Knowing When to Get Off Stage
Posted: January 9, 2023 Filed under: AAM, AAMD, AASLH, gender equity, Human Resources, Leadership, Nina Simon, pay equity, Uncategorized, Workplace Bullying 9 Comments
Happy New Year! This is my 402 post and it is my last. Leadership Matters is closing up shop. I’ve been thinking about ending this blog for a while. After all, it’s been a decade, nine years of writing weekly, and a year of monthly posts. When I started I was almost alone in writing about the museum workplace, particularly issues around museum leadership.
Today, so much has changed. Social media has exploded, Twitter has bloomed and faded, while TikTok and Snapchat are ascendant, along with ever-present podcasts. And the blog, a simple essay of sorts, has become a sort of antique. But changes in social media aren’t the reason I’m closing this down. In my most optimistic moments, I’d like to think the museum field caught up, that it’s ready to talk about the fact that working in a museum may not be the Nirvana it sometimes appears from outside, but more importantly, I know there are folks out there whose experience and thoughts are more relevant than mine. Hopefully you will find them or maybe you are ready to become one of the field’s thought leaders.
When Nina Simon packed up and took herself off stage in 2019, I was startled, but also in awe. It was a shock, but not a surprise, a totally Nina thing to do, combining courage, adventure and self care in one swift set of key strokes. If you’re a regular reader, you know I feel strongly about museum folk sticking around past their sell date. It’s not about age, it’s about knowing when you’re not contributing, and I’m pretty sure, that here on these pages, I’ve said everything I need to say.
I have friends and colleagues who “have” blogs, but they write rarely if at all. If Leadership Matters can claim anything, it can claim consistency. So for all of you who’ve enjoyed reading, thank you. Knowing you’re out there somewhere nodding in agreement at my thoughts, rants, and whining, means a lot.
Before I go, here’s a wrap-up of what happened here in 2022: Despite my optimism, things can’t have improved that much because guess what post stubbornly maintained its top spot for the sixth year in a row? Oh, that would be Leadership and Workplace Bullying. It was followed closely by How Not to Write a Job Description, Raising the Wellness Flag, and Trying to Plan in the Unsettling of Covid. Rounding out the top five were Putting the Dipstick Down on the Museum Workforce, and finally, The Silent Treatment and What to Do About It, which talks about bullying’s passive aggressive twin, not speaking to each other. Like I said, if you’re measuring the museum workforce’s health based on Leadership Matters’ readership, there’s clearly some work to be done.
So to end, as always, here in a list of bullet points, my hopes for museum staff and their leaders in 2023 and beyond.
- That leaders recognize the gender pay gap, recognize how racist it is, and act swiftly to close it. Or as Anne Helen Peterson puts it, “We are trying to make our partnerships more equitable, because enduring gender inequity (apart from being bullshit) monopolizes energy better sent elsewhere. ” Maybe you can’t fix the world, but you can fix your own organization.
- That leaders–indeed everyone–practice empathy, kindness and respect–rather than a kind of Gotcha Leadership where everything is fine until you cross a line you didn’t know was there. Remember what the inimitable Lisa Lee said, ““At the museum we pretend we’re not grappling with other issues, but we’re human beings all day.”
- That museums and heritage sites, however small, develop HR policies, helping staff, paid and volunteers navigate workplace issues from happy things–like pregnancy and adoption–to moments of grief, to bullying and harassment.
- That boards take their responsibilities, particularly in terms of their own biases–unconscious and not, as seriously as today’s museum leaders do, supporting brave, courageous organizations that help us understand the world’s issues and complexities.
- That boards and leaders recognize that failing to pay a living wage diminishes us all.
- That museums and heritage organizations partner, collaborate and listen to their communities, who not only know what they like, but know their own stories.
- That AAM, AASLH, AAMD, and AAMG recognize they are what they are because museum workers, hourly, salaried, unionized and not, support them, attend their meetings and trainings, and serve on their boards. Those people matter. Not just because they care for things, but because they are humans who work, and talking about the world of museum work, with all its foibles, makes it easier to understand, and in the end, maybe raises the bar on a better workplace.
Leadership Matters–all 400+ posts–will be available until June so if you want to read, print, cite or quote, have at it. After that it will close. Thank you again for reading, for commenting, and most of all, for the work you do. Flawed, courageous, human, and endlessly creative, you’re the best.
Be well and be kind.
