - but in a trust but verify sort of way so that he would not be able to hurt others on her campaign.

While it is very easy to second guess her decisions given that the man in question did go on to harass someone else at another job. I will not be doing that here. Instead I want to highlight what I thought she did right.

Too often, when people complain, they are isolated to protect them while the accused is left free to do whatever they want. This has the impact of socially isolating the victim and limiting their ability to do their jobs. When we do this - we are punishing the person who was brave enough to come forward and report what happened. Hillary not only supported this young woman - she rewarded her for coming forward.

Now, before anyone gets all antsy about how if we reward people for reporting crimes we are going to end up with a lot of false reports, don't worry about that. False reports are pretty easy to spot and don't stand up to basic scrutiny and investigation. Also, the rate of false reporting is quite low. Our problem isn't that we have a bunch of false reports, it's that people aren't reporting crimes of this nature when they happen in the workplace.

The person who was isolated and demoted was the harasser, not the victim. She gave him the benefit of the doubt, but did not leave him free to hurt others. He has monitored so he would have no opportunity to hurt other women on the team. Yes, that seems harsh - but it does give the accused the benefit of the doubt.

We do not know what actions Hillary took to verify the story of the young lady. I assume she did not demote someone without first verifying the story.

What I do know is that unless you take reports seriously and verify them - you won't know. So take reports seriously. Verify. There are not 2 sides to this. Either someone behaved inappropriately or they did not. If they did - they should no longer have access to other members of the team. If you don't fire them, isolate them so that they no longer have the ability to harm others.

And, if you verify that a claim was true - reward the person who came forward and notified you.

Which is worse? Dealing with someone who has behaved inappropriately - or allowing a predator to prey on your staff for years because people are too afraid to come forward? In case you are wondering - it's the latter. Not only in terms of harm done but this impacts workflow and is an enormous legal liability. People with courage to honestly tell you what is going on and that crimes are occurring in your workplace - should be rewarded.  People who are found to have behaved inappropriately need to be monitored closely and if necessary isolated so they no longer have access to their victims and other potential victims.

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To learn more about how to stop harassment and bullying in the workplace take my online course: Workplace Bullying for HR Professionals

https://humanistlearning.com/workplacebullying1/

Dealing with a Bad Boss

I do a lot of presentations to business and HR Professionals about how to use behavioral science to stop bullying. One of the questions I get at pretty much every conference session is how to deal with a bad boss.

The answer to that question depends. Is your bad boss a middle manager or – THE boss?

If they are a middle manager you would be doing your company a favor by trying to help them be less of a bad boss by letting management know of the problem and documenting what is going on as well as you can. It is not your job to fix the bad boss – it is upper management’s job to do that. To help them, you HAVE to have documentation of what is going on.

A documentation log includes What happened, when did it happen, who witnessed it, what exactly was said and so forth. If there is an email chain – make copies and attach them to your documentation log. It is a really good idea to follow up every conversation with a follow up email to ensure you understood their direction properly. The idea is to make sure you are being professional even if the bad boss isn’t. This will help upper management understand what the problem is and correct it. A lot of times bad bosses are bad because there are covering up their mistakes and blaming staff. All you can do is be professional and document and alert and try and encourage the boss to be more professional too – in a nice way. This is no guarantee you will succeed, but it will put you in the best position to do so.

If the bad boss is THE boss. Quit. Seriously – there is no external pressure you can put on them to change and any attempt to do so will fail.

If it is a middle manager and you want to learn how to stop harassment and retaliation in the workplace - consider viewing my program - How to End Harassment & Retaliation in the Workplace. It's available as an online course, streaming video, or DVD: https://humanistlearning.com/video-ending-harassment-retaliation-in-the-workplace/

A Humanist Approach to Sexual Harassment Training

Humanists approach problem solving a little bit differently than most people.  We use science and critical thinking to figure out what will work to solve our problem and we combine that with compassionate ethics for effective decision making and problem solving.

When it comes to the problem of harassment in the workplace, we have laws requiring training. It's well intention-ed, but the training doesn't ever seem to change anything.

There is a reason for that and that reason is because the training we receive almost never includes information on what works to get unwanted behavior to stop. Isn't it time we changed that?

Here is a slide show on what a good sexual harassment training should include - science wise - so that the next time your company offers harassment training - you can suggest a better way.



And if you would like this type of training for your company - here is a link - https://humanistlearning.com/sexual-harassment-compliance-training/

Are you asking the right questions?

This is a lesson in leadership for Human Resources professionals.

This came across my newsfeed the other day. It’s a post from a woman in one of my mom’s groups on Facebook.  It concerns an exit interview she had with a company she worked for.

“WTF really [company redacted]? They sent me a survey on my employment experience. Oddly there was nowhere to type WHY I left. And hostile work environment wasn't an option. Then they dare to ask if I'd ever come back and if I'd recommend them. I don't know [company redacted] your management bullied me to the point I walked out mid shift...what do you think?”

I teach how to stop bullying using behavioral techniques so, this post cut close to me. This is preventable. Both the bullying this person endured and the abysmal attempt at an exit interview which completely failed to provide any useful information to the company. I mean, why even bother if you aren’t open to learning what’s really going on?

I talk to HR pros all the time and they tell me – oh we don’t have a bullying problem here. Really? How would you know? I mean sure, your company may be the exception. But most places have at least 1 problem person. Sometimes the problems are systemic. But they all have interpersonal issues of some sort. You simply can’t get a lot of people together and not have them clash from time to time.

If you aren’t hearing about these problems, it’s not because your company isn’t experiencing them. It’s because you aren’t being told about them. Most employees don’t report abuse because most abuse is supervisor on employee. Reporting abuse can get you fired.

If you really want to know what’s going on, you have to do a little digging. And you have to be open to what you might find. You also need a plan for how to deal with what you find so that you can fix it.

If you aren’t aware of which of your supervisors is abusive, then you simply aren’t asking the right questions.

FYI – if you want to learn how to get abusive behavior to stop – that I can help you with – check out these courses at Humanist Learning Systems: https://humanistlearning.com/category/bullyingharassment/