Listening with One Ear

Key Points

      Metaphors are terrific change agents

      There are multiple realities all of which have meaning to someone.

      Your truth is no more reliable than anyone else’s

      Multiple truths can create all sorts of dysfunction

      It is important to listen with one ear

If you can stay awake for the first 20 minutes of the movie, Life of Pi, it morphs into an interesting film. Mind you, it could do with a shot of adrenalin from time to time to keep the heart going but it gets to its destination in the end. The book of the same name is beautifully written. Because of that it much more captivating. Books seem to get lost in translation to a movie, given they have to fit the story into the attention span of the average moviegoer. It’s such a passive medium compared to how a book massages your mind: makes you work.

But this blog is not dedicated to critiquing movies. Mind you, I’ve always wanted to be a restaurant, book, movie or travel critic and it’s nice to indulge myself. There is a language and a style that critics can use that would be seen as socially unacceptable in most civilised circles: or at least get you a bleeding lip down at the local pub. It is a style that is suggestive and with more reading between the lines than a treasurer’s budget speech. It is fun to play with words, language and see what you can do with it.

Without going into too much detail, a young boy, Pi, gets shipwrecked and survives in an open boat for 227 days. During the investigation of the sinking of the ship he tells his story of initially escaping the ship with a Bengal tiger, a zebra, a hyena and an orang-utan. The zebra has a broken leg and is eventually eaten, the hyena kills the orange-tan, and the tiger kills and eats the hyena. In the end only Pi and the tiger survive, as he finds ways not to be eaten by the tiger. Needless to say he learns lots of things about himself during his adventure. The tiger eventually wonders off into the jungle when they finally hit land. The investigators don’t like this story. So he tells another where he escapes with his mother, the cook and a sailor with a broken leg. He tells how the cook kills his mother and the sailor, and that he eventually kills the cook. Clearly the characters and animals are interchangeable in the two stories: Cook-hyena; orange-tan-mother; sailor-zebra; tiger-Pi himself.

For me, there are two dimensions to this story, other than the obvious one of learning about yourself when confronted with adversity. The first is the wonder of metaphors and how we can learn so much from them. I was disappointed that the metaphor was explained in the movie by a dorky journalist. For me, metaphors should not be explained but left to the listener to make sense of. I use metaphors all the time to help people change their behaviour and they are immensely powerful. Metaphors contain embedded messages and the listener can decide whether or not they want to accept it or not. Because it is indirect the receiver doesn’t have to use any of the defence mechanisms to protect themselves, as people do when they are told something they don’t want to hear. It is up to them and is often effective in getting people to think differently. Choosing the right metaphor or sets of metaphors is important-I have a collection of them, stories, kids stories and so on. Stories don’t have to be true although they must not be about you, but about a third person removed that you ‘knew’. Perhaps this is worth a blog on its own-let me know if you’re interested.

The second dimension is that reality is in the eye of the beholder and we interpret it in myriad ways. I cannot tell you the number of times that I have had people tell completely different versions of events about their relationship, their experience in the workplace or whatever the situation is. Their stories can be so different you would be forgiven for thinking the players were even in the same universe let alone the same few feet.

This is brought into start reality when it comes to conflict involving relationship breakdown such as in a marriage or in a workplace, or in workers’ compensation cases between employee and employee, for example.

When I started out as a nurse, fairly young and naïve, it was rather easy to get caught up in the world of the client to whom you are listening. You are their carer, they are your client and there is an obligation to advocate for them. We become caught up in their reality. Studying psychology and also some rather sobering experiences taught me some valuable lessons.

I was horrified when I discovered that a partner or another relative could give a completely different set of experiences from my client. In later years I have come to expect in my work with organisations for several people to have completely different memories of their experience. In fact, these days I’m surprised when there is any agreement at all.

So, I learnt early in my career as a psychologist to listen intently with one ear. The other ear is listening for the other version, the other story or stories, the unspoken. Such is the world of cynicism that psychologists inhabit.

