Someone at Your Organization Has Been Accused of Sexual Harassment. Now what?

Someone at your organization has been accused of sexual harassment or called out for inappropriate remarks or behaviors or an outburst. Now what if you're someone who keeps tabs on the trends in news like I do, perhaps you've noticed a few of these incidents lately. There's NBC news lifting the NDAs of former staffers who believed they experienced sexual harassment at the network. They are now free to tell their stories over at Harvard. More than 70 members of the Harvard band walked out of a banquet last week celebrating the group's centennial after an alumnus joked about the group's decision to implement a sexual harassment policy. That must have been a nice lapper. And then there is the assistant GM to the Houston Astros. More on this later. And those stories, those all happened just last week. I mean, before that we had Matt Lauer, of course, and there was another newsman in the mix, Mark Halperin, who is the person who inspired today's episode. Sexual harassment. This is not an episod episode about it. In short, don't do it. Enough said. But how to respond when it hits close to home, This will be a shorter episode than normal because the answer for responding to sexual harassment within your organization is pretty simple. Yet here we are in mid October, late October, in 2019, and and people are still bungling their responses. First, what is it? Sexual harassment comes in many forms. First, there's quid pro quo, which means if you come back to my room after broadcasting here at the Sochi Olympics and you let me do what I want to do to you, you might get a promotion or you won't lose your job. Matt Lauer it also comes in the form of inappropriate jokes or comments, pornography on office computers or cell phones, touching someone who doesn't want to be touched in a sexual, suggestive or even an accidental way, or in my case, conducting a workshop. And during the break, you're walking around the tables handing out an evaluation form and then you notice a table where a group of men were sitting. And there's a hand drawn portrait of a woman, a naked woman, a very graphic portrait of a woman who happened to look like. Like me. It was a gut punch. And it wasn't just the person who drew it that bothered me, but knowing that all of the men sitting at that table, professionals, were watching him do it. I mentioned the incident to the person who hired me. He felt awful. He's a good guy. He's a great guy who always looks out for me. But he did nothing. Not a thing. And I was left with a choice that a lot of women in similar positions are left with do I make a stink? Do I risk the work? Do I risk the pushback? Or do I just internalize it and let it go? And I did let it go. And you know what? It still bothers me to this day. Now, did this happen in 2002? Nope. It happened to me within the year. So anyone who knows me knows I'm no shrinking violent when it comes to letting people know how I feel in certain situations. But there I was silenced. And for me and for many people, mostly women, it's the power and balance that gets you. It could be direct, as in a supervisor. Like this past weekend, the Philadelphia police Chief was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting three female officers and he was their mentor or the threat of losing a job. If you fall out of favor, you know exactly what happened to the producer with Matt Lauer. Sexual harassment, in short, causes a lot of problems for people, especially at work. So let's say it happens. I'm going to make this very brief, but when an employee reports a claim of sexual harassment, the company is obligated to investigate normally would fall under hr, but they could bring an outside counsel to investigate. Now, if you are guilty, whether you knew it or not, the best course of action, of course, is to confess. You know, apologize, promise, and never do it again. Sounds like a very familiar three step plan. And hope for the best and hope that you don't get fired. But what if you're not guilty? So false accusations do happen. And it could be two completely different stories, two completely different perspectives of one story about what actually happened. If you were wrongly accused, what you need to do is to cooperate with any form of investigation. Confess to the parts that you did do wrong. Maybe it's, you know, dating a co worker, you know, whatever it is, maybe you didn't know it was wrong. Apologize. Even if you are innocent, let's say it's a joke and you didn't know it was inappropriate, you can still apologize for it. You can also hire attorney if you have to. And since this isn't a legal or human resources podcast, I'm just going to stop there. But I do want to look at the public relations. What do you do and say to the public if you are someone at an organization who gets accused of sexual harassment, or if you work for an organization where you have someone who is accused and it happens quite publicly. Now, you may be thinking this episode was inspired by the firing of Brandon Taubman, the