Holiday reads: Fueling heart, mind, and soul

If you’re looking to get beyond the hurly-burly of holiday consumerism, here are three books that will put you in a more thoughtful and reflective frame of mind. I’ve recommended them before, and I’m happy to do so again.

Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1956; many different editions)

One of the most personally influential books I’ve read is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1956). Frankl was a psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor who lost almost all of his immediate family in the Holocaust. The first part of the book details his concentration camp experiences. The second part explains his theory of logotherapy. Frankl believed that life’s essence is about a search for meaning: “We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing a something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.” Logotherapy is based upon these premises.

In 1991, the New York Times reported that, according to a survey conducted by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Library of Congress, Man’s Search For Meaning belongs to a list of “the ten most influential books in [the United States].”

Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

Karen Armstrong is a noted author on religious affairs. Her 2010 book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, mixes faith, philosophy, and self-help. In it, she offers a 12-step program to help make the world a more compassionate place:

• “Learn About Compassion”
• “Look at Your Own World”
• “Compassion for Yourself”
• “Empathy”
• “Mindfulness”
• “Action”
• “How Little We Know”
• “How Should We Speak to One Another?”
• “Concern for Everybody”
• “Knowledge”
• “Recognition”
• “Love Your Enemies”

This is not easy stuff. Armstrong’s program requires introspection, honest self-evaluation, and conscious effort.

Charles D. Hayes, The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning (2004)

Charles Hayes is a retired, largely self-educated writer and practical philosopher whose books and essays on finding meaning in life are hidden classics. Here’s the opening to his Preface from The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning, my favorite among his wonderful books:

When thoughts of our own mortality begin to crop up with increasing frequency, it’s time to pause and contemplate our legacy. We’re reminded to ask ourselves what of value we intend to leave for posterity. After the tangibles of the estate are settled, what will our successors remember about us? Is there something we can do now that will generate a lasting, positive effect in the lives of our descendants?

Some of the most instructive and inspirational books are written by folks a generation (or two) ahead of us who graciously share their life lessons with their successors. Hayes writes especially for those in the “September” of their lives, but anyone can benefit from his wisdom.

Recycling: Five years of November

Each month I’m reaching into the archives to highlight a piece from that month of each past year. Especially for those of you who missed them the first time around, I hope they provide interesting and useful reading. For each piece I’m including a short excerpt; you may click on the title for the full article.

November 2013: Creating new workplaces — “When I named the New Workplace Institute in 2006, I did so with institutional transformation in mind, hoping that it would contribute to the development of better workplaces. Some seven years later, I now realize that the term “new workplace” has at least three meanings. One involves transforming existing organizations into better places to work. Another involves creating brand new workplaces that are healthier and happier than their predecessors. And yet a third involves individuals finding new places to work, hopefully much better than the ones they left, and possibly including a career shift.”

November 2012: Does the term “collateral damage” help us to understand how some organizations treat workplace bullying? –“Though [collateral damage is] commonly used in a military context, the term resonates with my understanding of how some organizations regard the mistreatment of employees, especially bullying, harassment, and discrimination….(W)hen bullying or other forms of mistreatment occur, bad organizations often regard the targets of such behaviors as collateral damage. Hey, bad stuff happens in the rough and tumble world of work, and occasionally some really bad stuff happens – that is, to others. Organizational leaders assume that everything is going well, except for this distracting problem.”

November 2011: Some real “job killers”: Executive salaries, bullying managers, health care costs, and demanding stockholders — “The Chamber of Commerce and other powerful trade organizations are fond of using the term “job killer” to denigrate virtually any proposed legislation or regulation that protects workers, consumers, or the environment. They claim that costs of prevention and compliance drain monies that otherwise would be used to create jobs….I)n the interest of fair play, let’s consider an alternate list of job killers….”

November 2010: Do organizations suppress our empathy? — “That conditioning mechanism may be the culture of institutions that teach us to abandon the target, lest we, too, become one of them….In the case of schools, kids learn very early that targets of bullying are outcasts. Heaven forbid that we risk our social standing or sense of security to help someone being picked on, even if those whose approval we seek happen to be mean-spirited jerks. Not infrequently, the schools themselves fail to take assertive action to prevent or stop bullying, especially if the latter situation involves popular kids being the aggressors….Fast-forward to the workplace: A feared boss, or perhaps a popular co-worker, bullies another employee. Once again, the target is abandoned by colleagues and the employer alike. Cycles of abuse and abandonment repeat themselves among adults.”

