"Bad apples"

Today I read a New York Times article that Psychologically Healthy Workplace Program had shared. I couldn't help but notice that this article's title on the NYT website was not the link's teaser, "How to Endure a Mean-Spirited Workplace," but rather: "How Bad Apples Infect the Tree" by Robert Sutton. I tend to agree with Lisa Takeuchi Cullen's reservations about Sutton's "No Asshole Rule", when she writes: "But something about Sutton's message hits a nerve. Maybe it's the epithet, which he defines helpfully as someone who persistently belittles and abuses those of inferior power or status. (As if we needed it spelled out.) Or maybe it's his argument that jerks exact a cost to the bottom line as they single-handedly corrode an organization's cohesion."

It's good to see Ms. Cullen--while not condoning atrocious behavior--defending her bosses from the eliminative impulse, even after she admits that "Sure, beastly bosses have shaved months off my life." But not to worry. My experience is that those who tend to be labeled as "bad apples" and subsequently eliminated from the workplace are much more likely to be those who at some point were seen as being a challenge to someone of higher rank, rather than those who in actuality might act abusively toward their subordinates. As Sutton's colleague Sam Culbert lectures (@3:22): "We live in an organizational culture where it's highly likely--and even probable--that subordinates get fired and the bosses get promoted."

Emily Bassman writes: "Abused employees are in a Catch-22 situation. Their harassers are in a position to control a variety of resources, which makes abused employees similar to other victims of abuse. But, unlike other victims, they have an added disadvantage. By virtue of their subordinate position, they automatically have less credibility than their superiors. Charging that they are being treated unfairly by their supervisors would challenge the context of the hierarchical system, which is a very threatening proposition to those who are in a position to help."

Then there's the notion of provocative victims, who are "frequently misperceived as bullies." More generally, fingers being pointed at someone as being akin to rotten fruit--such that "people around them wish they'd go away"--seems unlikely to bring out their best behavior. This isn't the first time we've come across the employee-as-spoiled-fruit metaphor. The author of the Employee Termination Guidebook, argues against attempting to "rehabilitate the problem employee," noting that "a bad apple remains a bad apple."

Given the organizational culture noted above, for Sutton to conclude that bosses themselves should look in the mirror is indeed a bold admonishment. Luckily, he's got tenure.

What was Toyota thinking?

In response to Congresswoman Speier's question about whether Toyota would offer installation of a brake override "chip" to any existing Toyota customer who requests one, Mr. Toyoda responds (@6:02):

"I do not know the technical details, but if it is technically and engineeringly possible, or if we can find a good method, we will do that, but other than that I do not know a good answer to that."

It seems like he should have already had an answer to such a question, as it's a question that should have been asked internally at Toyota, and been asked well before Congresswoman Speier asked it this week. I would've thought of Toyota leadership as being well-versed in brake override systems, particularly as 1) they still don't believe electronics could be an issue, 2) such a software upgrade would prevent sudden acceleration from any mechanical cause (pedal hooked on floor mat, bad pedal spring return, etc.), 3) U.S. auto manufacturers have already equipped their cars with such a brake override feature starting several years ago, 4) people have died in SA crashes, and it doesn't take a senior design engineer to figure out that such a system can save lives, and 5) a brake override system, as one auto industry analyst put it, is essentially no cost, as it's just a few lines of software code, and the software development cost when spread over an entire fleet of vehicles is negligible.

Makes me wonder, what was Toyota thinking? So, the congresswoman's call for Toyota to provide any company documentation related to the NHTSA visit to Japan seems a reasonable and pertinent one.

I'm quite impressed with Congresswoman Speier's line of questioning here, as I was with our other members of congress.

Psychic Prison Quotes

Evans, P.  2003.  Controlling People: How to Recognize, Understand, and Deal with People Who Try to Control You.

"Other people's definitions of us are not just absurd--if unchallenged, they erect prison walls around us. As they rise higher, the light of awareness fades. The world darkens. We lose freedom, safety, confidence, conviction, and sometimes ourselves." (p. 77)

Foucault, M.  1995.  Discipline and punish : the birth of the prison.

"The practice of placing individuals under 'observation' is a natural extension of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue to multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penalty? Is it surprising that the prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" (p. 227)

Morgan, G.  1986.  Images of Organization.

