Object123 Simple tools to help stop power abuse
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These are simple tools to help stop power abuse and in the process create an environment where people feel safe to speak up and speak out.
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Object123 Simple tools to help stop power abuse
- 1. GOSSIPPING OBSEQUIOUS …why? Why do organizations look like this? ACQUIESENC E ASSENTING to authority CONFORMITY Politically Correct Failing to ask “dumb questions” Compromisin g SYCOPHANT S Walking on Eggshells discomfort
- 2. Power Abuse FEAR • FEAR of being ABUSED • FEAR of being ABUSIVE • FEAR the difficult conversation (because of ABUSE) • FEAR of getting fired or excluded unfairly (ABUSED) “shut the f#*k up!” ….because of of
- 3. The offender’s favorite TOOLS …. Browbeating The Offender is Offensive… DOGMA Blaming Rhetorical Questions NAGGING Volume Tone Intimidation Manipulation Steamrolling MISLEADING Sulking Humiliating GASLIGHTINGIgnoring (silent treatment) SARCASM Coercion ThreateningDEADLINES
- 4. SNOWFLAKE Go with the flow Let SLEEPING DOGS lie Don’t ROCK the BOAT! Don’t make WAVES! Don’t upset the applecart Suck it up BUTTERCUP Have a THICK SKIN Get OVER IT! Don’t be a SNITCH! The offended use of defensive TOOLS…. The Offended is Passive… So SENSITIVE!
- 6. Psychological Health & Safety Someday these tools will be mandatory also some day. Occupational Health & Safety Mandatory tools in the workplace. Psychological Health & Safety
- 7. Adding safety is exhausting… or…to remember…. Too much…. reading…. workshops….
- 8. or use simple tools to stop abuse… “want to teach… don’t bother… give them a tool… which leads to new ways of thinking” Buckminster Fuller
- 9. First we need to AGREE object to disagree with behavior… …in real-time content.
- 10. When one feels offended simply… The offender.. Or escalate to like a ref’s Whistle…… “ ”
- 11. or escalate to like a ref’s Whistle……Yellow Card When one feels offended simply… “ ” “ ” The offender..
- 12. like a ref’s Whistle……Yellow Card……Red Card When one feels offended simply… “ ” “ ” “ ” The offender..
- 13. …our peers decide if still unresolved ...not HR!
- 14. What people are saying… “ ” Very interesting point, Desmond. Democratize organizational power as we do political power, so (we) can vote people out Timothy R. Clark Author of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety
- 15. …the sky’s the limit …no more walking on eggshells When we stop power abuse
Editor's Notes
- 1. INTRODUCTION In 1983 I had a run in with my boss at my first job just out of Uni and I resigned A few months later I became a borne again Christian 2 & ½ years later I was kicked out for asking too many questions I found out later that I was slandered by the pastor of the group and had no recourse Thus began my quest to redress these issues…. First thing I learned was that my dogma and the groups dogma was eroding learning I came up with my first premise “ I could be wrong” and began to learn. Thus began my journey of some 35 years where I was finding questions were far more powerful than dogma. And here is what I have come up with so far to dissipate organizational power that stopped me in my tracks all those years back
- 2. INTRODUCTION 2003 (TWENTY YEARS LATER) My brother and I agreed to form a business together to test out our psychological safety tools After we discovered the power of an Acceptable Apology. Since then we have been working on each other and developing our PS tools while we have been developing our startups. 18 years on and I think we have just about gotten our suite of
- 3. INTRODUCTION 2020 (TWENTY YEARS LATER) Ready to Scale test
- WHY ORGANISATIONS LOOK LIKE THIS Walking on eggshells it my definition of offensive. It is not painful but it is not comfortable either Power abuse is offensive behavior…doesn’t cause actual pain And is certainly doesn’t make us feel comfortable Why do most if not all organisations look somewhat like this? Hear a pin drop! WHY????? Maybe we don’t even notice it because it is so common? And we only notice when others do it to us not when we do it to them, maybe?
- 6. POWER ABUSE causes FEAR! This scenario may never happen in the organization but we fear it could. I have experienced this behavior. So what happens if you are in a meeting with the team and a leader and he or she tell you to “shut the F#*k up!” Story at Plug & Play and team leader abused one member. Feeling offended or upset what standard recourse can you take in your workplace now? It is obviously unacceptable behavior but it happens! This abuse or misbehavior bleeds into all of our relationships including our organisations and leads to FEAR 1. FEAR of being offended with no standard way to redress the offense, especially if it’s the boss. 1. FEAR of causing offence or saying the wrong thing 3. Fear of the “difficult” conversation or “rocking the boat” and we don’t really recognize it 4. Fear of getting FIRED or EXCLUDED………
- POWER ABUSE is Offensive As a child when we didn’t get what we wanted we would cry or scream and throw a tantrum. As we grew up we WERE SUPPOSED TO LEARN TO NAGotiate LESS & NEGotiate MORE and control our behavior so that we can get what we want, FAIRLY. But even as adults we still get angry to a degree when we don’t get what we want or when someone doesn’t agree with us. We recognize this anger as abuse of power. It comes in the form of: …the following behaviors: These are our SHORTCUTS designed to GET us what we want at someone else’s expense. The more POWER one has the more ABUSE is possible
- 7. Well Worn Idioms …or do you just have to “SUCK IT UP” and put up with it? We have allowed Power Abuse to exist. The good news is we can stop it also. These abusive behaviors are not too hard to recognize but have difficult to deal with until NOW.