former assistant GM of the Houston Astros. Not so sexual Harassment. It's the prevailing story of the moment, but it was hatched. This episode was when I saw an email land in my inbox from the journalist Mark Halpern. So he's known for his position as a senior political analyst for msnbc and he was a co author of Game Change and Double down game change 2012. You may have read those books. Now, he's notable for the multiple allegations of workplace sexual harassment and misconduct that were made against him when he worked at ABC News. Halperin was subsequently fired by Showtime and NBC News, and all of this happened in October 2017. But in 2019, Halpern started posting again on Twitter. And then a few months ago, he launched a political blog called Mark Halperin's Wide World of News. And it comes in the form of an email, which I get every morning in my email box. So, first item of note, he was accused of sexual misconduct and I as a woman, read his email. Yes, I find the email very informative. Now, do I think Halperin was a D bag back in the day and and deserved every bit of the punitive actions against him at the moment? Yep. But the truth is, I like his email. Now, last week or this past week, there was an email that landed in the inbox on Tuesday and it said this. I appreciate the interest some of you have expressed in learning more about how I am addressing my responsibility for the pattern of sexual harassment in which I engaged during the period I worked at ABC News until 2007. Now he had my interest. He keeps writing. You may want to watch the conversation I had with Jenny Willoughby on this topic. I am grateful for the discussion and hope that by reflecting on my own failures, I can help contribute to the important and necessary conversation about sexual harassment. Hmm. I saw the email and my first thought was I have no idea who Jenny Willoughby is. So I looked her up and she's not an experienced journalist. More of a woo woo speaker. A person who transforms people's lives, not necessarily their reputations in a news story. So it wasn't quite sitting down for 60 minutes. However, at least he figured out that Halperin did that. He needed to have some form of visual proof of an apology for people to see. I was intrigued by this email because his acknowledgment was straight out of my playbook. You've heard me before discuss my formula for responding to an event or an issue. These behaviors are moves that can mitigate a full blown crisis. The three elements that can protect you if you mean what you say and you do what you mean. One, acknowledge, apologize, accept what happened. Two. Then you are allowed a grace period to put the story, or at least your side of it, into context. It's time to message your narrative to and in some cases it's spin, but you are allowed it. The next step, your plans, promises, changes that will be made. Here's what we learned. It's the mea culpa that if done correctly, following the steps in a timely fashion. So you will be given one ask. And this ask is like one wish from a genie's lamp. It could be forgiveness. It could be your job back to stay in office, people just giving you a break. Break any of the steps, don't complete them and the whole thing falls apart. Now, when it comes to the sexual harassment charge, I find that people fiddle with this formula. There is a struggle with that first step, the acceptance piece. There may be a legal issue if you have to admit certain behaviors or you work within leadership at an organization that might allow it in that type of a culture. But people understand legal tangles. You know, they still want to hear an acknowledgement. And in Halpern's case, he did just that. And with this email, he backed it up with a video on YouTube, which makes me love that plan because it's all about proactive pr. Now, I may be one of the only people in the world to even watch this video. Well, me and Jenny Willoughby. But Halpern took the time to set up the interview, and he likely paid for it out of pocket. And that full interview is listed with links to excerpts from the interview for Quick Views. Now, that's a PR response I can get behind, and that is a PR response for the digital age. I'm going to include a link in the show notes if you want to be. If you want to view the links as well, then there'll be maybe three of us that have seen the video. But anyone who listens to this podcast regularly knows my formula for managing any type of crisis in public. And there it was in Halperin's email. Because again, as far as the playbook goes, if you're on it, if you're on it with an email, a video, whatever it is, and if you can back it up, you may still have haters out there. But if you own up to your actions and you move forward, you're going to get the genie wish. That's just how it works. Not so much for the Houston Astros. Quick recap. Houston Astros, who are now tied with the Nats in the series. Come on, Nats. Had a PR debacle of a week when they whiffed on their response after assistant GM Brandon Taubman's locker room taunt that he directed at three female reporters after