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/

I have so many problems with this.

I came across the following statement on facebook. I have so many problems with it
POSITIVE PRAYING is more effective than POSITIVE THINKING! It is more powerful!

I am not a huge fan of positive thinking as I tend to think it is unrealistic thinking. I like positivity – but realistic positivity coupled with – action. You know – to get those positive things you think should be done done?  Yeah – you have to take positive action, or nothing will get done.

If I dislike positive thinking so much why do I have a problem with the quote?  Well …. as ineffective as I feel positive thinking is, I think positive praying is worse. Much much worse.  It’s like positive thinking on steroids.  All the problems with positive thinking multipled.

One of the biggest problems we have with positive thinking is that once people are positive a positive outcome is going to happen, they stop taking positive action to make that outcome a reality. People who engage in delusion positive thinking do less work to create their future then those who are more … pessimistic.

People who think positive praying is going to help get things done are deluding themselves even more. Because they aren’t just thinking good things will happen. They are convincing themselves that they are doing something to make good things happen, all while doing nothing actually tangible to make good things happen.

Look. I want good things to happen as much as then next person. But thinking positive thoughts and positively praying for good things doesn’t make good things happen. Positive action makes good things happen.

I don’t care if you pray or think or think about praying. What I want is for people to get out into the world and actually do good things for other people.  Rant over.

Great Advice for Parents

Punishments, time outs and consequences: making sense of the advice.

I’m a mom. I participate in a variety of mom discussion groups. I find a sense of solidarity and support in them. The most common theme that is discussed is: how the heck do I get my kid to do what needs to be done without punishing them?  I mean seriously – sometimes they only respond to threats.

We have been told punishment is bad and counterproductive and we are to use time outs instead.  But, we end up using time outs as if they are punishments, which ideally they are not. And so now there is a backlash against time outs called, wait for it ... time in. We have been told to create natural consequences to help our children learn to behave well, and we end up using consequences as punishments too. And we threaten our kids with punishment in the form of consequences or time outs. We can’t seem to get away from the do what I say or else model of getting our little heathens to behave the way we want or need them to.

There is a lovely article from psychology today that has a list of 10 alternatives to consequences. And the author rightly points out that consequences should not be used as punishments. (see: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/peaceful-parents-happy-kids/201407/10-alternatives-consequences)

Most of the advice amounts to reasoning with your child in such a way that your child will conclude: doing what you need them to do is a good idea. In other words, go Socratic on your child.

I’ve been doing this since my son became verbal. I have always made it clear, he is free to choose his actions and by doing so, he is choosing his consequences. I don’t just impost consequences as a threat. When he is acting out or being defiant – I say – ok – what is it you want to accomplish. He tells me. Then I say, Is doing whatever obnoxious thing you are doing going to get you that? (The correct answer is NO!) What is likely to happen if you keep doing it? (Hint – mommy is going to get frustrated and mad because – heck – she’s human). Do you want crazy mad mommy? (Usually he does not). How might you behave to get what you want? (Hint – do what I need you to do).

He is in charge of his behavior. He chooses his consequences through his behavior. And we do this explicitly. It’s not an emotional process. When he gets upset, and lets face it, we all do, we tell him it’s ok for him to get mad. But acting on anger usually makes things worse, so let’s work together to reason through his options so that we, his parents, can help him rectify his problem.  And, sometimes we can’t. And he has come to accept that too.

Bedtime battles? We never had them. His bedtime is what it is and there are certain things that have to be done before bedtime and if he wants story time, he needs to get them done in time for us to have reading time. He still gets snuggled and stuff, but certain privileges go away because of time constraints. This isn’t a punishment, it’s a natural consequence.

The key to being able to do this – is the reset (or Do-Over in the list from Psychology Today). You can’t be angry or frustrated when you help your child calm down and reason through their actions. You have to be calm and model calm reasoning. Being angry and frustrated is going to happen. You can’t expect your kid to calm down if you can’t. So you calm down first and then start compassionately helping your kids to choose their behavior so that both of you are happy with the outcome.

The Humanist Household: Helping Kids Through Anger: Coping Skills

Image: David Castillo Dominici /
 FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A large portion of my work is teaching people how to cope with life. How to think before you act so that your actions are beneficial and not harmful.  We call this adaptive vs. maladaptive coping. It's a central focus on my Humanist Life Skills Course actually. My friend over at The Humanist Household just did a wonderful post about helping kids learn adaptive coping skills and I love it and it's what I do with my son.

Enjoy -  The Humanist Household: Helping Kids Through Anger: Coping Skills: We all have coping skills because we all have to cope with things we don't like.  The real question is whether our coping skills are constructive or destructive.  READ ARTICLE HERE

Freedom of Belief has Consequences

Look – everyone has the right to believe whatever they want even if it is complete nonsense. We don’t, however, have a right to be shielded from the consequences of our beliefs. What we believe matters. If your beliefs are not reality based, you are going to have problems with reality.

I bring this up because there are a lot of people who, because of their religious beliefs, do not have a good relationship with reality. It is not surprising that these families try to insulate themselves from the real world and surround themselves only with other people who agree with them. This self-imposed insulation only makes matters worse because it re-enforces their rejection of reality.

If you want to teach your kids all sorts of misinformation about science such as evolution, go right ahead. But there are consequences to that decision. Mostly that unless they reject all the non-science you erroneously taught them your child will not be able to get a career in science if they continue to reject reality. It doesn’t matter how often you cry foul, the rules of science are not going to be rewritten to accommodate the reality challenged.