As we examine the bureaucratic form of organization, therefore, we should be alert to the hidden meaning of close regulation and supervision of human activity, the relentless planning and scheduling of work, and the emphasis on productivity, rule following, discipline, duty, and obedience. The bureaucracy is a mechanistic form of organization, but an anal one too. And not surprisingly, we find that some people are able to work in this kind of organization more effectively than others. If bureaucracies are anal phenomena encouraging an anal style of life, then such organizations will probably operate most smoothly when employees fit the anal character type and can derive various hidden satisfactions from working in this context." (p. 209)

Morgan, G.  1998.  Images of Organization: The Executive Edition.

"The groupthink phenomenon has been reproduced in thousands of decision-making situations in organizations of aIl kinds. It may seem overly dramatic to describe the phenomenon as reflecting a kind of psychic prison. Many people would prefer to describe it through the culture metaphor, seeing the pathologies described in all the above examples as the product of particular cultural beliefs and norms. But there is great merit in recognizing the prisonlike qualities of culture." (p. 186)

Zuboff, S.  1988.  In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power.

"Bentham's extensive plans for reform of prison management created both controversy and interest within the British Parliament. Though his management proposals were not implemented, the central principle of continuous observation made possible by technical arrangements was to influence the administrative and architectural orientation of bureaucratic organizations from schools, to hospitals, to workplaces in which individuals are taken up as unique problems to be managed and measured up against appropriate norms:
"Panopticism is the general principle of a new 'political anatomy' whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline....What are required are mechanisms that analyze distributions, gaps, series, combinations, and which use instruments that render visible, record, differentiate and compare....It is polyvalent in its application....Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behavior must be imposed, the panoptic schema may be used." (p. 322)

Morin, WJ.  1995.  Silent Sabotage: Rescuing Our Careers, Our Companies, and Our Lives from the Creeping Paralysis of Anger and Bitterness.

"At the organizational level, we must begin removing the hierarchical walls that we've built around us....We must move away from the concept that the boss is omnipotent and all powerful [sic] and move toward a more fluid organizational structure that favors a shared approach toward conducting business." (p. 57)

More quotes: psychic prison

See also: confinement, false self, unconscious, panopticism, organizational psychodynamics

Healing the Workplace Culture

Danna Beal:

What I'm seeing in the workplace today is a web of egos that battle and compete for power. I see managers disempower employees. I see coworkers hurt and sabotage one another. This internal competiveness, this rivalry is based in fear. But, I believe that if we replace fear with trust and compassion, people everywhere can be restored to their true identities...

A lose-lose game

Advice from a former employment attorney:

"In the end, employment litigation is a lose-lose game. Plaintiffs I represented who received hundreds of thousands of dollars were usually broke within three years. And companies I sued didn't end up treating employees more fairly; they just made their employee handbook thicker. I truly believe the system causes more damage than benefit, and that's why I'm glad I have been out of it for the last 10 years."

In regard to making the employee handbook thicker, William L. White writes:

"'The last act of a dying organization is a thicker rule book.' The need for rules to control staff members marks a dramatic change in mutual respect, loyalty, and the esprit de corps that characterized earlier stages of organizational life." [1]

While David Whyte writes:

"Corporations, for their part, have been engaged in a willful battle against the very grain of existence. Like the good Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, they have spent enormous amounts of energy putting in place systems that attempt to hold back the shifting, oceanic qualities of existence. The complexity of the world could be accounted for, they fervently hoped, by a simple increase in the thickness of the company manual." [2]

Ritual loss of creativity

Howard Schwartz writes about how the ritualization of work leads to a loss of creativity:
The Transposition of Work and Ritual

When work, the productive process, becomes display, its meaning be comes lost. Its performance as part of the organizational drama becomes the only meaning it has. Accordingly, the parts it plays in the organization's transactions with the world become irrelevant. When this happens, work loses its adaptive function and becomes mere ritual.
At the same time, the rituals that serve to express the individual's identification with the organization ideal, especially those connected with rank, come to be infused with significance for the individual. They become sacred. Thus, reality and appearance trade places. The energy that once went into the production of goods and services of value to others is channeled into the dramatization of a narcissistic fantasy in which the organization's environment is merely a stage setting.
Consider how this shows up in the matter of dress. One can easily make a case that patterns of dress among organizational participants often have some functionality. But when the issue comes to be invested with great meaning, one must suspect that ritual has supplanted function…
The dynamics of the ways in which ritual comes to assume the importance work should have help to explain the dynamics of the ritualization of work. For the willingness to allow one's behavior to be determined by meaningless rituals comes to be justified by an idealiza tion of the organization that elevates its customs above and discredits one's values--one's sense of what is important.

