Do You Have A Toxic Harasser In Your Workplace?

There are many stories that aren't being told. If every horrific story was told, then we would hear about it. And if every horrific story would be told, then the newspapers will be filled with it. Unfortunately we don't hear about them. What am I talking about? I'm talking about a toxic behavior called harassment. So with me I've got Peter and Aaron. Hello. Welcome back.

Thank you.

What do we mean by harassment as a toxic behavior?

Any behavior that is designed to denigrate or put down another entity or personal group. Basically.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. What do we mean by the difference between bullying? Because I suppose bullying and harassment tend to be interchangeable, but there is a clear difference between the two.

There is a lot more force behind bullying where it is a lot more forceful, a lot more overt. Harassment is designed to get a behaviour by almost stealth in contrast to bullying.

But it can also be discriminatory.

It can be absolutely. And it's intended to put people, quote unquote, in their place.

Alrighty, so let's take different views of the different types of harassment. Let's look at verbal harassment. What exactly is it?

Verbal is more likely to occur where you can get somebody to second guess themselves, get somebody to feel less than about themselves with basically talking to them or saying, hey, you know, this is going on or that's going on. Another one is the office joker that comes in and says hahaha, you always, blah blah, blah, look at that. That's designed to actually make the person the victim, let's call them the victim. The victim feel less than and under the thumb.

Yeah. There is a gray area in terms of verbal harassment because it's very hard to say, well you said something. And the other person could completely negate that.

Yes.

Because it's not a physical harassment.

And then you get the sideline, well, it was only a joke, correct?

Yes.

It comes down to how does it impact the person who's on the receiving end and whether or not they are able to deal with that. And not everybody's able to deal with everything. Even the toughest nuts out there have weak spots. And unfortunately the harassment side of things tends to find out those weak spots really quickly and focus in on them.

They're very good at that. What is a psychological or harasser?

When the harasser makes the victim feel like they need to second guess themselves, where they actually cast doubt, where they actually create insecurity. Now that can be directly with the person or it can be with a group of people recruiting a group of people to create an impression that everybody's on this page.

Why aren't you correct?

That's a very interesting tactic.

Yes. Digital harassment is maybe more the newest because we tend to use online. But it'd be interesting to see what's your take on it.

There's a couple of different things. There is a lot of people are very much more keen to express radical thoughts through their keyboard than they are face to face. So it's very easy for a perpetrator to seed a crowd that will then start becoming a group of voices that will then express an opinion or express certain things that will victimize a particular person. And something you mentioned before as well too. A lot of the digital stuff can also be enormous.

Yes. And it's so easy for people to be to hide behind a keyboard because they're not facing face to face.

Exactly.

Which leads me to the face to face, which is the physical harassment. Yes.

So physical can be. Well, obviously the most obvious of that is some kind of sexual harassment because that can be extremely inappropriate. It could also be intimidatory behavior like somebody looming over you at your desk and leaning on your desk, creating this menacing presence. And again, the perpetrator can turn around and say, well, I was just talking to this person.

Correct, correct, correct. Another form of harassment, you just mentioned it briefly, but it's quite common in organization is sexual harassment.

Yes. And I think we're all on the same page with this, that there is no place for that in a professional organization. That's not the forum, that's not the environment, that's not the arena for it. So yeah, I'm strongly saying that that should not happen.

That definitely should not happen. Now there are the forms of harassment such as racial or age based or disability or religion or even third party, which is, how do I explain it? Is it someone causing harassment inadvertently?

Yeah. And all of that is in various scenarios applicable. I think part of what has to be looked at is what is the impact on the individual? Because what might happen if you look at for instance as a third party something going on, you might think, well, you know, that's just a standard interchange.

But yes, correct.

If there is intent and if there is a feeling of negativity on the, on the part of the victim, then there is a harassment going on there. And that, I mean, sometimes you get the, you get the intuition to walk up to somebody and say, hey, are you okay with this?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that's kind of an indicator. I mean we're, we're. Our human radar is pretty good in those instances.

Okay. So let's sort of now sort of dive in a little bit more. Why would someone do the harassing? What's in it for them?

A lot of times, and I'm being very general here, but a lot of times it's. It's a cultural situation. So I guess the best example is that if you are remembering back to your sometimes horrendous times back at school, that there was a culture of the bullies or the harassers ganging up and saying nasty things to other groups.