This is not to say that people cannot be trusted. Apart from the small percentage of psychopaths and similar personality disorders most people mean well. We are all narcissistic to a degree, have a tendency to fudge the truth towards our own benefit, need to protect our sometimes fragile egos with all sorts of defence mechanisms, are competitive and rely on beliefs rather than facts. But generally we don’t mean others too much harm except when the chips are down and we are under extreme threat. Humans are also capable of doing really nice things to each other and so called lesser species. Our distortion of reality is not a conscious or a deliberate activity.

 A second, related issue has to do with how the listener chooses to interpret or perceive what another says or does. Inevitably this gets distorted too by the listeners predilections, beliefs, values, and experience. This is a human frailty that the media, advertisers, and spin doctors and use to great effect every day: spinning our experience to their own ends. I spend a lot of time checking what others seem to think it was that I meant or said. Not difficult and worth the effort.

I think this reality issue has reinforced by my obsession with group processes, systems thinking and communities of practice. Therein, we can use ancient tribal concepts of listening to the stories of others and seeing how others interpret them. We can see when our thinking is out of kilter with that of others. In a group we get more effective and rational decision-making, for information sharing, for perspective giving, and for experience sharing.

When you think of it, it’s a wonder we manage to get anything done given we are all seeing the world and what happens in such completely different ways.  

Have fun at work! Get Serious

One of my more irritating behaviours, and I have a few apparently, is to respond to questions about how I am with a big smile, eye contact and, ‘Absolutely Stunning’ or ‘Magnificent’.  The reaction varies a lot but mostly consists of the sort of confusion that one usually tries to create when inducing a trance in hypnosis. When people tell me that they are OK, I implore them to raise the bar, to be stupendous, incredible or sensational. I was in a coffee shop last week and a young woman responded with a huge grin and great gusto to my ‘Absolutely stunning’ with, ‘Well, I’m fantastically wonderful’.  This produced lots of laughs and grins from the assembled addicts, sprinkled with the odd look that seemed to suggest we were on prohibited substances.

A lot of these transactions are with people who are working and who do not, on the face of it, look like they are having a good time. In fact, I’ve often wondered weather or not people put on their serious hat when they walk into their place of work: managers included.

There is a substantial amount of research and plentiful anecdotal accounts to suggest that having fun at work improves productivity, inventiveness, engagement, and the health and well being of workers. Similarly we know that environment is a factor in determining how people feel: a bright airy, cheerful ambience is going to result in far more positive outlook than a dark, dingy and windowless office, for example. Humans are deeply sensitive and unconsciously so to events in the environment such as the behaviour of others both verbal and non-verbal, surroundings, climate, smells, light and so on.

Canny people, great leaders,  know how to influence people out of their awareness by manipulating these elements.

But it seems that work is a serious business as far as I can see. It’s almost irreverent to think of work as something other than serious for some people and one gets strange looks when the mask of seriousness is challenged. A now retired colleague of mine reminded me the other day of his previous habit of doing tapestry when he attended really long meetings. He did this to stop falling asleep and, I suspect, because he got extremely bored with the goings on. Some of these meetings would go all day. You’d think that such an event could lead to some sort of nasty psychosis. About an hour is as long as I can stand in a meeting before I start to get the fidgets. I am an expert at conducting short meetings mostly for my sanity.

You can guess the sort of reaction he got to this novel habit from what was a pretty conservative bunch of university council members. Mind you, he reckons that it was very powerful because when he put down his tapestry to speak all eyes were on him and he had their attention.

Most of you have probably seen the video or at least read articles about the fish market in Seattle appropriately called ‘Fish’. If you haven’t, then have a look, it’s fantastic. One of the themes is about having fun at work and this market have become world famous by doing what they do and entertaining customers and invigorating themselves. They didn’t want to be ordinary.

