Stage 4 – Small actions – Bullying and Incivility

In this stage, the leadership intensifies its work to kindly and firmly intervene on any silencing behaviours from whoever and wherever they emerge. It asks and encourages other people to practice and support this commitment through layers of the organisation/system.

The task of the senior leadership is to build the confidence to disrupt the conditions by which bullying and incivility are tolerated. To build the distributed capacity to act, so that everyone can help to disrupt poor behaviours in every nook and cranny of the organisation. Accepting that bullying and incivility is present in all areas, often out of sight of senior people.

People must test the scope of an experiment with this new level of authorization. As they do so, they need to remain sensitive to any gap between the intention to increase psychological safety and what happens in practice¹. A failure to intervene when people raise incidents of bullying and incivility will damage the credibility of those supporting and leading the project. People may be judged to lack the will to see it through, expecting others to do what they are not yet prepared to do themselves².

It is also the case that to intervene every time is a burden. However senior one is or confident one feels, to disrupt a meeting to ask why people are shouting or swearing, is hard emotional labour. Particularly, if previously one has sat in silence. One may be forgiven if one pauses to wonder if one has read it right and the risk is worth taking.

What can help build confidence is to anchor one’s authority to intervene less in seniority (positional power) and more in a mix of expert and referent power. The sense of authority that comes when you have faced your part in what is going on. The authority that comes from acknowledging one’s sense of complicity, contrition and determination to do something different. The following questions can structure this working through. It is better to have worked this through where one feels safe enough to do so.

How do I/we contribute to the conditions for bullying, incivility and by-standing?³
How do these behaviours play out in our senior group?
Who gains by things just carrying on?
Who and what is silenced?
Does this matter this is the case?
If it does, what would be different and for whom?

These are tough questions and facing them in the senior team can model some important assumptions and behaviours.

We have sometimes unwittingly and sometimes more deliberately, contributed to bullying and the behaviours being used.
Whatever we decide to do, this risk remains, and we need to talk about it as a part of our everyday management conversations.
We need, as a senior team, to demonstrate a reflexive agility. A willingness to go where the difficulties are first; and build our authority to do this by being tough and kind.

The working through of these questions proceeds the senior team’s legitimate expectation that people throughout the organisation will need to do and be the same, inline with their role and seniority.

And sometimes you just have to say stop

Persistent aggressive bullies need to be removed if they are unable to see how they are mobilised to silence people and how their behaviour contributes to a lack of safety. The approach needs to be kind and firm, lest it replicates the tyrannies of the past. Equally, people need to be offered a way back (as in there but for the grace of God go I)⁴. The extent to which senior leaders can acknowledge their own behaviour may help with this work⁵.

Notes

^[1] The belief that the work environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking. The concept refers to the feeling of being able speak up with relevant ideas, questions, or concerns. Psychological safety is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able – even obligated – to be candid.
(Edmondson, 2019, p.8)
Ref: Edmondson, A. (2019) The fearless organisation. New Jersey, Wiley.

^[2] This feedback or judgment needs to be thought about before it is repeated or accepted as ‘truth’. Confronting poor behaviours is hard work. It would not be a surprise if the very thing I am struggling to do is easier to notice in other people. The lack I see in you and then attack may be a clue about what I cannot yet face in myself – my lack of agency and how that makes me feel.

^[3] By-standing is a joint enterprise. Doing nothing is the normal response and it is not neutral. The more people that witness an event, the less likely it is anyone will respond. The lack of response creates a social context of acceptance.
‘[B]efore an individual decides to intervene in an emergency, s/he must implicitly or explicitly take several steps. If s/he is to intervene s/he must first notice the event. s/he must then interpret it as an emergency, and s/he must decide it is [their] personal responsibility to act’ (p.220).
Ref: Latane, B. and Darley, J. (1968) Group inhibition of bystander intervention in emergencies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 10(3) pp. 215-221.

^[4] This is to offer an opportunity for humility. ‘Humble individuals are not self-deprecating: they recognise their strengths, admit their mistakes and weaknesses and assume their role with others in a broader community’ (p.807).
Ref: Nielsen, R. and Marrone, J. (2018) Humility: our current understanding of the construct and its role in organisations. International Journal of Management Reviews, 20, pp.805-824.

^[5] People may engage in acts of incivility and bullying and not know that they are doing is wrong (I am just being clear; we must move quickly, there is no time for niceties; you told me to sort this). Leadership must be alert to a ‘moral inversion’. That is; bullying is convincingly redefined as good and necessary in the face of a threat (external or internal).
Ref: Adams, G., Balfour, D. and Reed, G. (2006) Abu Ghraib, administrative evil, and moral inversion: The value of putting cruelty first. Public Administrative Review, 66, September/October, pp.680-693.

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Trying to find a way to deal with unprofessional behaviours can feel daunting. If you would like to chat to me about how I or my colleagues could help, you can contact me here.