Latest / It’s All Your Fault: High Conflict People / World of Bullies #4: Recognizing and Confronting Bullying Behavior in Leaders
Transcript
- Speaker 1 (00:05): Welcome to, it's All Your Fault On True Story fm, the one and only podcast dedicated to helping you identify and deal with the most challenging human interactions, those involving someone with a high conflict personality. I'm Megan Hunter and I'm here with my co-host, bill Eddie. Speaker 2 (00:22): Hi everybody. Speaker 1 (00:23): We are the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute in San Diego, California where we focus on training, consulting, coaching, and methods and classes, all to do with high conflict. In today's episode, which is episode four of our World of Bullies series, we're going to talk about bullies as leaders in companies or other organizations, and it can be a big corporation all the way to a doctor's office. The first, a couple of notes send your high conflict related questions to podcast@highconflictinstitute.com or on our website@highconflictinstitute.com slash podcast, where you'll also find all the show notes and links. Speaker 1 (01:10): I'm going to say right here at the front because sometimes I forget at the end that we're doing a few bullies webinars in the US fall or the Northern Hemisphere's fall, which will be September, October and November. So Septembers will be on Family Bullies and Families. October will be bullies in at work and November will be bullies in communities. And it's not just talking about bullies all the time. What do we do about them in these different settings? So Bill will be doing those. It's four weeks for each type. So we'll put those links in the show notes and also a link to Bill's new book, our New World of Adult Bullies, which I just got my copy last week. And if you look at the last episode, bill will tell you about the cover. Ah, he has it too. It's very exciting. I love this book and I think of all the 20 plus books you've written, this is my favorite. Speaker 2 (02:11): I spent more time on this. So lemme add that. Three years. Speaker 1 (02:17): Three years, you put a lot of effort into it and a lot of thoughtfulness and I encourage everyone to get it and read it. So let's talk about bullies as leaders. You mentioned that a lot of leaders are born to be kings or queens and their ancient bully personalities just kind of drive them to that. So let's explore that a bit. Speaker 2 (02:41): The thing about the theory that bullies have ancient personalities fits, especially I think when you come to leaders because bullies want to dominate and or destroy. And if you think back thousands of years that bullies, before we had science, before we had history, before we really knew how to do things, we had to yet be strong as communities. We had to get together and humans help each other out. And in order to get us all together, we had to have leaders that we were loyal to. And so there's some characteristics of bully leaders that make sense. If you go back thousands of years before history, before signs, all of that where loyalty to the leader was everything. And the leader had to inspire people. So they would tell stories. There's a terrible crisis, there's an evil villain on the other side of the wall, the castle wall or the other side of the hill, right? Speaker 2 (03:51): And I'm your hero. Follow me and join together, right? Band together, yes, join together. And so bullies in many ways can be inspiring leaders, but they also can be very aggressive in that they focus on destroying other people or other locations. And if you think of human history, human history has gone through many different approaches to life, to the world, whatever. And what seems to happen is that some people win and some people lose. And that over time it seems like better ideas have won. But in many moments, the better ideas get wiped out for a century or two, and then they eventually come back. So if you think of the idea of dominance that were in many ways, like other mammals that have a dominant hierarchy, and the monkey tribe that for two or three years, Oscar is in charge and nobody can beat him in a fight. Speaker 2 (05:03): So he's in charge. And so he's kind of the leader and we kind of follow him and he's supposed to find a good places to get food and all of this stuff, but then they get replaced. There's constant revolutions in all mammal families, it seems, especially primates like monkeys and baboons and all, all our cousins. But we have to overcome that. And in society in the last thousand years, we've really shifted from one dominant personality to a society of rules and laws like constitutions, society of science, where we do know what happens to the sun during any eclipse, that it's not going away. And don't let anyone tell you that and follow them. So bully leaders are kind of driven to be aggressive, to dominate, to get people, to follow them, to lie if they have to gain power. And what was interesting in my book is I found bullies want to be leaders at all different levels of society. Speaker 2 (06:14): So there's bullies in families, like we talked about last week. They want to dominate people. There's bullies in the workplace, there's a supervisor that everybody goes, that's a