In fact, who wants to be ordinary? It may, of course, not be a matter of choice. Some people find it hard to have fun. I remember a psychiatrist once telling a patient that she was about to be discharged and she responded that she couldn’t go home because she was much too depressed. The doctor replied that she wouldn’t be happy unless she as depressed. This has stayed with me, I was 19 at the time, and I think there is an element of truth in this. Some people need to be serious, businesslike. Others find it hard to smile, have eye contact, touch, or respond with enthusiasm.

The psychotherapy literature, however, would suggest that you can indeed learn how to have fun in your dealings with the world. If we can teach depressed people to change how they speak, think and present themselves in a more positive way, then it seems likely that we can teach the average person at work. The research on happiness is still in its infancy so the jury is still out on what happiness is and how to achieve it, despite the popular books on the subject. But I’m convinced, as a therapist because I’ve done it countless times, that we can change how people behave and thereby change how they feel about themselves. I have worked with people who have Asperger’s Syndrome and they can be taught the skills associated with interpersonal connectedness, even though it doesn’t come naturally to them.

I think that being able to create a fun workplace is a mandatory capability for managers and, fundamental to being a great if not humane leader.  Make it part of your strategic conversations with your staff and develop, or have your staff, develop some great ways to enhance your workplace, make it cheerful and make it fun. Watch the culture change and people lift.

Incidentally, if you wake up miserable and don’t feel like being cheerful at work today-here’s a tip. Force yourself to sing in the shower, spruce yourself up, dress in clothes that mostly make you feel good, force a smile, and put your shoulders back. Force yourself to smile, make eye contact, and tell everyone around you how great you feel, that life is great and that you are going to have a hell of a day. Repeat as necessary and you will indeed have a great day. Mostly, enjoy yourself and make it your mission to make those around you to have a great day too.

Have fun.

Why Participative Democracy at Work is Not An Easy Concept

The notion of participative democracy in workplaces probably had its origins in the 1950s with the work of Kurt Levin. Since then a fairly formidable literature has developed along with techniques and methods for practitioners that come under the rubric of open systems processes. Many consultants around the globe have used these methods in either strategic planning, organisational development projects, leadership programs and training. Many tertiary education courses on management include at least a passing reference to participative democracy.

The basic tenets of participative democracy have been robustly demonstrated to improve productivity, engagement, creativity, and innovation in organisations. People work better and are happier in democratic workplaces. The idea of transformational leadership has built on democratic principles that include: participation in decision making; effective communication; jointly creating and transmitting a vision; and control over work. Others, such as Daniel Pink, for example, have shown that autonomy, purpose and mastery increase motivation and creativity. All of this is based on a well-established psychological research about what makes people motivated at work.

Despite all the evidence it is still the case that the idea of participative democracy in workplaces has not caught on. The well-documented processes and methods used for organisational change, strategizing and organisational development are rarely used. Consultants sometimes find it hard to sell the idea of very effective open systems processes to managers wanting to improve their organisation. Even when they are shown to work organisations eventually revert to type and fail to continue to use them.

One case history of a university comes to mind. The CEO of this small regional university used a lot of open systems processes to ensure that it differentiated itself from the rest. In doing so it managed to become a leader in both distance education and, more importantly, partnerships with public and private sector organisations. This was at a time when such notions were new, if not alien (as my PhD showed) to higher education institutions. The democratic, open systems approach was driven by a person who was hired for this task: someone who knew how to apply its processes.

When the CEO and his successor, who carried on the strategy at least in part, and the facilitator eventually left the institution quickly changed. It reverted to being like all the other universities in that country and, in doing so became irrelevant in many ways by being like the rest. Sadly the rest were all much bigger and able to do it better. The university was no longer differentiated in the market.

I was chatting to a colleague recently about this and he assured me that the same thing had happened, albeit on a smaller scale with a number of university programs in various institutions. That is, innovation was stifled by a drive towards a universal model and a closed systems rather than an open systems approach.