the Astros clinched the alcs. And you may have heard that one of the reporters was a female who worked for Sports Illustrated. Now if you follow the thread line of this story, it relates to a pitcher named Roberto Aluna. In May of 2018, Asuna was arrested on domestic violence charges. He allegedly beat the mother of his then 3 year old child while he was playing for Toronto. He played for the Blue Jays. The charges were dropped, but MLB suspended him for 75 games for violating its domestic violence policy. That's all good, but then Houston traded him shortly before the suspension ended. Not so good when you're thinking about prison. So here's where the Astros organization gives us a peek into the culture of their organization. Which by the way is the same ball club that was caught red handed cheating in Game 1 of the ALDS last year when an employee was filming near the Red Sox dugout and texting known cheaters. So again, the Astros front office reveals their culture and continues the thread that defines it up until this week. So they very publicly and falsely accused Stephanie Epstein, she's the Sports Illustrated reporter, of fabricating the events that she reported on in the locker room of Taubman, screaming they stated that the story was misleading and irresponsible. Calling out a reporter. I hear it all the time in my business. It is the primary tell for me when I know an organization is readying up for a significant PR nightmare. So the GM Lunow said, quite frankly, I believe you have a zero tolerance policy and also have the opportunity to give people second chances when they have made mistakes in the past in other organizations. Here he is putting the hiring in in context. Basana that's kind of how we put those things together. But therein lies the problem for the Astros and for this kind of defense, they don't go together. People are smarter than that. But the Astros didn't think anyone is, so they thought they could ride it out and many do. So they let Taubman, the assistant GM stay silent on the matter, hoping it would pass. It didn't. And this is where many, many organizations make mistakes. So keep following along. Taubman, the assistant GM makes a statement, so this is his last ditch effort to keep his job. Here is his statement and it is filled with plenty of misdirects and the ubiquitous non apology apology that I can call anytime. When these statements Start to roll out. Here it is. This past Saturday, during our clubhouse celebration, I used inappropriate language for which I'm deeply sorry and embarrassed. In retrospect, there's a tell for me when I know this is not going to go well for him. I realized that my comments were unprofessional and inappropriate. All right, listen for this one. My overexuberance in support of a player has been misinterpreted as a demonstration of a regressive attitude about an important social issue. Those that. Well, those who. Those that know me should be. Who know that I am a progressive and charitable member of the community and a loving and committed husband and father. Those could all be true, but make no difference to the story. I hope that those who do not know me understand that the Sports Illustrated article does not reflect who I am or my values. Well, it did. It re. It reported on an event that they saw firsthand. And then here comes the killer non apology apology. I am sorry if anyone was offended by my actions. The disclaimer only apologizing to the people who were offended. As soon as I read that last line, I knew that Tobin was dead man walking. Astros GM Jeff Luno then held a presser in front of a mic with a Nats logo on the windscreen. So that's bad ops for the gnats. But he was tasked with the duty of explaining the timeline of the debacle as the story unfolded. Now, Luna, working from the familiar and tired PR handbook that I see all the time, first contradicts the story. That's the first reflexive action is to deflect. And then he makes Taubman the patsy and distances himself and the front office as far as possible away from the story. As Juan Soto's home run off of Garrett Cole in game one of the World Series, I might add. So then there's this follow up presser after the firing of Tobin. Listen.

Okay, well, first of all, thank you all for your time. As you know, we've released statement, and in that statement we said a couple of things. First of all, apologies to Stephanie and to the rest of the people that were involved in the incident. We have separated with Brandon Taubman. He's no longer an employee of the Astros. His behavior was inappropriate and not representative of who the Astros are in our culture and what we. We stand for. That original reaction by the Astros was wrong and we own it as an organization. There were many people involved in reviewing that and approving that, and I'm not going to get into the details of that. It was wrong. It was the Astros decision. And that's, that's where I'm going to leave that.

So Luno starts off, okay, we have an acknowledgement, we have an apology. We're getting some context sprinkled in. And then there's this.