bully, that's a hard person to work for, but they're really good at something so the company doesn't want to fire them. And then you have the bullies that are the head of the company and maybe even on the verge of destroying a company. I've got some examples of that in the book. So it's a pattern of behavior that's actually relatively predictable if you think of them as ancient personalities. Speaker 1 (06:52): Yeah, I mean it really makes sense. And something that a couple of things popped into my mind. One is a question about lying. Do all bullies lie? Speaker 2 (07:00): Not necessarily. So I see at least three types to some extent. So the narcissistic bully in many ways wants to be the most the leader that probably more narcissistic bullies in leadership roles than anything else, but the antisocial bully who's more happy to destroy people. So they're often the conqueror, the dictator, the okay with wiping out 10,000 people that look different from them. But the borderline bullies, which we see more in families, child abuse, domestic violence, their problem is more a lack of self-control. So they can't stop their anger, they can't stop hitting people close to them, but they're not necessarily big on lying. That's not their problem. The biggest liars are the antisocial, bullies, narcissists, exaggerate, but they all lie more than the average person. And so people have to be aware of that. We're so trusting human beings by nature are trusting and bullies really can manipulate that. Speaker 1 (08:08): So would you ever say to a bully, Hey, you lied to me. Speaker 2 (08:12): You could. I would say don't say, hey, you're a bully, but I think you could say, Hey, you lied to me. That's not true. That could be part of setting limits. They might say it was nothing, just a little something. Or they might say, everybody lies or they'll deny they lied, even though you have total proof of it. Speaker 1 (08:34): Yeah, that's one of the most fascinating to me of anything is just this lying when you know can get caught. It's just mind boggling. Speaker 2 (08:46): But sometimes people stop. I caught somebody in court lying, and I proved to a judge that this person lied. There was something about dates when something was mailed and the liar burst into tears was a woman. And she burst into tears, says, but it's true, it's true. And the judge says, all right, let's move on. And I was like, come on, we caught her lying. She's conning you with her tears. So by the way, bullies can be women too. Speaker 1 (09:17): Absolutely. And you kind of pointed out a really challenging and tricky spot is when other people just allow it to happen, even if they know it's happening because we see it happening. And it can be the most frustrating thing in the world for the person who sees it and knows it and no one else cares. Speaker 2 (09:37): Yeah, that's the bystanders. And whenever you read about bullies, you read about bystanders, certainly childhood bully, there's a lot of bystanders around and they're encouraged to say something, but with adult bullies, people should be encouraged to say something too, Hey, that's enough Joe, or that's enough Jane. Cut it out. You don't have to have a major confrontation, you can just confront that. But imagine in today's world, if everybody called out bullies just a little bit, that would totally intimidate the school of fish Speaker 1 (10:15): And went to the next step of imposing a consequence. And that's the hard part is even if you can get someone to set a limit out loud and perhaps threaten the imposition of a consequence, then really carrying that out is that final step that is absolutely intimidating for most people. I think a majority of people are uncomfortable doing that. Some people have no problem with it, but I think it's scary to some because they're afraid of relationship loss or job loss or financial implications across the board. Speaker 2 (10:51): Yeah. What's interesting with bullies, and you said nonprofits and profit making organizations is, that's one of the big issues. Let's say you're bully is the CEO of the company or the administrator of the nonprofit who's going to stop them Right now? Nonprofits have boards of directors, corporations have boards of directors. And you would think that's one of the reasons for boards of directors. But there's so many cases that I know of and that I read of where people hesitated to set limits on the CEO because they were making money for them or they were in a nonprofit. You're getting recognition, maybe you're head of a hospital that's a nonprofit, but everybody says yours is the best hospital at heart surgery. And so they don't want to just because the best heart surgeon's a bully, they don't want to get rid of them. And so setting limits on the boss, that's a big issue and it keeps coming up. But I want to say bigger organizations tend to be better at this because they have procedures they've established and smaller organizations struggle with it. People are new, maybe no one was trained in management, they don't have a human resource department. Things like that can be harder, but bullies can pop up anywhere as leaders, Speaker 1 (12:30): And like you said, corporations, you're more likely to have good strong human resources departments, good