November 2009: Why concentrated power at work is bad — UC-Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner reports: “My own research has found that people with power tend to behave like patients who have damaged their brain’s orbitofrontal lobes (the region of the frontal lobes right behind the eye sockets), a condition that seems to cause overly impulsive and insensitive behavior. Thus the experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and socially-appropriate behavior.”

 

Targets of workplace bullying: The stress and anxiety of figuring out what the h**l is going on

One of the most significant stressors in experiencing workplace bullying is sorting out what is happening to you. The bullying behaviors themselves are bad enough, but the process of comprehending that you’re being targeted — especially when the bullying is covert or indirect — often adds a solid layer of stress and anxiety. What the h**l is going on here? is a question that runs through a lot of minds.

I feel compelled to say to readers who are current or past bullying targets that I understand how simply reading this post may push buttons and serve as a reminder of your experience. On balance, however, we must opt for spreading knowledge as a form of power. The more we readily grasp and recognize workplace bullying, the less anguish people will experience in trying to understand their situations.

Indeed, over the years I have heard from so many individuals who reported feeling very relieved when they discovered, say, the website of the Workplace Bullying Institute or this blog. The mere knowledge that this form of mistreatment exists and has a name can be deeply validating to those who are experiencing abuse at work.

As I suggested above, the process of comprehending a situation is especially challenging when bullying behaviors are more covert or indirect. Understandably, people on the receiving end sometimes question their judgment and assumptions, wondering if their instincts are reliable. In cases of gaslighting behaviors designed to confuse or disorient a target, this result may be intentional. All too often, folks in these situations wait too long to act.

So, here’s to education and awareness about one of the most frequent and harmful forms of job-related mistreatment. While workplace bullying is not an enjoyable topic to contemplate, understanding it can be empowering and useful when the need arises.

***

Resources

The Need Help? page of this blog provides a list of resources about workplace bullying specially useful to workers.

In addition, I served as a subject matter expert to the American Psychological Association’s Center for Organizational Excellence, helping them develop this public information page on workplace bullying, with an emphasis on resources for employers.

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No Ho Ho: Will Amazon’s warehouse workers benefit from the holiday shopping rush?

Now that the holiday shopping season is moving into full swing, a lot of folks will be clicking and shipping through their gift lists by way of Amazon. As someone who does not enjoy in-store shopping, I understand the appeal. However, I doubt that Amazon’s warehouse workers will be the main beneficiaries of the company’s holiday sales intake, and that should give us pause as we make our shopping choices.

Back in February I explained why I cancelled my Amazon Prime account, citing concerns over how the company treats its warehouse workers:

I cancelled my Amazon Prime account earlier this week, and until working conditions for their employees improve, I won’t be shopping there nearly as often as I have previously.

Amazon Prime is a premium membership service that guarantees two-day shipping on almost every item ordered. For frequent customers such as myself, Prime offers easy, dependable, click-and-ship ordering, with hardly any waiting time for delivery.

However, revelations about Amazon’s labor practices have become increasingly disturbing, more specifically the working conditions in its vast merchandise warehouses. For me, the final straw was a recent Salon investigative piece by Simon Head, “Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon’s sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers,” detailing how the situation is much worse than I imagined….

I’ve cut down on my Amazon orders during 2014, and I’ve resisted the temptation to rejoin Prime. I’ve searched around in vain for evidence that Amazon is making any major effort to treat its warehouse workers better.

To be sure, Amazon’s delivery systems are what Wired called a “Massive Wish-Fulfilling Machine.” Marcus Wohlsen concludes his detailed look at Amazon’s warehouse and delivery operations this way:

Amazon’s warehouses are designed to be wish-fulfillment machines, calibrated to feed our consumer wants with aggressive speed and precision at a scale that has yet to find its limit. We keep supplying more wishes to Amazon, and Amazon keeps turning them into more stuff.

However, Amazon’s systems continue to exact a human toll on warehouse workers. For example, Dave Jamieson, writing for the Huffington Post in May, detailed a lawsuit filed by South Carolina employees:

A new batch of Amazon warehouse workers sued the online retailer in federal court last week, claiming the company’s workplace policies don’t leave them with reasonable time to eat their lunches.

In the lawsuit filed in South Carolina, seven warehouse workers say they were required to continue working and complete their tasks even after their unpaid half-hour breaks began. Once they were done, they would have to wait in line to go through a security screening, then take a six-minute walk across the massive warehouse to get some fresh air and eat.