Recently I have been wondering about why, despite the evidence, despite the obvious value, that open systems and democratic leadership are valuable that the concept(s) have been largely ignored by the mainstream. Critical theorists would argue that it has to do with power and I have some sympathy with this view. As a Darwinist it makes sense that maintaining one’s power is fundamental to survival of one’s genes and to offspring. But I have often thought that there might be something else.

There may be another contributing factor and it is discussed below.

The idea of open systems and participative democracy is fundamentally liberal. It relies on a trust of people, that they are indeed self-motivating given the right circumstances, not just want to do a good job but to excel as a means to self-fulfilment. Liberalism emphasises freedom of choice and democratic principles on the assumption that people will rise to the occasion and contribute to society.

Organisations, with few notable exceptions, are largely conservative in nature: as are their managers. Conservatives have a different view of human nature. Largely it is that people cannot function effectively without direction and need control. For the conservative the decision makers have risen to the top by way of natural selection and need to rule, preferring autocracy over democracy.

Most importantly, recent research seems to suggest that the brains of conservatives and liberals are hard wired differently. Conservatives may have an innate difficulty with change and uncertainty that cause them anxiety. Thus, there is a need to maintain the status quo, to cover all bases, to be cautious and to make sure there is a tight rein on people.

The idea of open systems and democratic processes would be an anathema to the conservative. In fact, even to the liberally minded some open systems processes can seem anarchic, at least at the beginning. In most of the processes the manager is treated as just a member of the group, whose opinions are given the same status as everyone else. Handing over power to the masses is not an easy thing to do, even when the benefits are understood.

As I’ve mentioned previously, humans are more prone to acting on what they believe and on the basis of their personality characteristics no matter what the facts or evidence might be.

So, it would seem that the attempt towards healthier and more productive workplaces is going to be a bit of a struggle. I guess all we can do is keep on accumulating the evidence and keep on talking about it. Mostly I try to incorporate the principles when I get to work with organisations despite CEOs mostly wanting simple solutions that will probably not produce great outcomes.

Coeur de Lion: Courage

We've all seen the classic image of the ostrich with legs splayed apart, it’s bum up I the air and its head in the sand. If you get close to rabbits they will, more often than not, just sit still and hope that if they don’t move then you won’t see them. Now, as supposedly the most intelligent of primates and hence, all species on Earth, we recognise the silliness of this behaviour. We know that the strategy is ineffective and despite what the ostrich and the rabbit are doing there are potentially very negative consequences that neither have anticipated: much better to pretend that the threat will go away. I leave your imagination to construct what those consequences might be.

If you dig into your experience just a little you’ll recognise that the most intelligent of the primates also engages in this sort of behaviour in almost plague proportions. We are experts at ignoring the evidence that is before us, being oblivious to warning signs, act on emotion rather than fact, ignore the science and go with belief, and largely keep on doing what obviously does not work. We are especially brilliant at doing more of what doesn’t work in strange belief that somehow things will change. It’s a bit like how when we are talking to someone in a foreign country who doesn’t understand our language (often English) that shouting our request louder will somehow make them understand.

So, for example: we ignore the signs of a failing relationship and carry on doing the same things that are putting in jeopardy; our addictive behaviour is causing health, financial and relationship problems but we keep on engaging in the behaviour; we are being bullied and keep on going back for more; we know a decision is flawed but don’t speak up; the climate is warming but we fail to take action; and the pressure is rising to dangerous levels in the undersea oil drilling well but nothing is said because the decision to stop drilling would be unpopular. And so on.

The most important thing about the all the examples of head in the sand phenomena above, and all others that I can think of, is that the consequences of not acting end up being more severe than if we had done something earlier: no matter how uncomfortable it may have been. While there are ways in which we keep riding the dead horse even though clearly it is time to dismount (old North Indian American saying apparently), I want to focus here on organisations and leadership, or lack of it but I’m sure you can extrapolate to other areas of life.