Loss of Creativity

The delegitimation of one's sense of what is important gives rise to a special case of the ritualization of work--the loss of creativity. Schein (1983) describes the condition of "conformity" that follows from an insistence by the organization that all of its norms be accepted as being equally important. Under that condition, the individual "can tune in so completely on what he sees to be the way others are handling themselves that he becomes a carbon-copy and sometimes a caricature of them." Consequently, Schein notes: "The conforming individual curbs his creativity and thereby moves the organization toward a sterile form of bureaucracy" (1980).
The lack of creativity, since it is a lack of something, cannot be positively demonstrated. As an experience, it makes itself known as a feeling of missing something different that has not occurred, even though one does not know what the different element would have been.

When the devaluation of the individual’s sense of what is important is enforced by organizational power, this can constitute a form of abuse. Emily Bassman writes about the same unmeasurability of something that is lacking:

It should be clear that organizations make unmeasurable sacrifices in productivity and profitability by tolerating employee abuse. What makes the losses unmeasurable is the concept of opportunity costs. One cannot measure something that isn’t there; no one knows how productive a person can be under different circumstances. As Ryan and Oestreich (Ryan and Oestreich 1991) point out, in organizations where fear is prevalent, the organization generally will survive and may even be reasonably successful. The important question is, how much more successful could it be? No one can say, because lost opportunities cannot be measured, especially if their possible existence is not even considered. (Bassman 1992)

Schwartz continues about the loss of creativity:

In benign times, one may experience boredom: the consciousness of a sameness, a lack of originality. When circumstances are harsh, partly as a result of the lack of creativity that the organization needed if it was to have adapted, one may simply experience the intractability of the situation….In the hard times, I suspect, one rarely comes to recognize that the ideas that the organization needed in order to have avoided its present hopeless state may have been upon the scene a long time ago. But the individuals who had them might have been passed over for promotion because they were not "team players," or perhaps they were made to feel uncomfortable because they did not fit it in, or maybe they were scapegoated whenever the organization needed a victim. Indeed, ironically, the very ideas that were needed might have been laughed at or ignored because they were not "the way we do things around here." (Schwartz 1990)

Schwartz writes about the horror of a working life where one’s own creative self must be repressed. Further than this, what happens on an individual level when the scapegoating he mentions becomes full-blown workplace mobbing, or on a broader scale when the opportunity costs happen to encompass major unmet societal needs? Who else out there is asking these kinds of questions?

Breaker of horses

The following is excerpted from David Whyte's Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity.

A NEW LANGUAGE, A NEW WORLD
The inherited language of the corporate workplace is far too small for us now. It has too little poetry, too little humanity, and too little good business sense for the world that lies before us. We only have to look at the most important word in the lexicon of the present workplace--manager--to understand its inherent weakness. Manager is derived from the old Italian and French words maneggio and manege, meaning the training, handling and riding of a horse. It is strange to think that the whole spirit of management is derived from the image of getting on the back of a beast, digging your knees in, and heading it in a certain direction. The word manager conjures images of domination, command, and ultimate control, and the taming of a potentially wild energy. It also implies a basic unwillingness on the part of the people to be managed, a force to be corralled and reined in. All appropriate things if you wish to ride a horse, but most people don't respond very passionately or very creatively to being ridden, and the words giddy up there only go so far in creating the kind of responsive participation we now look for.

Sometime over the next fifty years or so, the word manager will disappear from our understanding of leadership, and thankfully so. Another word will emerge, more alive with possibility, more helpful, hopefully not decided upon by a committee, which will describe the new role of leadership now emerging. An image of leadership which embraces the attentive, open-minded, conversationally based, people-minded person who has not given up on her intellect and can still act and act quickly when needed. Much of the wisdom needed to create these new roles, lies not in our empirical, strategic disciplines but in our artistic traditions. It is the artist in each of us we must now encourage into the world...[1]