Burn Books and Power Dynamics

Strategies to reduce drama at work: Part 3

Part 1 offered some ideas on how to get away from blame and towards responsibility.

Part 2 looked at dysfunctional relationships and games.

I am wrapping up my notes on workplace drama with thoughts on gossip, bullying, and power dynamics. Of course, there are entire books written on each of these topics; these are just short stories to give some inspiration for your own research.

People love gossip

A few years ago, I read an interesting book [1] that explained how much of the dysfunction at work emerges from the fact we bring to the office behaviors that originated in our “first organization” — our family. It’s up to us to identify the patterns and figure out where they are coming from, often from family and cultural background, and decide whether we need to adjust.

When it comes to gossipy behavior, I believe a lot of us bring that from home, and in hindsight, it would be best if we left it there. Many people are raised to gossip. I think I bonded with my mother over pictures of Madonna marrying Sean Penn. I know what I am talking about.

Not everything we usually classify as ‘gossip’ is damaging. Speculation about what’s going on is quite natural and driven by curiosity and interest in what other people are doing. In the more general context, gossip defined as the act of two or more people talking about someone who is not in the room fills up to two-thirds of our day to day conversations. And it can have positive social effects [2] — it’s an “efficient mechanism for social bonding and social learning.” It can make people more reflective. Positive gossip inspires us to self-improve. We hear about something great some other person is doing, and we may want to emulate them. And even negative feedback can become a learning lesson on what’s acceptable and what’s not within a given social circle [3].

Malicious, damaging gossip is, according to the experts, as low as 3–4 percent of all the chatter we generate. But let loose in a work environment and used as a channel for dragging other people down, it truly creates a problem. That’s the kind of gossip that harms interpersonal relations and group morale.

In general, I find workplaces don’t believe gossip is a big deal. There are tales of companies that have declared war on it, like, for example, Bridgewater, infamous for recording all employees’ conversations and making them accessible to everyone, a move that is credited for removing toxicity from the office [4]. Or Belay, a distributed company with a zero gossip policy that would terminate employees who engage in gossip [5]. But these are exceptions rather than the norm. One could argue that employees can simply go somewhere else to talk. And some studies show that people are more effective when they are allowed to gossip. My own personal opinion is that while anti-gossip measures probably don’t address the root cause of why people do it, it is worth adopting mechanisms that clearly articulate the commitment to a healthy workplace.

Since gossip thrives when information is not flowing, and people start creating their own narrative, a more grounded approach to combat these issues is to create an environment of transparency and decent communication practices. This solution sounds simple, but I find it’s hard to achieve gracefully — you can be incredibly transparent, and information may still not flow properly. Yet, this is a critical skill for leadership to develop if we want to enable a network organization. Our job as enablers is to analyze the information and make sure teams have the intelligence they need to make smart decisions [6]. But we also need to make sure that we are covering areas that, while not critical, can help mitigate the risk of rampant gossip.

An additional point to make is that rumors are often rooted in fear. As Amy Edmonson put it, “side conversations about substantive issues are a source of organizational pathology” [7]. I won’t repeat in here her advice to build safe environments, but it’s worth checking if you think this is something your organization needs to work on [8].

You may also need to address severe cases of gossiping employees directly; just remember that you cannot make them change their minds. It’s everyone’s choice to understand the dangers and move to a position where they can take responsibility for their own environment. And rather than calling people out, I like the idea of focusing my energy on training people towards awareness and towards being able to handle important conversations better.

In “Managing to Make a Difference,” authors Larry Sternberg and Kim Turnage invite readers to try this experiment[9]:

1. The next time someone brings you third-party information, ask the person why they are telling you this and respond accordingly.

2. If person X has a problem with person Y, tell X to speak to Y, not to you.

3. If the person needs help managing conflict on their own, follow coaching strategies to help them.

4. Do not act. Do not try to verify what you have heard. Do not do anything. Go about your business. Focus your time and energy on activities that add value and make your organization better

5. Keep this up for 90 days and reflect on what has changed for you and your team.

Getting creative with Bullies

A workplace bully would be someone that displays unacceptable, aggressive behavior that is clearly wrong. They often intend to manipulate political and social power to control others, although what they really, really want is not always clear.

The thing is, this is not black and white. I’ve worked a few times in France, and I still remember the meetings as some of the most aggressive and uncomfortable I have ever experienced, yet to them, it was just a normal day in the office. There is really a degree of personal perception and, especially, cultural interpretation [10] at play.

If you find yourself the receiver of aggressive behavior, think about everything we have discussed over the previous posts in this series — you cannot change the fact someone is doing this to you. But you can choose how to react.

For example, let’s imagine a colleague criticize your work in public, in a way you experience as mean and destructive. You may be wondering if you are being bullied. The Responsibility Process will kick-in, and you can then get stuck in all sorts of blame and shame. Or get to a point where you can take ownership of the situation.