Head in the sand phenomena fall into two categories. There are those where we know fully consciously what the problem is and what we are doing. We know that the situation is unhealthy, dangerous, or causing difficulties but we decide not to do anything about it. Mostly this occurs out of fear: that the consequences for us personally are too great. Sometimes it is lack of interest or engagement so that the person just doesn’t care: ‘it’s not my problem’.

My guess is that you’ve seen this happen in your place of work or may have responded this way yourself. Both fear and lack of engagement are common phenomena in organisations and can be avoided by good leadership. There is absolutely no reason why cultures of fear and disengagement need to exist. Sadly their consequences are far reaching. One of the problems with being a CEO, a government minister, or potentate is that they often don’t know what’s really happening in their organisation. Underlings, advisors and others are know to shield the boss from bad news, to not ask the difficult question, to not tell it the way it is, because of the fear of consequences. And it is the boss’ behaviour that is at the heart of this problem. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico can be sheeted back to a culture where productivity was valued above safety and where bad news was not received well.

Humans mostly don’t like conflict. Consequently, we avoid those difficult conversations, taking on the bully, telling the manager what she doesn’t want to know, and ignoring the evidence to ensure a peaceful life. We also avoid speaking up because we don’t want to be unpopular. Being part of the tribe is important to survival and being ostracised is a frightening prospect: we like to be liked. I think we need to train children at an early age to manage both these issues better and also to be more open to receiving news that we may not want to hear.

I’ve worked, as a consultant, with quite a number of organisations where people are unhappy, there is a high turnover of staff, things are not going well, there is low engagement of staff and productivity is poor. I get asked to come in and solve the problem. Sometimes this happens because a new manager has arrived and recognises the problem and wants help to fix it-which is the best kind of assignment. On other occasions it becomes clear that the problem is actually the boss and the culture that has developed due to poor leadership. This is the more tricky and sometimes impossible assignment because how do you tell a boss that they are stuffing things up without the obvious repercussions. The conspiracy of silence rules in organisations in the same way it can rule in a family with an abusive parent.

The other category of head in the sand phenomena is what is known as denial. Here we unconsciously put the problem aside because it is just too scary to think about or just too hard to manage. It makes good sense to do this but is every bit as problematic as the conscious variety of burying one’s head in the sand: it’s just a bit harder to confront at times.

The way to avoid the head in the sand culture is entirely in the hands of the leaders of the organisation through the well-known application of transformational leadership. That is, creating a culture where people have the coeur de lion (the heart of the lion), the courage to speak up, to say the difficult things. This means developing trusting relationships, fully involving people in decision-making, high participation, enabling autonomy, creating a sense of real purpose, ensuring intrinsic rewards, and developing openness. These are the conditions that create a healthy workplace, a healthy tribe as compared to the neurotic organisation in which fear, distrust, negativity and lack of engagement rule: where avoidance is the result.

We need to have the courage to say it the way it is and the courage to listen to what we don’t want to hear. These are not easy things to do but courageous leadership can enable them.

Being Depleted

Imagine you are in a US gaol and seeking parole. What would be your plea to your lawyer? What would you want him or her to present to the parole board that would get you out of your prison garb and into some comfy jeans and clean shirt?

Well, the answer to this is not a matter of what but a matter of when. A really neat study showed that you are more likely to get your parole request approved if the hearing is held first thing in the morning or immediately after lunch. Outside of those times you may be out of luck.

This and some other intriguing research suggests that we feel more positively inclined towards the world when we are less stressed, less tired or as Dan Ariely puts it, less depleted. Later in the morning and in the afternoon the research suggests that the learned judges are tired and probably low on sugar: depleted. Depletion also seems to be associated with worse decision-making and generally diminished cognitive performance, general grumpiness and a less than positive affect.