Joan Baldwin
AASLH 2022: After the Words, Action?
Posted: October 3, 2022 Filed under: AASLH, Gender, gender equity, History Museums, Leadership, Leadership and Gender, Leading Across Organizations, museum staff, Workplace Bullying Leave a comment
Two weeks ago I went to AASLH’s annual conference in Buffalo, NY. I’ve gone to AASLH meetings for years, but this one was different. Maybe because for many of us it was our first public meeting since the Pandemic, and, after navigating a sea of Zooms, masks, vaccinations, uncertainty, and illness, suddenly we were loose on the world again, able to talk to one another face-to-face. But I think there was something else. Maybe I’m imagining it, but did politics and culture ripple through the conference in a way it never has before, a feeling of I’m not backing down?
My own meeting started with a panel discussion on the “Museum Worker Crisis.” My role was to provide some historical context, unraveling the past to help participants understand how the world of museum work got to where it is. It’s something I’ve done more than a few times on these pages, and I touched on issues of pay, the gender pay gap, overwork and the Red Queen effect, gender and sexual harassment, bullying, and the high cost of entering the field. I also brought up Quiet Quitting, which seems to be the Great Resignation for people who can’t resign.
My introduction laid a foundation for Dina Bailey, Michelle Moon, Sarah Jencks, and Kate Hayley Goldman to use systems thinking to untangle the problem of why museum workers are in such a pit of despair, and most importantly, what to do about it. Each table worked to define the problem, while keeping their Guiding star (a desired future state) in mind. In systems thinking the Guiding Stars are the leverage points where it’s possible to intervene in a system. For example, participants asked whether public consciousness regarding work in history and heritage sites could be changed so it’s seen as a profession with high value? If that happened, would salaries change?
As they worked, networks of Post-It notes grew across their tables. Ultimately, those were lifted and applied to the walls as each group reported out, raising still more questions like how individuals enter the field, whether an apprenticeship is more appropriate than requiring a master’s degree, and how to change a culture that tends to look backward toward a system that’s no longer viable. There were also some whopper questions like this one: Is it unethical to hire in such a poorly paid field.
Two other highlights for me at least were Rick Hill’s keynote address. Former Assistant Director of the National Museum of the American Indian, writer, father, and member of the Beaver Clan of the Tuscarora Nation of the Haudenosaunee tribe, Hill’s gentle tone belied a career that took him far from home and then back again. He struck an opening note while reminding us that place matters: That we are all born into a place, and it’s ours to use, but most of all to care for, and we must “be careful where we plant our feet.” Forty minutes later, he reminded his audience that the best land acknowledgement is to ask local indigenous people to do acknowledge place in their own language. Failing that, acknowledging a place was important to a people might be better than getting into ownership which flies in the face of the Indigenous idea that we are steward’s for the next generation, not owners.
Day one ended with the General Session titled Historical Thinking Under Fire. And holy smokes, if you needed any evidence that we’ve emerged from the Pandemic to a world that’s ever more Orwellian, this was it. In a panel discussion led by Sarah Jencks, here are some quotes I took down: Critical Race Theory is not a theory, it’s history supported by primary sources; Discomfort doesn’t mean students are scared, it means they are processing; Don’t cede the ground of patriotism, patriotism involves a good honest look at the past; and last, “Nobody cared that I lived with the trauma of enslavement as a school child.”
Unlike other conferences the comments at the panel’s close weren’t a graduate school class in one-upmanship, but a rallying cry. Individuals got up to testify about keeping books on shelves, about standing up to local government, about making John Lewis’ “good trouble.” It was awesome. Can we–and by we I mean history and heritage museums and sites–turn those individual actions and feelings into something collective? Can AASLH help us? (Actually, I think AASLH already has. See its statement on what’s happening in Memphis, not to mention its ongoing work on gender harassment with NCPH.)
As we move forward in a world decimated by climate change, beset with right-wing ideologies and wracked with political divisiveness, my hope is that history museums and heritage sites become a force. As individuals we can’t afford to enable racist, rude, misogynistic behavior. We can’t be silent. As organizations, we need to do the same thing, supporting our fellow non-profits when they are on strike or under attack. And as leaders, we must become employers where staff is safe, seen and supported, and where pay is fair and equitable. So collectively we become places where old patriarchal narratives are pushed aside, and history is told as the complex story it is, not for political gain, but because that’s how we learn—and we’re all learning, if not, pack it in NOW. That we move into the future, listening, empathizing, understanding, and working for change. That’s a history field we can be proud of.