strong policies, handbooks and manuals that are thick as a brick. But I can think of a major he care organization, major hospital, that it's grown so quickly that they can't really keep up. So they mostly, it seems ignore any type of bullying behavior or bad behavior at all. So the employees kind of feel like they're left out to dry, and that just defeats morale. And so let's talk about leaders, bullied leaders in organizations. So let's say you are a manager, you have a supervisor under you who has some employees, you have someone the employees complaining about their direct supervisor to the person over that supervisor. What is that person supposed to do? Who's overall of that? Because what we find a lot is ignoring the problem and these employees just finally leave or they just feel so defeated if they can't leave, don't have other job possibilities. It's very demoralizing and that's not good. And if we are in a hospital setting, who does that impact that impacts patients? If it's in a school, who does it impact students? If it's in a religious organization, who does it impact parishioners? I mean, there's so much impact from one bully and they need this whole school of fish like the positive advocates to come along and help out. So the leaders, how do you as the a leader address someone that's reporting to you? Speaker 2 (14:22): Well, I think the first step is to recognize that there are bullies and to keep your eyes and ears open really. I think in a position of responsibility, you should always be kind of conscious, are there bullies in my organization? Where are they? Because they're in every organization of any size. That's true. So we're small, so we don't have any bullies in our organization, high Conflict Institute. But when you've got about 30 or more people, then you're going to run into the, let's say it's 5% of society. That's one out of 20 people. So anticipate this, and that's the six strategies I put in the book. The first is recognize the pattern. And the problem in so many organizations is that the supervisor of the supervisor is being told wonderful things by the supervisor. Let's say the supervisor, Jane, I use Joe and Jane a lot, and the manager or the division head is Joe and Jane just has Joe figured Jane is wonderful, she's perfect, she's charming, she knows what she's doing, and yet the employees under Jane says she's screams at us. Speaker 2 (15:47): She assigns tasks based on favoritism. She takes time away from the office, but then she won't let us take time away without explanation, stuff like that. And so the person in the division, chief Joe position, tunes that stuff out because they're so impressed with their own relationship with Jane, the manager, that the employees are probably just complaining and it's not that serious. And I hear that story so many times, and one of the things we say, so you say, what do we do? So employees need to explain in detail, and sometimes it's a series of employees, you need to talk to Joe, you need to talk to Joe, you need to talk to Joe. And for some people as a group, they go and talk to the division chief, this manager Jane, is just terrorizing us. And you've got to understand that and get their attention. Speaker 2 (16:55): The one thing to avoid, I think, is setting up a meeting that's a surprise where you get the Joe, the division chief, say, we want a meeting with Jane, the manager and six employees. Because what that turns out to be is a mobbing kind of situation. Surprise attack, surprise attack, which can go either way and will not save the organization and maybe destroy, it'll not go destroy the organization. So what Joe needs to do is hear what's being told and maybe even solicit information, say, tell me more. I want to understand. And a lot of good businesses will regularly get feedback, have people give feedback on how are people doing, how's each other doing, et cetera. So it's built in if negative feedback filters up. But what Joe would then need to do is sit down with Jane and say, Hey, I'm hearing some problems exist here. Speaker 2 (17:56): We need to talk about what can be done, what do you think's going on here? And have a talk rather than ignoring it. Some people have managers solicit information that's part of coaching. And you and I with High Conflict Institute, we really promote coaching and we have several coaches that people really like part of coaching with, say a manager level is having them solicit feedback and then look at what they can change, what they need to change, and that there's an expectation of change, but there's also support for change. It's one of the big messages about bullies that I want to convey is they're not bad people. They don't even really know what they're doing. It's part of their personality. And maybe half of them with some coaching can take off the rough elbows as they call it in the tech industry and improve their communication and problem solving. Maybe half can't and have to leave the organization. And that's the last thing I want to say is if they don't get addressed, the organization's going to lose good people. And that's why organizations really have to do this because they suffer if they don't in the long run. Speaker 1 (19:18): Absolutely. So let's take a quick break and