Recent neurophysiological research has confirmed the long held belief by philosophers and other students of human behaviour that emotions play an enormous role in decision-making and other cognitive activities. We are not as rational as we thought, in fact that we are barely rational at all, but are more the victims of our emotional needs, and predilections than we like to think: gut feelings trump facts. This is all due to a small part of the brain called the amygdala that is the seat of our emotions. It is not only close to the part of our cortex responsible for higher cognitive functions, such as judgement and decision-making, but it has a lot of connecting nerve cells with this area too. At a quite unconscious level it influences the information to which we pay attention, how we appraise the information, and what we decide to do in response.

When we are depleted we are even more influenced by raw emotion, as our overloaded or tired nervous system becomes even less able to attend to the facts, the details, the rational. Our biases and preferences and previous emotional experiences, are more likely to hold sway against the facts as our amygdala runs unchecked. The opinion of the person we dislike and those that we admire or respect will hold even less or even more weight depending on to whom we are listening. Politicians know this only too well, that how what one says is received is hugely influenced by how people feel about us, or our party: the truth is largely irrelevant.

Most of us probably at least intuitively knew about how depletion, fatigue and stress affect what we decide and how we act. But I’m not convinced that many of use actually take it into account and self-regulate. Self-regulation is the capacity to be aware of our current state and to take it into account before acting. It has been a key feature of a number of psychological treatments in Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy for many years. Self-regulation is also found in the organisational psychology literature about the reflective practitioner (see Chris Argyris and Donald Schon, for example).

The key to self-regulating is having a more acute awareness of self-a tricky thing at the best of times but we can get better at it even though understanding ourselves is so difficult. When we know we are depleted then perhaps we postpone important decisions, don’t have that challenging conversation at that time, become more participative and ask for other opinions, and do mundane rather than important tasks. In other words, save the important things for early in the morning or early in the afternoon so that we don’t send someone to the firing squad by mistake just because our blood glucose is low!

An Inconvenient Belief

I have just been listening to a boffin on a science program on the ABC. The scientist was talking about how they could work out long past climate activities in Queensland by looking at salt deposits in layers of ice in the Antarctic. Apparently, an El Nino effect causes increased rain in Queensland and in turn reduces salt in the air in the Antarctic and, hence, less salt being deposited on the surface of the ice. This is yet another example of the mind numbing complexity of phenomena that has long been described in complexity theory.

One of our many human foibles is that we like simple explanations for events. Humans are really good at inventing quite sophisticated mystical reasons for phenomena if an immediate physical cause cannot be identified. Even science has been guilty for rather simplistic linear thinking. And it is in explaining social phenomena that we take this short cuts taking in our data gathering, thinking and analysis to an extreme.

We are hard wired to make quick assumptions based on limited data. And this makes sense from a biological and survival point of view. It saves on processing power and avoids the risk of overloading busy and somewhat limited iconic and short-term memory systems. We increase our chances of survival by not spending too much time focussed on one object and missing critical elements in the environment. You can see this working in a cocktail party where we will pick up a mention of our name on the other side of the room in a hubbub of noise while we are engaged in conversation with another group. Our perception systems are based on the ability to make wholes out of small amounts of data. When we look around a room we only take in a limited amount of information visually: our brain makes up the rest.

There is growing neurological evidence demonstrating that the way in which we make judgements and decisions is less rational than we like to think and is enormously complex. Decision-making is fraught precisely because of the way in which we draw on emotion and previous experience that generate preference, rather than examining the facts with any conviction. Stereotyping, racial bias, and misogyny are classic negative examples of this phenomenon. A convenient belief will trump facts any time.

Leaders are no less prone to these basic human traits. The different might be that the impact of poor judgements and decision-making might be greater than for others. Let me give a couple of examples. Our previous experience and preferences can affect our choice of leadership style that might be quite ineffective but we ignore what research might tell us about leadership effectiveness and carry on regardless. The same can be said for the way in which participative process is often ignored in organisations despite the fact that it leads to better outcomes. Leaders are great at locking onto a fad or a sharp talking consultant with a cookie-cutter solution to all problems. They eschew the evidence that demonstrates that all solutions need to be custom made to acknowledge the hopeless complexity of nearly everything.