Be well, fight the good fight, and I’ll see you in a few weeks.
Joan Baldwin
People Don’t Change: How to Fix the Team, Not the Person
Posted: July 12, 2021 Filed under: active listening, Leadership, Self-Aware, Workplace Bullying Leave a comment
For many sites and museums Summer 2021 is a re-emergence. Staff dismissed and subsequently rehired or staff who’ve worked from home are back. There is a joy in seeing the band back together again, but there is also the potential for new and not so new workplace conflicts to arise. Although we missed the congeniality of the happy workplace, no one missed dealing with the frustrations of irritating colleagues and staff.
Once about a billion years ago, I worked for a really great leader. When I legitimately complained about a co-worker’s behavior, a macabre mixture of bullying and misogyny, her response was, “Joan, people don’t change.” She meant that she couldn’t radically change this person’s character. In its simplicity, her response wasn’t that different from what my then-therapist said: that I needed to let person X be person X. On the one hand, it was hugely cynical. There are a gazillion pages like this one every week filled with hope. They counsel change, urge new behavior and the rewards that come with it, and yet here were two people I admired and respected telling me not to expect change, suggesting it was not the norm.
So what’s a leader to do? People come to work every day burdened with baggage: lousy parents, bad relationships, illness, challenging children, financial struggles. We expect and need them to re-focus, to essentially drop the baggage, and put work first–the exhibition they need to do, the policy that needs revision, a grant application submitted or a donor cultivated. And often that involves change at least during the work week. Maybe not a huge amount, but enough to move the needle. So how do leaders grease the wheels of behavioral change, while being realistic enough to know that at the end of the day person X will still likely be person X? Do we ask them to change at work for work? Do we point out that in this case the whole is greater than the parts?
One of the first things to keep in my mind is you aren’t a fixer. You’re not Lucy Van Pelt offering “Psychiatric Help, 5 Cents Please.” As a leader, you need your museum, heritage organization, program or team to function well, but thankfully that’s the extent of your responsibility. Nor is it entirely HRs–presuming you have an HR department. That said, the place where individual behaviors and the workplace intersect is the murky ground of bullying, meanness, and sexual harassment. There are laws about that. Should you discover that what appeared to be a workplace squabble is something more, that is when you bring in your HR leader, read your HR policy, and never/ever take a hands off approach. It takes enormous courage to report any of those incidents and each and every one needs to be investigated carefully and treated respectfully.
But what if you’re dealing with garden variety behaviors? They aren’t illegal, but they are annoying, and they almost always have an impact on your team. What about chronic lateness? Epic messiness? Or staff who take a ridiculous amount of time to focus on a task, distracting others in the process, and then blithely announcing they will stay late to finish, thereby eliminating collaboration?
Talk with them. If you have an HR team, it might be a good idea to brief them first, weaving their ideas into your first conversation with your staff person. Is there an outside reason that’s prompted or accelerated this behavior? Does your organization have resources your staff person could tap to help outside of work? Do they need personal time off? Is that an option?
Do a personal check-in. Where are your own biases in this particular contretemps? Is this a person you’ve struggled with as well as your staff members? Why? Know where you are before you talk.
Be clear and direct. It’s not about them–and you are not blaming them for their divorce, their parents’ illness, childcare issues–it’s about work. You may feel like saying, “What is wrong with you?” but you don’t need me to tell you that’s not appropriate. For example, explain how chatting aimlessly for 50 minutes prior or post meeting affects the team, how subordinate staff don’t always feel they can leave a conversation, and how work is delayed and left unfinished.
Give clear, measurable goals. Being direct with staff doesn’t mean you are short tempered, but if a person is unaware that their epically untidy office means it’s off limits for conversation, then they probably need a simple directive that by the end of the day, the week, whatever, progress is made toward tidying up. Ditto for other problems.
Plan to meet again. These conversations aren’t fun, but they lack utility when they are one-offs. Underscore that this matters to you. Why? Because your staff member and the team and the work you all do matters. Before you close the initial conversation, set a date to meet again.
Write Down What Transpired. Keep detailed notes that can be shared, if need be, with HR. God forbid, things don’t get better, you will need your notes to establish how certain patterns of behavior are detrimental. For yourself, process what happened, and how you can improve.