All told, the holdups typically left them with “less than 18 minutes” to enjoy their lunches….

In addition, here’s how Jason Del Rey, writing for re/code in June, previewed a CNBC documentary on Amazon’s working conditions:

While CNBC found warehouse employees who were thankful for the pay and benefits that come with a job at an Amazon fulfillment center, several spoke out about against the unrelenting pace of work and unreasonable expectations that take a physical and mental toll on employees.

“I felt like Amazon was a prison,” one former female worker said in the documentary. She and others interviewed reported tough working conditions that include being timed on just about any action imaginable, from bathroom breaks to packing boxes to picking products off of shelves.

Amazon is among the companies that seek out older workers who roam the country in search of short-time and part-time employment, especially on a seasonal basis. Journalist Jessica Bruder was interviewed by public radio’s Here and Now program on the phenomenon of “workampers”:

A story in Harper’s Magazine opens a window into some of these people. They’re called “workampers” (a contraction of working and camping) and they travel across the country in their RVs, often performing seasonal work, selling fireworks, pumpkins, Christmas trees. They even work part-time in huge Amazon warehouses.

Jessica Bruder is author of the story, “The End Of Retirement: When You Can’t Afford To Stop Working,” in the August issue of Harper’s. She told Here & Now’s Robin Young that this movable work force is a great thing for companies like Amazon.

As you might guess, many workampers are doing what they do because more secure, higher paying jobs have eluded their grasp, especially during this ongoing economic crisis. They probably won’t be enjoying a lot of holiday cheer as they nurse their tired bodies after long, demanding shifts. 

 

Cultivating gratitude at work

Jeremy Adam Smith, writing for Greater Good magazine published by the UC-Berkeley Greater Good Science Center, observes that we are less likely to express gratitude in the workplace than in just about any other setting:

Elsewhere in American life, we say “thank you” to acknowledge the good things we get from other people, especially when they give out of the goodness of their hearts. We say “thanks” at home and in school, in stores and at church.

But not at work. According to a survey of 2,000 Americans released earlier this year by the John Templeton Foundation, people are less likely to feel or express gratitude at work than anyplace else. And they’re not thankful for their current jobs, ranking them dead last in a list of things they’re grateful for.

To remedy this, he describes five ways in which organizations and workers can cultivate gratitude at work:

1. “Start at the top” — “Thank you” should come from the boss first.

2. “Thank the people who never get thanked” — Instead of recognizing the usual suspects defined by high institutional status, how about giving kudos and appreciation to those often overlooked, such as staff?

3. “Aim for quality, not quantity” — Authentic, heartfelt expressions of gratitude count for a lot more than frequent obligatory ones.

4. “Provide many opportunities for gratitude” — People may prefer to express gratitude in different ways, so provide different options for doing so.

5. “In the wake of crisis, take time for thanksgiving” — In the aftermath of a crisis, assess, debrief, and show appreciation for those who helped to get through it.

Potential misuses of gratitude

In addition, I think it’s important to recognize the potential misuses of expressions of gratitude. Two immediately come to mind.

This first is when gratitude is expressed selectively by the Powers That Be to remind everyone who is “in” and who is “out.” When appreciation or recognition reinforces factions, cliques, and hierarchies at work, those left out feel ostracized and neglected at the expense of others who are made to feel superior.

The second is when expressions of gratitude are used primarily to kiss up, kiss down, or otherwise curry favor. Such examples of brown-nosing and manipulation give a bad name to genuine gratitude.

What about your workplace?

Is genuine gratitude a valued expression where you work? Do people feel valued and acknowledged? Are good work and extra efforts validated and acknowledged? Why or why not? The answers will tell you much that you need to know about the quality of life at your workplace.

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Measuring employer heart quality: How does an organization handle worker departures?

This hit me like a ton of bricks the other day: If you want to know whether an organization is a good place to work, take a look at how it treats people at the end of the employment relationship. In other words, the way in which an employer handles resignations, terminations, and retirements speaks volumes about how it values its workers.

Sure, hiring the right people for the right jobs is challenging work. But it’s usually a positive result and interaction. People are glad to get jobs, and employers are pleased to hire new folks to fill their needs. Most everyone feels good about it.

However, concluding an employment relationship is quite another matter. This is, after all, a separation, and with it goes much of the perceived value the worker offers to the employer. For various reasons, the employer, employee, or both have decided that it’s time to part company.

