LITMIR.BIZ

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psychological workings, otherwise known as psychodynamics. My dad didn’t use that term with me—he just got me thinking about why people do what they do. For example: I was probably nine years old, sitting in a car with my dad at a stoplight, observing a disheveled man walking with a strange gait, shouting and waving his hands. ‘‘See that man over there?’’ my father asked. ‘‘He’s probably schizophrenic.’’ I somehow knew that schizophrenia meant mental illness, but I still questioned, ‘‘Couldn’t it be that he just walks funny?’’ I don’t remember my father’s exact response, but in that early interchange I was being taught that behavior has meaning and that with psychological insight one can read the underlying meanings (motivations) of behavior. This man’s behaviors were the external expressions of his internal struggle with psychosis.

These tutorials continued throughout my childhood. I have another memory of our family attending a banquet held for one of my father’s colleagues. When we got home, my father commented that the man was depressed. How could he possibly know that? The man had made no mention of depressing events or depressed feelings. When I challenged my father, he responded with a description of what I would later learn to be vegetative symptoms of depression: ‘‘Well, he’s normally talkative, but he said very little, never smiled, and hardly ate.’’ My father was able to observe and interpret this constellation of behaviors (withdrawal, flat affect, disturbed appetite) as probable indicators of depression. What an education! I was learning by observing my father’s exercise of psychological insight: the practice of reading emotions to understand behavior. Over time I gradually learned to observe behavior and do my best to accurately interpret its significance.

      My education wasn’t always fun. Psychiatrists read behavior, and let me tell you, it can be pretty irritating when you’re the book they’re reading. I remember telephoning my parents during my freshman year at college to nervously declare that I would not be coming home for Christmas vacation, instead planning to go on a car trip with my newfound friends. I remember my father pausing and then announcing, ‘‘What you really mean is that you wish to separate and individuate from your parents.’’ I will be eternally grateful for my mother’s retort: ‘‘Oh, for God’s sake, Ralph. What she really means is that she just wants to be with her friends instead of her boring parents!’’ To this day I bridle whenever I hear the phrase, ‘‘What you really mean is . . . ,’’ but that’s what reading emotion is all about: deciphering the meaning behind our actions. (By the way, both parents were correct in their interpretations.)

My Education Continues

In the last chapter I shared my first encounters with the working wounded as an employee assistance counselor in Alaska. After ten years in that role I was recruited to go Outside (Alaskan slang for the Lower 48) to embark on my next career incarnation: executive in a global managed health care corporation. I rubbed shoulders with a few abrasive bosses (luckily, none of them mine) during those years, without incident—they were focused on others. I eventually left the corporate racetrack to hang out my shingle as a management consultant—I was on the trail to becoming a boss whisperer.

      Over and over again I would be called in by a company to help with a ‘‘communication problem’’ (management’s diagnosis). The typical scenario was of a boss in conflict with his or her subordinates, peers, or superiors. I’d interview the parties on both sides of the conflict, and on closer examination it would become obvious that one party (composed of the coworkers) was behaving reasonably and the other (namely, the boss) wasn’t. More often than not it wasn’t a simple case of differing ideas or objectives. Instead I would discover a chronic pattern of abrasive behavior on the boss’s part that had strained working relationships to the breaking point. Coworkers were well into the defensive modes of fight or flight. They were either fighting the boss through active or passive resistance (‘‘If he thinks I’m going to lift a finger for him after the way he treated me, he’s got a big surprise coming’’) or fleeing through withdrawal (‘‘I can’t deal with her anymore— I avoid her at all costs’’). I was puzzled. Why were these apparently intelligent bosses riding roughshod over their seemingly rational, dedicated coworkers?

      Boss whisperers have a great advantage over horse whisperers in that bosses talk and horses don’t. I wanted to understand what I was seeing, so I started talking to these bosses, carefully phrasing my questions so as not to provoke defensiveness. We psychotherapists are pretty good at concocting gentle questions that explore emotion and behavior—you’ve heard them before: ‘‘And how did that make you feel?’’ or ‘‘And why do you think you reacted that way?’’ By listening very carefully to put myself in their shoes, I was gradually able to see the world through their eyes and gain insight into the emotions that drove their abrasive behavior. I learned a lot, but before I put what I was learning into practice I wanted to compare my findings with others who had studied abrasive bosses.

My research began at the local bookstore, where I had no trouble finding a shelf loaded with books on abrasive bosses. These books bore remarkably similar characteristics, beginning with their melodramatic titles: Jerks at Work (Lloyd, 1999), The Bully at Work (Namie & Namie, 2003), Corporate Hyenas at Work (Marais & Herman, 1997), Crazy Bosses (Bing, 1992), Snakes in Suits (Babiak & Hare, 2006), and Brutal Bosses and Their Prey (Hornstein, 1996), to name a few. Talk about catchy titles! Authors referred variously to their books as combat guides, survival guides, bullybusting strategies, or tyrant-toppling techniques. The books typically consisted of an overview of the problem, followed by the author’s commanding and colorful classification of boss types ranging from A(ssholes) to Z(ombies). Some examples: Certified Asshole (Sutton, 2007); Bully, Paranoid, Narcissist, Bureaucrazy, Disaster Hunter (Bing, 1992); Executioner, Dehumanizer, Blamer, Rationalizer, Conqueror, Manipulator (Hornstein, 1996); Self-Involved Toxic Executive, Toxic Disorganizer, Valueless Toxic Executive (Reed, 1993); Constant Critic, Two-Headed Snake, Screaming Mimi (Namie & Namie, 2003); Angry Screamer, Saccharine Snake, Space Case, Invalidator, Cold Shoulder (Felder, 1993); and Casanova, Explosive, Gangster, Spineless Sensation, Turncoat, Backstabber, Accuser, and Zombie (Di Genio, 2002). Even the authors of one of the earliest serious research efforts into intolerable bosses (their term), Michael Lombardo and Morgan McCall (1984), couldn’t resist the seemingly irresistible lure of the lurid label, referring to these bosses as Snakes in the Grass, Attilas, Heel Grinders, Egotists, Dodgers, Business Incompetents, Detail Drones, and Slobs.

I was struck by this sensationalistic and frankly unprofessional approach to abrasive bosses. If I were to peruse the section devoted to child abuse in that same bookstore, would I find books titled Evil Parents and Their Prey or Psychoparent-Busting Strategies, complete with categories classifying parents as Baby Bashers, Kiddy Kickers, or Toxic Tot-Tormentors? The answer is no, because in today’s society, child, spouse, and elder abuse are treated as serious issues deserving of serious attention. Demonizing people who inflict pain on others is understandable but irresponsible, and more important, it’s unhelpful. I continually struggle to understand why we don’t we take employee abuse as seriously as we do these other types of harm. We have a choice: we can view abrasive bosses as evil demons who cannot change (thereby keeping our distance), or we can seek to understand the phenomenon through serious research. I decided to pursue the latter option and devoted my doctoral work to developing a deeper understanding of the abrasive bosses that filled my coaching practice.

      Disappointed and disgusted by most of what I’d discovered in my bookstore ramblings, I embarked on a review of the scholarly literature on abuse in the workplace, also termed workplace bullying. I had high hopes of learning about abrasive bosses but found that the research focused almost exclusively on the impact of workplace abuse on employees. I found numerous studies that explored the types of this abuse and its effects on employees, but I couldn’t find any systematic studies conducted with the abrasive bosses themselves. Finally, I came upon an article that explained this gap, a gap termed the black hole of workplace abuse by researchers Rayner and Cooper (2003):

      Gathering data about black holes is difficult because we cannot see them.

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