- TOOL TO STOP TO POWER ABUSE Object123 is a tool designed to deal with these power abuses during a disagreement, by nipping in the bud, any offensive behavior, before it becomes a dispute.
- 8. PROVIDE PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY MANDATORY Most developed countries have mandatory OH&S in the workplace but NOT psychological health and safety yet. OPH&S will be the next new new thing especially for the knowledge economy https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/320696 6 Effective Tactics for Handling a Toxic Boss 65 percent of bullied employees lost their original jobs when they tried to stop the bullying. Psychological Safety has become the latest buzz word after google article in the NY Times 2016 about What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team When they found the a 1999 scientific paper by Amy Edmondson on Psychological Safety and why some teams are more successful than others. New research reveals surprising truths about why some work groups thrive and others falter. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html Within psychology, researchers sometimes colloquially refer to traits like ‘‘conversational turn-taking’’ and ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ as aspects of what’s known as psychological safety — a group culture that the Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’’ Psychological safety is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’’ Edmondson wrote in a study published in 1999. ‘‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’ Just as it is the employer’s responsibility to provide a WORKPLACE SAFETY for employees. I believe it will become incumbent upon all employers to provide Psychological Safety in the workplace? And a provide tools to dissipate organizational power to protect their staff
- 9. TOO MANY BOOKS TOO MUCH TO LEARN TOO MANY SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT These books TEACH focus on teaching teams and management psychological safety. They focus on ADDING SAFETY (not so easy to define), we focus on STOPPING ABUSE (easy to recognize and stop) Object123 is a tool TO STOP POWER ABUSE So how do we stop POWER ABUSE? The fearless Usually 200 pages of logical and seemingly reasonable ideas Thousands of tips on how to be more emotionally intelligent. These ideas are exhaustive and exhausting OR…..
- 10. SUPPLY THE TOOLS, DON’T TEACH We supply tools to stop or subtract abuse or offensive behavior "If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.“ Buckminster Fuller:
- 11. SPLIT DISAGREEMENTS INTO 2 Parts What is the difference between disagreeing and objecting, anyone know? We disagree with the content We object to abusive behavior (we know when by being offended) Duel conversations running in parallel and in real-time is the object of Object123
- 12. HOW IT WORKS – BE LESS OFFENSIVE Object123 ensures the objections are always less offensive than the misbehavior, That is, by simply objecting to someone’s objection. If necessary. We have simply agreed to moderate each other’s misbehavior and objections. I believe most abuse, malicious gossip, aggression and anger are just poorly delivered objections.
- 13. TOOL 2 = OBJECT123’S THREE SIMIPLE AGREEMENTS Agreement 1. Ref’s Whistle Agree to “Instead of retaliating when we are offended we simply offer a mild caution, in real-time explaining why we have taken offence.” The offender simply acknowledges or challenges the offense. (ensuring the caution or objection is always less offensive than the misbehavior) Yes, this will pause the CONTENT conversation while we have the BEHAVIIOR conversation. Yes we slow down the content conversation but ultimately..... ...we save the potential hours lost to people’s gossiping behind each other’s backs after And save on having eventual confrontations And disputes later after such offences are repeated on a number of occasions. Resulting in these examples “I’ve HAD ENOUGH!” or “I’m SICK of THIS” or even “SHUT UP” or “FUCK OFF” don’t just occur on the first offence.
- 14. OBJECT2 YELLOW CARD Agreement 2. Yellow Card “If we don’t get an acknowledgment or adequate explanation for the caution then we can escalate it to an Objection and now receive a simple apology.”
- 15. OBJECT3 RED CARD Agreement 3. Red Card “If we don’t get a simple apology or adequate explanation for the Objection then we can escalate it to a Stop and now receive an acceptable apology.” If we still don’t get an acceptable apology or adequate explanation The objection can be taken up to the team hearing where the team decides,
- 16. FINALLY – OUR PEERS VOTE PEOPLE OUT! Thus democratising organizational power where the janitor can take the CEO before the team. Not use HR, we don’t want management investigating management like the GOP senate investigating the GOP president
- 17. HOW THE PROCESS WORKS - REAL CONVERSATION FOR LEARNING We learn from listening to the offended person’s real-time objection We learn as the offender acknowledges or apologizes… By either retracting their offence or if escalated to a STOP then explaining what they did and why and what they will do next time (ACCEPTABLE APOLOGY)
- 18. WHAT PEOPLE THINK IRONY Funny story is that after I joined his Psych Safety group and asked him a question on one of his posts about what guarantee his system has of not being sacked by the boss. He said there was none and promptly blocked me from the group…so much for psychological safety….ha!
- Feeling Safe means we can have all those difficult conversations AND DISAGREEMENTS and who know what we can eventually agree to? THE SKY MIGHT NOT BE THE LIMIT I have decided that instead of focusing on psychological safety I would focus more on what I believe prevents it and that is abuse of power. After all, strip away power abuse and how can anyone cast any legitimate aspersions or stones for that matter, leaving us safe to do incredible things, only to receive constructive criticism for our outlandish ideas. Stepping across that red line would activate our agreed to, simple tools to help stop power abuse.
- 19 CONCLUSION Finally achieve a level of psychological safety when we feel safe or safer through democratizing Organizational Power. We don’t have to fear being fired because we dare to speak up Can share more easily any of our concerns and insights without unfounded fear of upsetting anyone or being upset. Object123 is a step in the right direction.