It may involve a resignation or voluntary departure: A worker retires. Another goes to a competitor. Still another pursues a new vocation.

It also could be in the form of an involuntary termination: Perhaps someone is performing under expectations or isn’t a good fit for the position. Maybe business is bad and layoffs are deemed necessary.

Does the organization handle these myriad departures with class and decency, and maybe even support and kindness when appropriate? Or does it treat people as disposable parts, exhibiting as little grace as possible? In the case of involuntary separations, does it typically use the ritual degradation ceremony of same-day terminations, often with an escort out of the building?

Finally, does the organization conduct a genuine exit interview when an employee decides to leave, or does it simply assume that every departure short of a termination is “voluntary” and for positive reasons? Good employers want honest information about why people leave; bad ones prefer to assume there’s nothing wrong.

Of course, where a forced resignation or involuntary termination is the final piece of an extended period of bullying, mobbing, or harassment, then that says all we need to know about organizational integrity.

In sum: Quality workplaces do their best to conclude employment relationships with humanity and dignity, while less wonderful others treat soon-to-be-former workers as “unpersons,” to be quickly processed, dispatched, and (oftentimes) forgotten in a coldly efficient manner.

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What can military planning teach us about creating transformative change?

(image courtesy of clipart panda.com)

Can an understanding of military strategy and tactics yield important lessons for achieving social change?

Yes, I know, some readers may wonder why a civilian with liberal politics (uh, that’s me) is looking to the military in this way. But I’m also a devoted amateur student of history, and I have a lot of respect for many who serve in the military. I believe that we have much to learn from the best military leaders. Here goes:

Plant the seeds for future success now, even if that success seems far away

During the early years of the Second World War, Hitler was running rampant over Europe, and the Japanese were doing the same in the Pacific. The Allies were losing the war on just about all fronts. Nevertheless, their leaders assessed what needed to be done, and they developed rough timelines for achieving their goals. Among other things, Churchill and Roosevelt made the critical decision to defeat Germany first, then to tackle the Japanese.

Lesson: At times, changing things for the better seems like an insurmountable obstacle. If your assessment of a situation indicates that major change will require many steps and stages, plan out the order in which things should be done and go from there.

Avoid tunnel vision: Plan using parallel tracks, and chunk it out

Sound military strategy usually involves a multifaceted approach toward achieving goals. For example, those planning the D-Day landings in France needed to think about personnel, equipment, geography, weather, communications, and a host of other logistics and contingencies. Take the “simple” question of building landing craft to reach the beaches: Someone had to develop proper designs, the factories had to start mass producing them, and the boats had to be shipped to England. All of those plans had to be in the making well before the June 6, 1944 landings.

Lesson: Most significant social change goals also require parallel tracks of planning. Making the world a better place typically involves multiple stakeholders, actions, and timelines. Understanding how those dots connect is vital toward achieving success. However, the resulting to-do list may seem overwhelming. That’s why it’s important to chunk out these tasks and get them done one-by-one.

Be passionate about your goals, but plan and evaluate dispassionately

The stakes in warfare could hardly be greater. But when it comes to military planning, the best leaders don’t let their emotions carry them into making bad choices. They stay focused, stoic, yet appropriately flexible, with a constant eye on their endgame.

Lesson: Change agents are similarly urged to disentangle their passion for a cause from the cool planning and evaluation needed to create transformation. This is not easy. The more invested we are in addressing injustice or societal challenge, the harder it can be to advocate effectively. Our hearts should fuel our passions, while our heads should guide our actions.

Learn from mistakes, even (especially) gruesome ones

If you study the biographies of great military leaders, then you will see that many of them made fairly big mistakes and experienced setbacks on the way to their signature successes. The stakes were huge. Bad decisions cost lives. Nevertheless, they learned from their mistakes and remained determined to succeed.

Lesson: There’s no substitute for experience and the capacity for continued growth. This includes learning lessons from our miscues. No one likes revisiting their errors and mistakes, but this evaluative process is necessary if we want to maximize our positive impact.

Sometimes you compromise, and sometimes you fight

Not every situation in life can be a “win-win,” and armed conflict is a prime example. At times, negotiation, compromise, and settlement are the right thing to do. On other occasions, one must press on to overcome the enemy. Hitler is an easy case of an enemy who had to be stopped completely, but there are countless other situations more complicated than that. The Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, offers valuable lessons about how military force, diplomacy, and compromise combined to narrowly avert a nuclear catastrophe.