Correct.

That if you translate that into an organization, a lot of times there are cultural constructs that are at play and they tend to perpetuate because people soon learn that to get along, they have to play along.

Yes, that's true.

Which means that inadvertently people who have come in with the best of intents get roped into this situation and perpetuate it.

Yeah. When is harassment not harassment? Or when is a behavior not harassment?

When there is a genuine need to trans. To give somebody the understanding that this needs to change, that this needs to move, but it has to be a direct addressing of something that somebody can change and do.

All right, so if, for example, a person plays a practical joke on someone whose religion and it's just done once, is that seen as a form of harassment? Because it's just a single incident?

The answer to that is that yes, it is harassment. If it's a perpetuating harassment, then it becomes a harassment problem.

Yes.

Just a one off, that person never does it again. Then there's a bit of grace inside of that.

Yes.

But if that person then does that with somebody else, keeps coming back to the same person, then you've got a real problem.

So we talked about harassment so far, done against an individual. Can it be done against, let's say, a group?

Absolutely. Absolutely. So even inside of large organization, there are, I suppose you could call them tribes.

Yeah.

So one tribe thinks that it's. It's higher up on the, on the ladder than another tribe. You know, the. The maintenance staff or the supply staff or, you know, are you. You guys down in maintenance, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, yeah.

Which. Yeah, so there's like this tribal harassment going on as well too, which can turn into sabotage, which is where maintenance turns around, says, really? Okay, we'll see about that.

And then also, it doesn't have to be one versus one. It could be also a collective of people gaining up against a single person or another.

Exactly.

Okay, let's look at an organization by and large, because they tend to not identify or aware of this problem, how do you see that? You think it's often brushed underneath the carpet?

I think a lot of organisations, especially with higher offices that have come up through the organisational, I guess, ranks, they're aware of it, they've weathered it and in their own mind they feel justified that somewhere along the lines this is just part of the process. I think in this day and age we need to rethink that. I think we need to look at whether or not that is productive. Yeah. That's an individual situation to look at. But especially in an organisation that is service oriented, the especially in an organisation that is public facing, that really needs to be assessed very, very thoroughly. And again, what you tend to put up with, you tend to perpetuate.

Yes. Which leads me to the next question, which is basically hypothetically, imagine a new employee comes on board and finds out that the team of people that he works with have a perpetual. To cause harassment to some of the people.

Yes.

What do you think is going to happen from here on? Moving forwards?

So you can either be in the fold or out of the fold, but either way what's going to happen is that there's going to be this huge energy expenditure towards dealing with that situation or being party to that situation. That's not being applied. That energy is not being applied to the core business of what that organization needs to do.

Yeah.

That's just a waste.

Yeah. What, what do you see as the impact of. For the victims being the harassee as such?

It's very demotivating. Yeah. And to a certain extent makes it a very uncomfortable. Well, it makes it a very uncomfortable workplace. You can have all sorts of stresses. We talked before about stresses, what stress can do. It can make people vindictive, it can make people reactive, responsive, it can create saboteurs. But internally and externally, the range of outcomes is only limited by a person's personality.

Yeah. What do you think could eventuate to the organization if this culture allows to, you know, continue? So you have situations whereby people are arresting other people. Left unchecked, what is the, what does it look like for the organization? What's the impact?

Well, I think from an organization's point of view, as long as they're still producing what they're supposed to be producing, then the organization is happy and they're quite happy to be ignorant of what's going on.

Yeah, yeah. But there's a potential downside as well.

There is that. That the. At one point in time it's going to become a problem.

Yes.

And I mean as simple as organization XYZ and all of a sudden somebody blabs to the newspaper and this, I mean, that's just a hypothetical.

Yeah, yeah, correct.

But these are the kinds of risks that an organization handles or has to think about if they allow that sort of thing to perpetuate.

Correct. And we know that handling situations so much easier when it's done right in the early stages.

Absolutely. Before it becomes the norm rather than the exception.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay, so wrapping it up, what is.

The key takeaway from this toxic behavior in any organization? Harassment really should have no place in the organization. And even if it's as innocent as the office jokester, the office prankster, these things have a habit of going underground and, and becoming a problem at the end of the day.

I do. Peter, thank you. Thank you. Thanks for watching. The next video is going to be about the narcissist. Interesting. So stay tuned.