Author and former HBR editor Karen Dillon recommmends[11]:

• Trying to understand the motives — is it reasonable to think this person is just a bit too passionate about quality? What other evidence exists this person is a bully?
• Approach the person in a conciliatory way — disarm your attacker by expressing that you would like to have a good working relationship with them. In this example, you could tell your colleague how their opinion makes your work stronger and then suggest a structured critique approach to keep everyone positively focused on the work and minimizing the risk of misunderstandings.
• If you are fairly sure this person is a bully, probably your best option is to call out the aggressive behavior. Approach them privately and say something like, “You had good points earlier, but your tone was quite harsh. I am wondering if there is any problem?”. Doing this may sound intimidating, but research shows that bullies don’t want the confrontation and will think twice before targeting you again.

And yes, we all agree that there are terrible cases of bullying and harassment that go beyond what employees can do on their own despite best efforts to train everyone to have these conversations. Get help for those. We often hear about cases in which organizations fail to address awful situations of abuse. But many other cases are actually resolved, and we don’t hear about. If you feel it’s safe, it’s worth trying to report situations that have gone beyond what we think we can solve on our own. It will also show your organization’s true colors.

What if you handling the bullying is your responsibility

If you find yourself with the organizational responsibility of managing a bullying situation, and you don’t happen to be a trained psychologist with years of experience dealing with aggression, chances are you find this quite intimidating. I know I did.

First of all, if you are dealing with a bad case, don’t fool yourself thinking you can solve it on your own. Think about worst cases of bullying as domestic violence with an abuser that is on payroll. Call for help. Bring a specialist, or send this person to therapy. If you feel your company harassment policy has been breached, consider actions from an employer perspective. So partner with HR. And if you happen to be HR, you know you have work to do.

For milder situations, what has helped me in the past is to remember that bullying happens when someone craves specific outcomes that they are unable to get on their own. These are usually related to belonging, safety, and relevance. Bullies often emerge from insecurity but resort to aggression to channel it.

You can follow this five-step process to address bullying [12]:

1. Identify the behavior
2. Interrupt the bullying pattern immediately
3. Engage the bully and try to understand the outcomes they may be looking for, and what obstacles they find to get there
4. Create a plan of action
5. Follow up with regular check-ins

There are different ways to do step number three. But one of my favorite ways to do visioning and outcome work by adapting the Celebration 5W and 15-Minute FOTO exercises, part of Mike Burrows’ Agendashift [13] engagement model.

Celebration 5W invites participants to envision a future in which things went the best they could. The 5W correspond to five questions for the participant:

• Who is celebrating with you?
• What are you celebrating
• When are you celebrating?
• Where are you celebrating?
• Why is this important?

This exercise is relatively quick, can be fun, and might give meaningful insights as to what this person wants to achieve.

With these needs established, you can use a second Agendashift exercise named 15-Minute FOTO. FOTO stands for “From Obstacles to Outcomes” and makes use of Clean Language [14] questions to coach the individual towards clear outcomes.

For 15 minutes, discuss the obstacles in the way of achieving the vision that came from the Celebration exercise. For each of those obstacles (you can prioritize if there are many of them, in my experience, only the top three usually matter), you will only ask from a pool of predefined questions, as seen below. Start with “What obstacle might be in the way of …?” and follow up with others.

Once you have evident outcomes, you can start preparing a plan of action. Having a clear path towards what they want may be enough to calm and get the bully out of the problem behavior.

If these exercises look too weird to use, note that you can guide the conversation more naturally but still following a similar arc. But I also find that using the canvas and bringing cards with the questions is an excellent way to pique the person’s curiosity.

Be careful about the bully adopting a Victim role in the Drama Triangle and asking you to become the Rescuer. They need to genuinely realize what they have been doing and see the need for change. If they don’t really want to change, they will eventually blame you and this process for their inability to get to a better place. If they don’t truly want to change, it’s a signal they probably need to leave the organization.

Managing Power Dynamics

The last element I haven’t touched yet, and that tends to create its fair amount of grief in organizations, is the hierarchy and power distribution. If you have ever worked with me, you know I’ve actively worked towards minimizing the toxic effects of top-down authority in collaborative environments.

I realized some time ago that I needed a model to frame what was in my head; otherwise, I would risk coming across as a borderline anarchist with an uncanny ability to polarise people around me, which has happened once or twice. A couple of years ago, I stumbled across the work of Richard D Bartlett, which led me to Starhawk’s definitions of power [15]. These insights helped me shape how I explain and discuss power in organizations.

As she explains, in a collaborative group, we encounter four types of power:

• Power-over or coercive power, used by a person to control another. It allows to control resources, impose sanctions or punishments.
• Power-from-within or empowerment: this is the creative force we feel when we engage in what we are passionate about.
• Collective-Power: the power we have as a group when we act in concert. Also known as solidarity.
• Power-with or social power: influence, status, rank, or authority that determines how much you are listened to in a group. This type is the one that creates the most confusion and drama.

