“I Feel Like We’ve Been Stuck In An Insane Asylum For Years With Our Faces Pressed Against The Windows Begging For Help…”

Two members of the C-Suite, the Senior VP, HR, and Chief Marketing Officer, hosted a “Get to Know One Another” lunch for ten of the company’s newest employees. After everyone had settled into their chairs, the CMO said, “Just as a fun way to learn a little about each other, let’s go around the table and have everyone name a famous person who they find attractive. Oh, and if you’re a man the celebrity you pick needs to be a woman; if you’re a woman they need to be a man.”

 The Senior VP, HR, raised no objection. After one of the women made searing eye contact with the CMO while naming Lady Gaga, and then one of the men did the same while naming Jonathan Bailey, the CMO abruptly suggested that they all “dig in and enjoy lunch.”

At another company, four female employees, one of whom was a senior VP, and a fifth employee who was male arrived at the hotel where they’d be attending a professional conference the following morning. After dining together, they retired to their rooms. The male employee discovered that a box had been delivered to his room. Inside was a cake shaped like a vagina. There was no note accompanying the cake. He called his wife thinking this may possibly be a joke that she was in on. She was just as baffled as he was. He took the cake to the hotel’s front desk, where he explained that it had been sent to his room in error.

As previously planned, the following morning the team met for breakfast in one of the hotel’s small conference rooms. There on the table sat the vagina cake. Two of the women in the group roared with laughter along with the senior VP as she explained, “The gag was from me! I didn’t want you to feel lonely last night.” The man tried to laugh along with them.

One of the women, the person who later shared this story with me, objected to the “gag,” protesting that it could be considered sexual harassment. After the conference was over, she reported what had happened to her HR consultant. The HR consultant later told her in confidence that when she had brought this matter to her boss, a senior HR leader and a close friend of the “prankster,” he had told her to “lighten up.” The complaint died there, as did the HR consultant’s career at the company. She was terminated a week after bringing this complaint forward.

At a third company, I was contracted to facilitate “post-trauma sessions” with a leadership team whose VP, the head of a corporate function, had left the company days earlier. “I feel like we’ve been stuck in an insane asylum for years with our faces pressed against the windows begging for help, and by that, I mean writing all about Joanne’s craziness in our annual employee experience surveys,” said one employee, “and yet nobody came to help us until now, after she’s gone.” Others in the group nodded and applauded. This senior leader had inflicted upon her employees many destructive behaviors. She probed her team members for personal information, reveled in gossip, made no secret of who her current favorites were (and these favorites changed constantly), and pit employees against one another. She concocted disparaging nicknames for some team members and others who worked outside her department, swearing her employees to secrecy regarding the latter.

Her vanity was legendary; her hunger for flattery, insatiable. She was immensely proud of her large breasts and wore tops accentuating them. At meetings she would puff her chest out over the conference table. Picking up on the cue, one of the male employees would say, “The girls look very well today!” or “How are they doing today?” Joanne would beam and reply, “Thanks, they are very well indeed!”

Why is it that some workplace leaders including many at the highest levels, behave in ways that most adults would never want a leader to behave? Why do some HR professionals and these errant leaders’ own more senior leaders and/or board members let them get away with it? I’ll share some thoughts on this below. Each of the points I introduce here will receive further mention in later posts. I invite you to write me with your thoughts and stories about leaders behaving badly.

·         Many first-time leaders applied for their new role because it was the next promotion in sight. They were competent individual contributors of one sort or another (nurses, insurance underwriters, data science professionals, or what have you) and sought career advancement. They may not have considered that leadership requires a set of skills and aptitudes all its own, or they may have imagined that they would pick up the necessary skills as they went along.

·         The people who hire these first-time leaders often choose them because the applicants are competent in their current roles and sometimes because they come highly recommended by people the hiring managers’ respect. Too frequently, however, hiring managers don’t adequately assess a candidate for the aptitude, temperament, and skills that identify leadership potential.

·         Skills essential to good leadership have long been termed “soft skills,” and thus assigned less significance that technical skills. These so-called soft skills should more aptly be termed bedrock or fundamental skills. They are essential for constructive human-to-human interaction, which provides the foundation for organizational success.

·         Once in place, first-time leaders do the best they can with whatever leadership skills they may bring with them. There is typically little or nothing required of them in terms of leadership training. Every leader up and down the organization’s levels may similarly be doing the best that they can, with some having developed great leadership skills and others, well, reference the above.

·         The most thoughtful first-time leaders, those who recognize their need for training, may also fear that asking for such training within the organization may be interpreted by their supervisor as a confession of incompetence or even a sign of weakness. Of course, exactly the opposite is true. Acknowledging the need to enhance one’s skills shows wisdom, as does taking the initiative to participate in learning experiences.  These are important strengths. Such wise first-time leaders often seek leadership training and mentoring outside of their organization.

·         Human beings learn how to fit within a particular setting by imitating others, particularly others who have high status. Leaders become role models. So, in workplaces where competent leaders have risen to high levels, competent leadership may cascade through the ranks. In workplaces where people such as those described in the first paragraphs of this post have risen to high levels, lunacy is likely to cascade through the ranks.

·         Not enough attention is paid to what I call Everyone’s First Performance Expectation: Consistently safe, civil, respectful, and collaborative behavior. If a member of the workforce is not interacting with others in this way, they have a performance problem. Responsible leaders are not only role models for this performance expectation, they also deliver ongoing guidance, performance counseling, and accountability to ensure that all employees meet this first, most basic performance expectation.  

·         Most people seek to avoid conflict. I advise leaders to keep in mind, however, that if one of their team members consistently disregards the first performance expectation--they’re uncivil, disruptive, or even threatening, let’s say--and the leader does not promptly give them corrective guidance along with a promise of consequences for further non-compliance, that team member will almost always escalate their troubling behavior. If you give bad behavior space, the bad behavior will almost inevitably grow to fill the space provided it.

·         Too many people in our workplaces and everywhere else understand power as “power over,” the right to control other people and resources instead of “power with,” the responsibility to facilitate shared success. (See my video on this.) When leaders exercise power as “power over,” we’re too frequently on the path to stories like the ones above.

·         One of HR’s key functions is to protect the interests of the employer by helping to ensure that all employees are treated with fairness and respect. There are many facets of modern workplaces that make this challenging, one being situations such as those described above.

·         HR professionals sometimes support bad behavior from leaders because they prioritize their continued employment over doing what’s right.

Most jobs are stressful enough without employees having to deal with crazy from their supervisors, managers, and senior leaders. It doesn’t have to be this way. Improved candidate selection for leadership roles, ongoing performance management at all organizational levels, and widely available training that teaches “soft skills” as essential skills, are some of what’s sorely needed.

Blowing the Whistle on Workplace Crazy: True stories (with names and other identifiers changed to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent) and commentary from a mental health expert/leadership advisor/retired corporate executive. Crazy=bizarre, unexpected, sometimes darkly humorous.

Send your workplace stories to me at kenddv@gmail.com with the subject line, “Workplace Crazy.” I’ll share (minus identifying details per your instructions) and respond to them here.