Leaders inevitably make judgements about people. Our personal preferences can make or ruin a career, and diminish or enhance team or organisational effectiveness. We can surround ourselves with people who make us feel comfortable or we can hire people who are innovative, challenge our beliefs and judgements, and who bring diversity to decision-making.

Effective leaders recognise the hopeless complexity of the social (and physical) world and the limitations of their brain that seeks simple explanations and quick solutions based on immediate perception. What they do is to use processes to try to counter this propensity. They do research, use participative process, and seek out naysayers and people who naturally challenge. They seek to recognise the emotional reasons for their decisions and judgements.

No easy task but better leadership.

Is that an elephant that I see?

Elephants are big people. In fact, you would not want one to sit on your sandwich.  You would think an elephant is too big to ignore. But there are zillions of elephants, everywhere you look, but we pretend they’re not there: it’s the elephant in the room phenomenon.

In families, elephants in the room range from the worst kind, such as family incest, to the more harmless (except to her) cupboard drinking of Aunt Mildred.  Everyone knows what is happening, in the case of incest it may even be the mother, but often no-one speaks up or takes action. Humans are even reluctant to say anything about relatively small matters such as offensive or antisocial behaviour, being let down by a friend or that what someone is doing might in fact be a poor choice: what I call the ‘zit on the nose’ phenomenon. We just don’t like to tell people bad things.

It takes courage to act. Largely, humans dislike conflict mainly because it creates a huge amount of anxiety, which is extremely uncomfortable and to be avoided at all costs. There is also the fall out that might involve fractured relationships, being disliked and rejection. We like to be liked or as Albert Ellis says, we are love slobs. Better to remain in the inner circle with a nasty secret that being a pariah and morally or ethically intact. After all, it is family.

Elephants love living in organisations too where they are ignored with an even greater intensity than in families. You’d think it was the other way around given the emotional factor in a family setting but it is likely that there are huge emotional investments in the organisations in which we work and play.

Again, there is a huge range when it comes to severity and impact. There are organisations in which there is institutionalised corruption and bullying, for example, that goes on unchecked. In some cases the organisations acknowledge that there is a problem, such as paedophilia in the Catholic Church and bullying in the Australian defence forces, but still nothing is done. Its as if the elephant has been let out in the garden for feeding time.

Poor behaviour is one of the more common elephants in the room. Here I am not referring to poor performance, which often gets picked up at performance review time but to what amounts to anti-social behaviour. Every organisation or organisational unit has at least one person who behaves in ways that causes reactions from mild irritation to motional catharsis.

This is an even bigger problem when the person is a manager. You might find, for example, a very senior person is a dreadful bully but he is allowed to get away with it. The result is a culture of bullying that runs right through the organisation. People are, understandably, reluctant to speak up and people who do in fact blow the whistle on high level abuse or corruption do not have a good time if it, as the research on whistle-blowers shows.

We might think that, well, if its not a big thing then let it go. So what if the boss or someone else in the team tells lies, doesn’t keep promises, doesn’t listen, fails to communicate information, gets a little irritated, ignores people, is not a team player or is just plain rude. It doesn’t matter.

Well, it does, Employee engagement is a critical factor in job satisfaction and, we know that both these effect performance. Employees can easily become disengaged by elephants in the room. They sap motivation, destroy loyalty, disintegrate faith and hope, distinguish innovation and create a culture of mistrust. Elephants in teams can completely undermine effectiveness.

When we let someone get away with poor behaviour we being a co-dependent. We are implicitly saying that all is fine, that we approve and the behaviour will continue. And we’ll complain: a co-dependent victim.

All it takes is courage.