There is no single way to use this. It’s knowledge and awareness. When I sense that hierarchy is a source of drama, may it be too much hierarchy or the absence of one, I start asking myself these questions:

• Is there too much power-over going on? Is someone telling everyone what to do? Is this a cultural expectation? How is it happening? How are people reacting to it?
• Is there an absence of power-within? Are people enjoying their creative work? Are they able to speak up, contribute ideas? Do they have ways to develop themselves and achieve their goals? Is the organization helping people get there?
• Is power-with transparent? Is it understood what the different leadership roles are supposed to do? Why they even exist? What is the organizational driver for them? Is it clear how people progress and access those kinds of roles?

I used to work on traditional console games development. Games that can sometimes require hundreds of people and for which management often rely on (the illusion of) control. The bigger studios I worked with exercised a significant amount of power-over. They were top-down hierarchies with creative directors making all decisions, and an army of project managers to make sure everyone executes as prescribed. And there is often quite a lot of hostility and anxiety going on in those environments. An industry home to passionate people is, in many cases hindering empowerment and minimizing power-within. They ask many of their creative employees to leave their creativity at home. A particular workplace seemed very proud of their culture of meritocracy. Still, they implemented it with such a lack of transparency on how that was supposed to work that had everyone guessing. Power-with was the problem here — people, of course, assumed the worst; you would progress if you were a particular gender, spoke the right language, and were friends with the right people. And even if that was probably not the case, it was never clear and was the source of gossip and yes, drama.

The idea is not to go in tomorrow to work, tell everyone “there is too much power-over going on in here” and attempt a coup. First, people will be puzzled and/or laugh at you for using weird language; second, if you are in an organization dealing with legacy, it’s not going to fly; and third, disruptive change rarely works. But knowing these things might give you more insights about where the drama is originating. I find that questioning the different powers and the impact they have on the culture around is an exercise worth doing.

Bartlett also wrote a list of some practical steps [16] you can take towards a more balanced organization. Go and read them!

Wrapping Up

This whole series was probably longer than I wanted, but I hope it gave you ideas and references to explore on your own.

As you may have noticed, it all goes back to the way we react to things. We cannot really change much of what goes around us. Even if you happen to have the authority and mandate to affect culture, the reality is that we cannot change other people’s minds. We can only hope for people to want to follow us and be part of the solution.

Trying to understand why it’s happening, what games are being played around you and moving people into problem-solving is always a good first step. You want to redirect the negative energy into something that has the potential to make things better.

And remember that you first need to learn to help yourself get out of the drama before you can help anyone else.

Photo credit: curiouslittlekid.com

Once you discover the root causes, the real dysfunction, or conflict behind the game, you are going to have less drama but a lot more work in your hands. Welcome to my world.

References

[1] Sylivia Lafair “Don’t Bring It To Work” (2009)

[2] Kate Murphy, “You are not listening” (2020)

[3] “Gossiping Is Good”, Ben Healy (The Atlantic, 2018)

[4] As explained in “An Everyone Culture” by Robert Kagan and Lisa Laskow Lahey (2016)

[5] As detailed in “Culture Wins” by William Vanderbloemen (2018)

[6] To learn more about this you may want to revisit “Team of Teams” (that’s assuming you are not already sick of it) by Stanley McChrystal

[7] “When employees are open with each other but not management”, Amy Edmonson (HBR, 2020)

[8] Amy Edmonson “The Fierless Organization” (2018)

[9] Larry Sternberg and Kim Turnage: “Managing to Make a Difference” (2017)

[10] Cultural differences could have been an entire new chapter in this drama series, but in reality they cut across all the elements I’ve touched. If the topic sounds interesting, read Erin Meyer’s “The Culture Map” (Int. Ed. 2016) or “Bridging The Culture Gap” (2nd Ed. 2008) by Penny Carté and Chris Fox.

[11] Karen Dillon: “HBR guide to office politics” (2014)

[12] Adapted from https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinecomaford/2014/03/12/bust-workplace-bullies-and-clear-conflict-in-3-essential-steps/#397559007912

[13] Mike Burrows’ Agendashift: https://www.agendashift.com

[14] Judy Ress and Wendy Sullivan’s book is a good place to start if you want to get into Clean Language: https://www.amazon.com/Clean-Language-Revealing-Metaphors-Opening/dp/1845901258

[15] Starhawk: “The Empowerment Manual” (2011) and Richard D. Bartlett: “Patterns for Decentralised Organising” (WIP, 2018)

[16] Richard D. Bartlett: “11 Practical Steps Towards Healthy Power Dynamics at Work” (Medium, 2019)

Image: “Mean Girls”, written by Tina Fey, directed by Mark Waters (Paramount Pictures, 2004)

Image: “Devil Wears Prada”, written by Aline Brosh McKenna, directed by David Frankel (20th Century Fox, 2006)