Make sure you understand what your options are. Does your HR department have a personal improvement plan fr staff who are struggling? If not, can you and they craft one? Are there ways of separating the staff member from other staff without making it feel like a time out? If need be, do you know how to go about firing someone?
Don’t let the situation distract you. Another wise person told me 90-percent of my time as a leader would be devoted to 10-percent of the team. Remember to give yourself a break as well. Get up, leave your office. Take a walk. Do something completely different. Make sure you have an outlet–outside of work–to download what’s going on.
Despite this post being all about work, I’ve been on vacation for 10 days. I hope as this hot and fiery summer continues you find some time to re-create too. I also hope you read Vu’s piece on non-profit leaders and the need to re-charge. BTW, if he’s not on your weekly reading list, he should be.
Be well.
Joan Baldwin
10 Tips to Manage Workplace Anger
Posted: February 15, 2021 Filed under: Gender, Leadership, Self-Aware, Self-care, Workplace Anger, Workplace Bullying Leave a comment
This blog is eight years old, and represents 345 posts. In addition to the 741 comments, people sometimes email me. Occasionally those letters detail workplace situations so horrendous it makes you wonder how the writers get up in the morning. Then there are the complimentary emails, making me feel as though weekends spent with my laptop aren’t a complete waste. Infrequently, I get angry emails. When you get an angry email, it makes you wonder. You can’t help think, wow, if we worked in the same office would the writer yell at me? You imagine staring at your screen when a co-worker bursts through the door shouting. You’ve done something really bad, you’ve hurt someone else, you’re thoughtless. You made bad choices.
Let’s face it, work is stressful, and now, 11 months into the pandemic, more stressful than ever. There are illness worries, staffing worries, financial worries, family worries, the too-much-screen-time-almost-no-human-time worries. And on, and on. If we could see into each other’s thought bubbles some days, we’d probably put our own heads down and weep. Thank heavens we can’t. But on the days when life really stinks, how do you keep the thought bubbles private, and that inner raging voice from becoming all too public? And if it does, what do you do next?
Anger at work might be more complicated than anger at home with family or friends. They love you unconditionally. Work is different. In museum offices creativity, efficiency, and collaboration take precedence, followed closely by respect, empathy, and good humor. Work–particularly museum work–has a reputation for being rational, decorous, and prudent. Museum offices are not places where tempers are lost easily. Or frequently.
When tempers are lost, we face a horrid mixture of guilt, humiliation, and residual rage. When we’re angry, we react physically not just mentally. Our temperature goes up, our heart rate increases, and our body sends blood rushing toward our muscles. In other words, we’re ready to fight except our brain is yelling, whoa, wait, YOU’RE AT WORK! If you identify as a woman, one of the physical manifestations of anger may be tears which further humiliates you. There you are furious AND CRYING in front of your staff. And if you’re a woman, and you’ve worked in the museum field or frankly anywhere longer than five minutes, you already know workplace anger, whether accompanied by tears or not, has gender implications. And because gender almost never stands alone, workplace anger is also intersectional.
If you haven’t read this article from Frontiers of Psychology (November 2020), it helps explain how gender and race influence our perceptions of workplace anger. Anger communicates dominance, and when you–because of your race and gender–aren’t perceived as dominant–anger can backfire big time. For example, the researchers point out that white men receive a status boost from anger that Latinx women do not. The latter are not considered aggressive and therefore getting angry is out of character. They suggest loosing your temper at work is damaging to women across races, but in different and complicated ways. The article posits we are all influenced by cultural stereotyping, and when those stereotypes are violated, over the long term, it’s the angry person who is punished.
So what should you do? You’re at work, something happened. Time is lost, a chance is lost, your team messed up, regardless, you’re in a rage.
- Change spaces. Whether it’s the restroom, stepping out of doors, or going to get a cold drink, preferably non-caffeinated, change your environment. Breathe deeply. It sounds woohoo, but actual, intentional breathing tells your body to slow down.
- Self-reflect. Is this a day where everything went wrong from the moment you got up? If yes, is it possible you are globally angry (and frustrated) as opposed to specifically angry?
- When you’re ready, go over the narrative again. Think of yourself in the third person. What was your role? How could you have changed things? What would have made you less angry or frustrated?
