Sep 11 07
Art Bell - You Can’t Talk To Me That Way
We’re happy to once again welcome Art Bell to More Than Talk. On this program he joins us to briefly talk about another book he’s written, You Can’t Talk To Me That Way: Stopping Toxic Language in the Workplace. (Total Running Time 8:22)
Full transcript after the jump
Renn Vara: Art Bell is back and he’s written a book called “You Can’t Talk To Me That Way: Stopping Toxic Language in the Workplace”. Art, welcome back.
Art Bell: Thanks Renn.
Renn Vara: First of all, I thought we all had been taught by our mothers and fathers that you can’t talk to people that way. But I guess that’s not true.
Art Bell: Well, experience would bear it out. 62% of US postal employees say that within the last year they were sworn at either by their supervisor or by their co-worker at work. This is in a major survey out of the University of North Carolina. And I think most of us recognize that in the workplace the tradition of, as Fortune Magazine would say, the ten toughest bosses in America, that tradition of the butt-kicking boss who can say what he or she damn well wants to employees, that’s still out there in America. Less so than in Europe, probably.
Renn Vara: Like a Donald Trump.
Art Bell: Exactly.
Renn Vara: And that show and all that. Now, I must tell you, that watching him on there, even though it’s tough talk, it’s not demeaning tough talk. Is there a difference here between tough talk and then being demeaning or tearing down your people?
Art Bell: I think everyone of us recognizes when someone is criticizing our job performance, which is perfectly legitimate, as opposed to trying to destroy who we are, that is to say cutting deep to depth of character that’s going to hurt us.
I’ll give you a quick example. Even though it didn’t involve swear words, an employer, with some regularity, referred to one of the physically larger women in his employ as a “pathetic cow”. Well, “pathetic cow” doesn’t cut to performance, it doesn’t cut to anything that she does on the job. What it does is try to destroy the core of who that woman holds herself up to be in front of others in the organization.
And that’s the level of verbal abuse that the book is addressed to and many companies are acting on, partly for legal protection, frankly, and also partly out of moral grounds that people shouldn’t be treated that way.
Renn Vara: Yeah. I would think, particularly in the American culture, and I’m sure this is spreading thoughout the world, but the legal side of this has got to be prohibitively expensive.
Art Bell: Increasingly so. There’s not a company that you can walk into in the United States that doesn’t know well what happens when sexual harassment suits get started. That all occurred because we have under EEOC entitled “Seven Law Protected Groups” that have special protection in federal law against a hostile work environment. The phrase “verbal abuse” is the new kid on the block coming after sexual harassment.
Companies are recognizing that in the same way that you can’t create a hostile work environment by criticizing or teasing someone’s sexuality, neither can you attack the core of who they are in a severe and pervasive way. Those are the legal words for it, “severe and pervasive way”. You can’t attack the nature of their being, their personhood, if you will, in the workplace unless you want to pay their salary for the next ten years with a promotion probably involved.
Renn Vara: That could be a welcoming thing then for the employee. Yell at me please.
Art Bell: Exactly. More and more lawyers are looking at this as an area of litigation that they’re stepping forward to be the point person on.
Renn Vara: The bottom line, this is obviously bad for business. It’s bad for the work environment. You gave some extreme examples there, but it seems to me that there’s also the subtlety here of talking people down or managers responding in a demeaning way.
Art Bell: That’s right. And that’s why you haven’t seen a lot of this in Court TV. It can be subtle. It does involve sarcasm. Sometimes it involves silence, where the boss walks by and all he does is kicks your ash can against the wall and lets you know in a thousand ways that you’re not cutting it around here but he won’t tell you why. All he’s going to do is embarrass you in front of other people.
But you know, proving that in a court of law has been difficult historically. More and more, as this issue comes to the fore and companies train against it and train managers not to do it and so forth, the issues have been clarified. But in terms of who really gets hurt, I think the knife cuts both ways.
Yes, employees often quit over these kinds of issues, “I won’t be treated that way.” In fact, the most common reason people quit their jobs has nothing to do with money. It’s, “I couldn’t get along with my boss” or “I couldn’t get along with co-workers.” So, good people do leave the area of their talent and the area of their employment.
But the other part of it that we don’t look at enough is when a boss comes to work feeling like, “I’ve got to be tough. In fact, I’ve got to be a little tougher than I was yesterday. And tomorrow I’d better turn it on a bit more because you have to keep driving with anger these employees who I look at as lazy.” You know, those people get destroyed quickly.
The Dartmouth Hart study pointed out that anger is the prime component specially among American males that are causing these 48, 50 year olds to drop dead of heart attacks. So if we’re looking at long term productivity and what’s best for the workplace, keeping bosses healthy and keeping employees doing what they do best, those are both goals that we can pursue by nixing this whole thing of toxic language in the workplace.
Renn Vara: But we have a challenge here. The culture, if you look at movies, TV shows throughout history and books that have been written, the outstanding, successful boss is the hard-ass who comes in and kicks trash cans and kicks butt.
Art Bell: Yes, and that’s a uniquely American phenomena that we’ve got to be a little embarassed about as we look abroad to the European Union and recognize that every company in the European Union has pages of rules against bullying in the workplace. Most cities in Europe have civil law against bullying in any kind of public context.
We’ve been slow on that probably because of a little bit of our John Wayne tradition, if you will, and it’s backfiring on us. I would prefer not to be managed by an angry parent figure in any job that I would take. And I think most of us would make that choice. But if you and I sit here and say, “Well, of course! Who wants that in their professional life?” I think we also have to recognize most of people don’t want it.
Renn Vara: Right. But then what do you do with folks who believe that managing is kind of like being a parent to children? Do they need to change their mind?
Art Bell: I think you handle it the same way that American business successfully, over a period of a decade, handled sexual harassment with remarkable success. First of all, you address the moral issue and you say, “Even if it didn’t cost us a dime in terms of productivity, this is bottom-line wrong. This should not happen in the workplace.” You attach that same kind of moral stigma to verbal abuse.
We’re not talking here about the boss that says “Damn!” or “Hell!” This is not Sunday school. We’re talking about the purposeful destruction of another person’s being by what you say to them in the work context, so these are serious moral issues. Then you go on to the kind of training system, sanctions within the workplace. We have a wonderful model in sexual harassment. You follow the same guidelines and drive it out of the workplace.
The issue that you raised about parenthood, now that’s really important because I think a lot of people practice a form of verbal abuse in their home life. Perhaps in the way that they talk to their teenagers, or I’m just making this up since I have a teenager, and of course, none of this might apply to me.
[Laughter]
Art Bell: But things we occasionally say to our kids, we translate that into the workplace. We don’t make the bridge between eight o’clock in the morning and at 8:15 when we arrive at work, and we start turning on some of the same ‘parenting techniques’. Being a manager is not being a parent, and as quickly that you figure that out, the better off you are.
Renn Vara: Very good point. The name of the book is “You Can’t Talk To Me That Way: Stopping Toxic Language in the Workplace”, and the author is Art Bell. Thanks Art.
Art Bell: Thanks Renn.