Lesson: This dilemma applies to nearly every attempt to engage in meaningful change. When do you broker an agreement, when do you go for it all, and when do you back off? A capacity for understanding the bigger picture helps us to make smart choices in this regard.

Be gracious and humane in victory

Wise wartime victors know that treating a vanquished foe with dignity is the right thing to do, both morally and out of self-interest. In the aftermath of the First World War, the victorious Allies set out to punish Germany, imposing humiliating conditions of surrender. They helped to enable the destruction of the German economy and planted the seeds for Hitler’s rise to power. After the Second World War, however, the Allies realized their mistake and imposed conditions upon Germany and Japan that promoted renewed relations with those nations and the rebuilding of their economic and social structures.

Lesson: In social change efforts, too, good victors don’t attempt to humiliate their opponents. Such mistreatment likely fuels cycles of anger, resentment, and aggression.

Envision something better

As the tides of the Second World War turned, and defeat of the Axis forces seemed likely, the Allied countries began planning the United Nations. Today, the U.N. is far from being a perfect world organization, but it plays an important role in brokering diplomatic communication and humanitarian efforts.

Lesson: As your social change goals near a milestone victory, think hard about how that success can lead to more lasting, positive transformations. What comes next?

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This post was revised in March 2019.

“I am powerless….” (Probably not, but let’s talk about it)

(image courtesy of clipart-library.com)

Over the past couple of months, I’ve taken note of essays and blog posts where individuals have shared a sense of powerlessness to change things for the better. The saddest of these are proclamations: “I am powerless to (fill in the blank)….” They come from good people who care about making the world a better place, yet who have reached a place of deep exasperation, frustration, or hopelessness. Some are venting, others are mourning. Some, having gotten it off their chest, will jump back into the fray, while others seem poised to move on or withdraw.

I want to think about this out loud for a few minutes.

I haven’t gone back to find and link to those various writings, as it’s not about questioning or highlighting individuals or their causes. Rather, it’s about recognizing that trying to change things for the better — however one defines “better” — can be hard, challenging work, especially when forces against that change have a lot of power (economic, political, personal, what have you) and exercise it freely. And we happen to live in an age where extreme concentrations of power are ever more common.

In my work on workplace bullying, I see this all the time: Aggressors at work who treat others abusively, and often get away with it. Executives and senior administrators who stoke climates of hostility. HR officers who safeguard abusers and toss targets under the bus. Powerful business interests that want to keep workplace bullying legal.

Nevertheless, I also have been a witness to, and at times a participant in, positive change. A form of mistreatment that didn’t have a widely-recognized label a decade ago (at least in the U.S.) has entered the mainstream of discussions about employee relations. Articles and coverage about workplace bullying appear regularly in the print, electronic, and social media. Some organizations take bullying behaviors seriously and cover them in employee policies. Unions are negotiating about bullying and abusive supervision at the bargaining table. Legislatures are deliberating on and slowly starting to enact workplace bullying legislation.

My experiences are hardly unique. People are exercising their power all the time to change things for the better. Oftentimes they are cast in the role of underdog, yet they are moving the world forward within their spheres of influence regardless.

But what if you are feeling exhausted, hopeless, and maybe a little beaten up?

First, let’s acknowledge that steps to reconsider, regroup, recover, renegotiate, reassess, and reenergize are wholly permitted.

If the work you’re doing to make a difference is overtaxing your body and soul, then you need not be a martyr. Maybe you’re at the point where you’ve done what you can do, and it’s time to pull away.

Or maybe an angle you haven’t considered or fully explored can serve as a breakthrough — or at least as a more rewarding pathway. Perhaps you’re close to that breakthrough with the approach you’re using, but you don’t fully comprehend it.

If you want to cogitate on the stay vs. go question, check out Seth Godin’s short, thoughtful, quirky book, The Dip: A Little Book that Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) (2007). Here’s a snippet:

Quit the wrong stuff. Stick with the right stuff. Have the guts to do one or the other.

The decision may look simple, but we know it’s a lot more complex than that.

Finally, we must keep strive our egos and expectations in check, which is no small task when we’re emotionally invested in something. Especially when our popular culture demands immediate satisfaction and embraces short term “deliverables,” we are primed to expect and celebrate quick results. But deeper change can take time. Even dramatic tipping points are often preceded by a long run up.