- Don’t react in the heat of the moment. Don’t send that email. Don’t barge back into the meeting. Wait before discussing what happened with your colleagues or staff. Instead, acknowledge what happened quickly. Let your direct reports know you’re sorry for the disruption, and you’ll get back to them in a day or so to talk about it. That acknowledges your anger without entangling you in explanations you may not fully understand. It also gives you time to think things over.
- In the meantime, do something useful and completely separate from whatever prompted your anger.
- Apologize. Sometimes leaders and colleagues think if they just don’t mention their angry outburst, people will forget. They don’t. It’s almost a universal truth that we remember bad events more clearly than good ones. So plan on apologizing, not just to say you’re sorry, but to offer some explanation for what happened–you’re suffering sleep deprivation, your parent is gravely ill, you’re preparing for a tricky meeting with the trustees–and that your goal is preventing it from happening again.
- Be prepared to wait. Confirmation bias or the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories is something else to think about. Because confirmation bias affects us all, our colleagues are more likely to remember your single angry moment, then your many even-tempered ones.
- Healing takes time. You may be over your anger–studies show that young men in particular shed anger faster–but your colleagues who faced the brunt of your outburst, may take some time to build trust again.
- Be empathetic. If it’s a staff member or colleague who’s angry, treat them the way you want to be treated, and offer them some space to collect themselves and reflect.
- Last, if you’re the recipient of someone else’s anger, know the difference between anger and bullying. Don’t let yourself be bullied.
We spend a lot of time at work, more than many other industrialized countries. Citizens of the European Union have the right to refuse to work more than 48 hours per week, while workers in Germany and Sweden work closer to 35 than the U.S.’s 46.8 per week. Regardless “workism,” particularly in the age of COVID when work is always with us, makes us stressed; being stressed makes us angry, and as we’ve seen, being angry leads to a boatload of problems. Take your self-care seriously. Eat healthfully. Try to get enough sleep. Take the vacation that’s due you, and model self-care for your colleagues and staff. When you feel like you’re going to snap, be honest. Say, “I’m about to implode. I’m going for a walk.”
Forget the stupid groundhog. Spring, vaccines, and immunity can’t be that far off. Breathe deeply.
Joan Baldwin
It’s All About Your Staff: Ending Workplace Bullying
Posted: January 4, 2021 Filed under: AAM, museum staff, Workplace Bullying 2 Comments
In the past, I’ve used the first post of the year to offer hopes for the coming 12 months, but I’m a little short on hope at the moment. It still feels as though we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. So this week I’m taking a different tack. When I reviewed Leadership Matters’ 2020 data and discovered that after three years Leadership and Workplace Bullying remained one of the most read posts, maybe bullying deserves some more air time.
2021 will be a different sort of year in the museum business. As more and more of us are vaccinated, large wealthy organizations will plod forward, bolstered by their endowments, while smaller, nimble museums may emerge completely changed. And, if we’re to believe AAM’s grim prediction, one out of three museums won’t survive at all. But for those who do make it, maybe this is the year to mentor, nurture and protect staff. That means recognizing bullying for what it is, and most importantly, doing something about it.
Ever had a nightmare where you feel as though you can’t wake up? Being bullied is a little like that. When you’re bullied, you are trapped in a pattern of behavior that’s foisted on you by a perpetrator. You may feel as though you’ve been drop kicked back to middle school, surely a nadir in human emotional development. Depending on who you believe, somewhere between 20 to 25-percent of Americans experience bullying at work at some point in their adult lives, and another 20-percent witness it. That’s almost half of the workforce so perhaps it is no wonder this topic attracts readers.
What is bullying? According to researchers at the Workplace Bullying Institute, it’s “repeated, health-harming mistreatment of one or more persons (the targets) by one or more perpetrators that takes one or more of the following forms: verbal abuse, offensive conduct/behaviors (including nonverbal) which are threatening, humiliating, or intimidating; or work interference – sabotage – which prevents work from getting done.” For all museum leaders out there, take careful note of the last phrase, that bullying keeps staff from doing their work.
Bullying differs from harassment in its repetitive nature. Harassment could happen just once and is often directed from a perpetrator toward a member of a protected group, for example, a younger white male toward an older BIPOC female. Bullying is not illegal unless the target can prove they are part of a protected group, but it is deeply embedded in gender and power. Seventy percent of bullies are male and 61-percent of bullies are leaders or supervisors. That doesn’t mean bullies can’t be women or your co-workers. They can. Bullying isn’t always visible, but its effects are.