when we come back, we'll keep talking about this a bit and some things people can do. And I also want to talk about something new. We're introducing new ways for work for leaders, so we'll be right back. Speaker 1 (19:42): All right, we are back. So Bill, let's talk about you developed along with georgi, ano a coaching method for helping high conflict or bully employees in the workplace to learn some new skills and so that they can have a productive work environment. And you called it new ways for work, personal skills for productive relationships. It's actually very helpful for people who just aren't aware particularly that they even have these behaviors. And now, so we train the coaches how to coach people in the work environment or outside, whether life coaches, hr, that kind of thing. And very soon we are introducing today, I guess new ways for work for leaders. And so it's a little bit different from coaching employees, but when you're in management, when you're a supervisor, when you're a director, any kind of leader, how do you handle high conflict situations? How do you create an that is bully proofed, right? We'll start this in July, 2024, which is just about a month and a half away. So we'll put that link in the show notes. But how do you see new ways for work applying to or helping leaders manage? Bullies, Speaker 2 (21:04): First of all is really there's a set of skills with all our new ways methods, flexible thinking, managed emotions, moderate behavior, and checking yourself. These fundamentally can help leaders. It's just how they apply them are different when they're the leader instead of an employee who's just dealing with coworkers because they're a role model and they need to really exude openness, interest, empathy. They need to have a lot of contact, they need to have relationships with as many employees as possible. Some of the happiest working groups have leaders that regularly drop in and say hi to people at all different levels. And so that kind of empathy, attention, respect for people playing that out with just little doses, people love that. People absorb that. It's hard, I think to be a real organizational leader in today's world and be super shy. You might be like Warren Buffet apparently is relatively shy, but he is a super big leader and he's always putting his opinions out there. Speaker 2 (22:24): So even if he's communicating with his newsletter, rather than shaking hands on the shop floor, you need to be reaching out a lot. And if you're doing that, then you're also hearing how's it going? So being that open, but also the strategies I was mentioning, six strategies in the book is being aware that there's patterns. You have to be aware. But second is pulling the plug. Is there some way I'm supporting bullies? And leaders have to constantly ask them that, is there some way I'm supporting bullies? Is there something that I'm doing or not doing that needs to address this issue? Because in the workplace, one of the biggest issues for employees and managers is difficult people. And I think it was 2006 that the surveys on the workplace tipped to other workers were the biggest problem rather than schedules pay nature of the task. And even today, I think it's like number two or three, if not number one. For a lot of organizations, Speaker 1 (23:40): People are a problem. Speaker 2 (23:43): And so pull the plug. If you're helping that be a problem, look at your part in it. The third is setting limits. And that's what we've been talking a lot about lately, you and I and our trainings is people don't set limits and organizations especially need to set limits. Say, Hey, that's not okay. This is what we're looking for everybody, but hey, that's not okay. And they need to show that they're addressing problems. So people feel like if there's a problem, I can go to this leader and they will take it seriously. Or Speaker 1 (24:20): The boy may not see such open space to get away with their bullying behavior. I mean, if you know that an organization is going to do something about it, I mean, I think back to school, you kind of kept in line because you didn't want to go to the principal's office because back in our day bill, for me, at least at our school, it meant a paddling with a wooden paddle. And that was the last thing I ever wanted and I never got it. So I guess if you apply it to this, there's no wooden paddles, but a metaphorical wooden paddle be setting limits and being active about it and letting your organization know you are proactive about making sure that things are done right. When it comes to people, Speaker 2 (25:06): You're absolutely right. And I think an important point you're making is if the organization is clear about setting limits and post policies and routinely addresses problem behavior, then bullies will restrain themselves to the extent they can because bullies often are relatively unrestrained. But if their environment is restrained, then they may restrain themselves from making that comment they were going to make and be productive workers, be productive leaders. And the example I love when we talk about leaders is Steve Jobs. I think that his success with iPhones, iPad and all of that was significantly enhanced because he had a good leadership team, a good