We had a sense of what had happened that was different than what we found out pretty immediately afterwards. But we wanted to wait and make further statements that were correct and not sort of react again to new information because quite frankly, not all the information that was received at the beginning, even in the middle, even at the end, is consistent with the other information. So there are some varying degrees of detail, recollection of who was where and all of that. And as you would imagine after a long night. And so, you know, it's not 100% clear what the truth is, but what we do know is the truth is that those comments were inappropriate. They were directed at individuals, and that's inappropriate. And we weren't going to tolerate that.

The COVID up dead men walking or in this case, dead organization reputation walking. So the answer to the question posed in the title of the episode, how do you survive? What do you do when someone at your organization has been accused of sexual harassment or they're called out for inappropriate remarks, behaviors, or crazy outbursts in a locker room? Now what, what you do is this. You recognize from the very beginning that any form of sexual harassment is wrong. It comes from a place of imbalance, a power imbalance. Someone or someone within the organization is exerting power over someone else. And when this happens in 2019, when we are firmly planted in a call out society with a huge part of the population who are quite comfortable calling people out online in real time, they will do it and they will do it quickly and they will come down hard. So when people try to finagle their way out of a harassment accusation or excuse it, or try to cover their way out of it, it doesn't work. It won't work, and it won't work ever again as long as the Internet exists, as long as social media exists. And people will not stand for it. I said it in the episode about Matt Lauer. I'll include that link in the show. Notes. His biggest problem, believe it or not, was not the sexual impropriety, it was the power imbalance. And leaving that employee who he had the relationship with feeling powerless. When he ghosted her, he angered her. Powerlessness breeds anger. Whether it's someone who is harassed, someone in a relationship that gets ghosted, a customer. It doesn't matter. When someone is left without power, they get angry and in many cases that anger finds its way online. When you are called out online, heads will roll. Reputations and brands are tarnished. Go back to the three step formula. Acknowledge any inappropriate behavior. Make that apology and make it a genuine one. Don't water it down with half apologies or only apologizing to the people you offended. No disclaimers explain how you got there, but how you now recognize the error in your choices of hiring, or what you accepted or what you allow. Maybe you need a culture shift and then tell people when it will change and how it will change. People will give you a break. The public can regain your trust, but they will crush you if you break it. I asked people on Twitter over the weekend what they thought about folks at organizations who deny sexual harassment charges before they face the facts about the issue. So is it blind trust or is it not understanding the public blowback? One person replied, yes, it can be both, which is absolutely true. It can be both, another follower wrote. And we went back and forth and he had a lot of lot of good thoughts on the idea of sexual harassment and why it's allowed. He said culture movements take time to change and not to settle in complacency. I responded back, well, how much time does an organization need? He said that a lot of these changes only started happening in like 2009, 2010, but here we are, you know, closing in on 2020. When is it going to change? My favorite line that he mentioned, especially with the Astros in particular he was mentioning it starts with social and power blind spots. That was so good. I think the blind spot is the power of the call out and the pushback. Organizations have no idea what can happen to them because of the online pushback. Many of these playbooks were written 20 years ago. Many crisis playbooks were written around the time of 9 11, around the time of terrorism, around the time of financial problems. 2008 Enron. That's when companies said I think we need a crisis plan. But the problem is they haven't been updated. No one is looking at the public pushback that happens online. If there's anything to remember about navigating a personal crisis in the age of digital, it's the this. Know your blind spots. And if it's understanding how quickly an online movement can turn into a PR tsunami, turn around and run for the high ground. The truth. It's the only place you won't drown. Thanks for listening to this edition of the Confident Communications Podcast, a podcast helping leaders and organizations learn how to navigate the digital age of messaging. If you want to have a conversation with me online, check me out at Twitter. Molly McPherson, go ahead and follow me and let me know what you think of this week's episode. I'm dying to hear your opinions. That's all for this week. I look forward to speaking with you next week. Go, Nance. Sam.