If you are a bully’s target:
- Knowledge is power, so know the signs. Are you isolated at work? Do people stop talking when you walk into a room? Are you reprimanded or belittled in public in ways your colleagues aren’t? Are you given ridiculous and impossible assignments reminiscent of the fairy story where the princess has to empty the pond with a sieve? The list goes on, but if any of this sounds familiar, you are likely being bullied.
- Protect Yourself: Bullying isn’t something you can deal with alone so be certain you have support. If you have insurance, consider working with a counselor or psychologist to help process what’s going on. Make sure you you share with friends, colleagues and family as well, and that they understand the serious nature of what’s happening.
- Take Action: Keep a record of what’s happening to you. I know it’s 2021, but it’s better if you keep a record in pen, preferably in a spiral bound notebook. If your organization has an HR department, talk to them when you are ready. And speaking of ready, recognize that your workplace may choose not to discipline your bully, so understand you may need to look for another position if the situation becomes untenable. Your health is not worth your job.
If you’re a colleague and witness bullying:
- Support your co-workers: One of the hardest things for bullying targets to cope with is isolation. If you avoid the target like the bully wants and expects, if you join the bully in withholding information or by staying silent when they join a group, you’re part of the problem. Implicitly, you are bullying too. Be there for your colleagues.
- Listen to your colleagues, empathize and respect their story. Do your best to disrupt the perpetrator’s plans: Invite your targeted colleague to join conversations, and share information with them. Offer to go to HR with them. Sometimes multiple voices resonate in ways that a single voice doesn’t.
If you are a museum leader:
- Create a Museum Values Statement: Collaborate with representatives from the board, the staff, and volunteers, to write a Values Statement that spells out behavior your museum or heritage organization expects on its campus. And make sure your HR personnel policy is up-to-date.
- Check in with your staff: While you’re not a counselor or a psychologist, your staff’s well being directly affects the running of your organization. Stop and ask how they are. Bullying is toxic. Don’t let it run amok.
- Take Responsibility: Bullying is about power. It’s frequently directed by the less able towards the talented. The whole point of bullying is to control a situation. It won’t go away on its own. If your museum doesn’t have an HR department, work with your leadership team–including board members–to figure out a plan B for how to address bullying.
- Bullying isn’t exclusive to staff: In any museum or heritage organization, it can happen on the board, from board to staff, from donor to staff, and from staff to volunteer. Be aware. Be empathetic. Be supportive, but commit to taking action.
The museum field is a competitive one, made all the more so with the huge number of people who’ve seen their jobs eliminated or put on pause as the result of the pandemic, but as I’ve written before, your staff is your organizational lifeblood. Without them, you are a fancy house with fancy stuff, a grand building with important paintings, acres of green space with living collections, or a building where exhibits and experiments go untried. Commit to making 2021 the year when your staff, whether paid, volunteer or both, feels safe, seen and supported, so hopefully when I run Leadership Matters data for this year, the posts on bullying will no longer be in the top three.
Stay safe. Be well, and best wishes for a happy, creative, regenerative New Year.
Joan Baldwin
A Speech We Wish We’d Given, A Speech for All Women
Posted: July 27, 2020 Filed under: Human Resources, Leadership and Gender, Sexual Harassment, Uncategorized, Workplace Bullying Leave a comment
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the House floor on Thursday. The New York Times, Inc. House Television, via Associated Press
This week Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a speech in Congress many of us wish we’d made rather than fretting alone in our cars or the women’s room. She said what so many of us want to say, only better. Ocasio-Cortez is member of Congress so we expect her to be collected, measured and smart and she was, but she included all of us, speaking for any woman who’s ever been diminished, trash talked, or on the receiving end of harassing words from a man, because to quote her, “all of us have had to deal with this in some form, some way, some shape at some point in our lives.” Ocasio-Cortez was responding to remarks, and then a subsequent public apology, by Congressman Ted Yoho. He called her a f***ing b**** on the Capitol steps where Yoho’s remark was overheard by a reporter.
So if you’re still working in the museum world and not among the formerly employed, and you identify as a woman, what do you do when this kind of gendered anger comes your way? As we’ve said, the museum world is still hierarchical, patriarchal, and traditional. In cultures like that women are expected to be kind, collegial, even motherly, but definitely not strong and especially not angry.