The old social activist adage, be the change you want to see in the world, applies now more than ever. In addition, a vital lesson I’ve learned as an educator is that we must also be willing to work for change that we may never personally see. (My friends who are parents may understand this implicitly.)

When we put these two pieces together, we have a lot more power than if we did not.

Can you spot a workplace psychopath from a resume and job references?

In a piece for Mainstreet.com, Kathryn Tuggle suggests that we can identify potential psychopaths from their resumes and job references:

They may seem normal, diligent and affable, but when it comes to new employees remember that crazy can fool you for a little while. Keep an eye out for these red flags, or you could end up hiring a psychopath . . .

Drawing from interviews with a clinical psychologist and an executive recruiter, the piece identifies supposed telltale indicators:

• Instability as evidenced by many positions over a short period of time;
• Unexplained chronological gaps in employment histories; and,
• References who go over the top in describing how “charming” the candidate happens to be.

True, chronic instability, dishonesty and deception, and superficial charm are potential signs of psychopathy and other personality disorders. However, there may be other more innocent explanations behind the indicators identified in the article: Younger workers are more likely to move between employers on a frequent basis. Employment chronologies may look especially spotty in a difficult economy and job market. And some people may be truly charming without being the next Ted Bundy.

A more likely (and disturbing) scenario: The “almost psychopath”

I submit that much of the worst damage to the emotional well-being of workers is done by “almost psychopaths,” a term suggested by Dr. Ronald Schouten and attorney James Silver. Almost psychopaths are smart, ruthless, calculating, and have staying power. As some loyal readers know, I have embraced the Schouten/Silver concept of the almost psychopath and written about it on several occasions. Here’s a snippet from a previous blog post:

Ronald Schouten (M.D./J.D.), a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, and James Silver (J.D.), an attorney specializing in criminal law, have co-authored a fascinating new book, Almost a Psychopath: Do I (or Does Someone I Know) Have a Problem with Manipulation and Lack of Empathy? (2012). . . . The authors describe psychopathy as a “major abnormality” marked by a lack of empathy and behaviors that are “inappropriately deceitful, aggressive, and indifferent to the rights or feelings of others.” . . . Schouten and Silver have dealt with genuine psychopaths in their professional practices, but there’s another type of individual they encounter more often, the almost psychopath, which they describe this way:

Nevertheless, we much more frequently find ourselves dealing with people who don’t meet the current technical definition of a psychopath, but who have more than the usual amount of difficulty following rules, fulfilling obligations, or understanding how to treat others.

. . . Whether because of the nature of their behavior . . . or because they violate social or legal norms so frequently, these people live their lives somewhere between the boundaries of commonplace “not-so-bad” behavior and psychopathy.

Their benchmark for making these assessments is the well-known psychopathy checklist developed by Dr. Robert Hare.

“Almost psychopaths” often are adept at navigating the institutions and place settings of everyday life. They also are more prevalent in our society than full-blown psychopaths. Whereas clinical psychopathy covers roughly one percent of the population, Schouten and Silver estimate that some 10-15 percent of the populace might be classified as almost psychopaths. And given survey data suggesting that those harboring psychopathic traits are more likely than others to ascend to leadership positions (there’s the superficial charm kicking in), it’s fair to assert that a lot of managers and executives fit into this category.

Workplace bullying

In a presentation that Dr. Schouten gave at a New Workplace Institute event two years ago, he applied the almost psychopath framework to workplace bullying. Here’s a partial summary of his remarks:

The “almost psychopath” falls short of meeting the criteria for psychopathy, but nevertheless may exhibit many of the most disturbing traits and behaviors. In the workplace, a good number of almost psychopaths engage in bullying. They often escape detection and removal as they charm their superiors and exploit and abuse their peers and subordinates. Almost psychopaths often are fueled by workplace cultures that enable bullying behaviors. Schouten emphasized that this cultural component is often passed down within an organization. It’s possible that interventions could reduce some of these problematic traits in order to improve relationships in the workplace.

Over the years, I have become familiar with hundreds of reported workplace bullying situations. In many of the worst instances, the chief aggressor fits the almost psychopath profile. Rather than frequently switching jobs, almost psychopaths manage to stay and accumulate influence and power, which they leverage to treat people abusively.

Although I wish that identifying individuals of this nature was as easy as a resume and reference check, in reality it’s a lot more difficult than that. On occasion almost psychopaths are identified and dispatched, but often not before they have done a lot of damage to individuals and organizations.

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