Stage 3 – Sense making – Bullying and Incivility

Stage 2 was about gathering people’s lived experience of work. Inevitably the very behaviours under scrutiny will continue. Stage 3 is the watershed. People are invited by the senior leadership into a sense-making conversation, based on the data from the individual conversations and any relevant informal conversations triggered by the investigation. At the same time, the senior leadership will begin to model different ways of interrupting any behaviours that risk silencing people during these conversations

This sense-making needs to take place in the context of the literature on the effects of bullying and incivility (see my notes on ‘How we talk matters’). People will need to be briefed into this, building on what has been communicated by the senior team in stage 2. This briefing aims to test the idea that the roles of bully, victim and bystander are not as fixed as people may assume. That poor behaviours can be understood as evidence of problematic organisational business being done. Trying to work out what this business is, can reduce the pressure on people to bully and stay silent.

This testing and development of theory requires the senior people to lead the process. To enable people in the hierarchy to talk to each other and with the senior team. To make it possible for difficult things to be spoken, heard and understood. For the inevitable miscommunications, fumbles and uncertainty to be tolerated and explored. A way of describing this capability is the capacity for humble inquiry:

This form of asking shows interest in the other person signals a willingness to listen, and, thereby, temporarily empowers the other person. It implies a kind of Here-and-now Humility… (Schein, 2013, p.10)¹.

Stage 3 is the leadership’s public declaration that something is not right; and while it is not yet clear what will improve things, it is going to talk to people to find out. The only way to do this is to ask. That progress to improve how we talk to each other will come from this shared learning. The sort of learning that explicitly questions the deeper assumptions that frame how people think and act. A process of learning where thinking about what is being avoided and silenced is integral to being a learned professional

The senior leadership has to hold its nerve. Hold the uncertainty, to allow new ways of thinking to emerge and not tell people what to think. The uncertainty is evidence of being on track².

Notes

^[1] Schein, E. (2013) Humble inquiry – the gentle art of asking instead of telling. San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler.

^[2] See: Argyris, A.  (2000) Flawed advice and the management trap.  Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Argyris, C. 1991. ‘Teaching smart people to learn’.  Harvard Business Review.  vol. 69(3), no. May – June, pp. 99-109.
Argyris, C. 1986. ‘Skilled incompetence’.  Harvard Business Review.  vol. 64(5), no. September – October, pp. 74-79

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