management team which could rein him in and say, Hey, Steve, we got to go for a walk. He let them reign him in to some extent, even though he yelled at people and burst into tears at meetings and threatened to fire a lot of people when things didn't go his way. But he was kept in check a lot by the management team. And what you're saying is absolutely right is if the upper management has a really strong structure, bullies, even if you have them, aren't going to be bullying. And that's really important. Speaker 1 (26:37): Yeah, it's just kind of putting people on notice and you don't have to be a jerk about it. It's just, here's what we do, here's how we do it. Here's how we treat each other. Here's what we do. Here's what happens if you violate, which is a strong word. Speaker 2 (26:53): That's the next thing though. The imposing of consequences and threatening to impose consequences. If you're someone with a credible reputation is almost as good as imposing the consequences, they know you're going to do it and they back off. And if you don't have consequences, you can set all the limits in the world and people will just roll right over them and roll right over you. So that imposing consequences goes with setting limits. And that's our new acronym is Setting Limits and Imposing Consequences is Slick, SLIC, slick Solutions. And in many ways, that's at the core of what my book is about, setting limits and imposing consequences. And there's story after story where that happened, but there's also story after story where that happened late in the process, and it's too bad it couldn't have happened a lot earlier. And that's another point about organizations is they wait too long to set limits because they don't believe in bullies. Speaker 2 (27:58): They go, well, she'll straighten up, she'll come to her senses, or I told 'em to stop. And with bullies, that's just not enough. They have to know there's a hammer waiting to fall if they keep acting this way. And so the consequences, really what helps bullies is consequences. It's not helpful. And we teach kids this, I'm not helping you if I let you get away with what you just did. So there's a consequence. So you can think about this, you're going to have some time out, and sometimes employees get or need to get a day to think about whether they want to work here. And that's sometimes itself that supervisors are serious enough if they can do that to say, you may not be a good fit for us. We may not be a good fit for you. I'd like you to take a day off and think about this. Because in the long run, people recommit. When they have limits set, they often recommit with more energy because they feel the power of the structure. It's like, I want to be part of that. I want to be part of an organization that sets limits on people like me. Speaker 1 (29:13): Right? Yeah. So I think that's a great way to end this bill, and it's really fascinating, even as you were talking about a manager, a leader walking around shaking hands, saying, Hey, how are you doing? Checking in. And I know for myself as a leader, I got so focused on we're a wholly remote team and have been for however long we've been in existence 17, 18 years, which I think makes it that much harder to stay connected with your team. And I realized even pretty recently that I needed to do walkarounds. I need to do check-ins. I need to, particularly in remote environments, just say, Hey, how are you doing? Have that conversation and focus people management instead of just efficiency and all the tasks and things that have to be done to run a business. That's been hugely empowering for me, and I think probably helpful for our team as well. Speaker 1 (30:10): You and I see each other on our podcast a lot. We have these nice conversations, but all of the people that support us in the wings, I'm making sure now that I touch base with them a lot more, and I think they appreciate it. So anyway, thank you for this. And we'll put all the links to the New Ways for Work for Leaders and New Ways for Work for coaching trainings. The New Ways for Work Leaders Training in July is being offered as a first time rate at 50% off the normal price. So you'll want to sign up for that. Cheryln, Knapp and Bill are the trainers for that course. Bill is prerecorded, and Sherilyn is live eight hours training. So that'll be there. The Bullies book link will be in the notes and all kinds of things. Next week we'll talk about bullies as Neighbors. So in the meantime, send your questions to podcasts@highconflictinstitute.com or send them or submit them on our website@highconflictinstitute.com slash podcast. We'd love it if you tell your friends and colleagues about us. Give us a like thumbs up, leave a review wherever you listen to our podcast. And until next time, keep learning and practicing these skills. Be kind to yourself and others set limits, watch for bullies. They are real. While we all try to find the missing piece and keep the conflict small, Speaker 1 (31:43): It's All Your Fault is a production of True Story FM Engineering by Andy Nelson. Music by Wolf Samuel's, John Coggins and Ziv Moran. Find the show notes and transcripts at True Story fm or high conflict institute.com/podcast. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show.