Yoho called Octavio-Cortez crazy and out of her mind. Research tells us when men get angry it’s associated with power; it’s even seen as courageous. In an article on women’s emotions and the workplace, the Gender Action Portal says that male job applicants expressing anger were more likely to be hired than those expressing sadness. With women, on the other hand, emotions, and particularly anger are inexorably tied to hormones, to centuries of tropes and metaphors where emotion comes from some dark, crazy, peculiarly gendered place.
So what should you do if someone at work name calls you in this gendered way? It’s unlikely there’ll be a reporter nearby to make the interchange viral, and equally unlikely that the name caller will stand up in front of all your colleagues, and frame an apology while invoking his own wife and daughters. So here are some things to keep in mind:
- First, keep your composure. Channel your inner Michelle Obama, and go high, rather than low, and your inner AOC by stepping away and collecting yourself.
- Know your rights. If a colleague or your direct report calls you a f***ing idiot, that’s different than if you identify as female and that same person calls you a f***ing b****. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) classifies the latter as abuse because it’s tied to your race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, national origin or genetic information. Be sure to document every incident, preferably in pen on paper with date and time, the old fashioned way.
- Assuming your organization has an employee handbook, know what it says. Very few organizations tolerate abusive language in the workplace. Whether they enforce their own rules is another matter. Do remember that HR’s primary purpose is to protect the organization so if you approach them, make sure you are calm, unemotional, and frame what happened not only to you, but its spill over effect on your team, program or department.
- Don’t let anyone–your boss or HR–describe what’s happened as a clash of personalities. It’s not. According to the Workplace Bullying Institute, which is a fount of information, the he said/she said scenario is an easy go-to for HR because they can shrug their collective shoulders and act as though it’s impossible to legislate.
- Know when you’ve reached your limit. In hard times like a global pandemic and subsequent economic crisis, it might seem like madness to walk away from a job. But bullies are masters of serial behavior. If you’ve been name called once, it’s likely it will happen again. Dodging someone’s targeted anger can affect your health and well being.
- Consider whether you have the will to press forward with legal action. If so, follow the steps outlined by the Bullying Institute.
- Last, if you’re not the target, but instead the witness to this kind of behavior, for the love of God, stand up and help your colleague. Don’t avert your eyes while giving a silent thanks that it’s not you. Comfort them. Validate what’s happened to them. Write down what you observed and share it with them. Ask others to do the same. In theory, HR is far more likely to pay attention to a group than an individual.
The museum world isn’t a very happy place at the moment. Too many are out of work, and recent articles report that the fiscal downturn and pandemic closures may take out one in three museums. Yet rather than caring for their staffs, museums like the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Akron Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and the Erie Museum of Art spent last spring as poster children for organizations who failed to acknowledge workplace bullying, gender harassment, and racist behavior until it was too late. What AOC demonstrated in her measured and inclusive response is to make clear that for her Representative Yoho’s remarks weren’t personal, but instead another instance of the type of targeted language used by men against women. She’s a busy person. She could have turned away and forgotten about it, but she didn’t. You don’t have to either. #MuseumMeToo.
Joan Baldwin
Workplace Bullying is a Work Problem: 9 Tips to Deal With It
Posted: February 3, 2020 Filed under: Leading Across Organizations, Museum, museum staff, Organizational Values, Workplace Bullying, Workplace Values | Tags: Leadership, museums, nonprofit 1 Comment
This week a colleague of mine was lied to by a co-worker in an effort to coerce a change in plans. He also accused her of stealing, something so serious it’s a wonder she wasn’t rushed to HR by security. But she wasn’t. That’s because what was said to her was part of a pattern of bullying that goes back at least 24 months.
Sadly, bullying doesn’t just happen in our feral middle school years when everyone seems to behave badly. For many, it continues into adulthood, flourishing in offices, meetings and break rooms. The Workplace Bullying Institute defines bullying as threatening, intimidating, unwelcome behavior that occurs over a period of time and is meant to harm and control individuals who feel powerless to respond. The fact that there is a Workplace Bullying Institute indicates how badly we treat one another.
Nationally, some 75-percent of American workers witness bullying, with 47-percent reporting as victims. In the museum world–which is still waiting for a serious workplace behavior survey–we know from our 2018 Gender Discrimination Survey that 66-percent of museum workers responding experienced being talked over and having their opinions and ideas go unrecognized; however, there’s a lot more to bullying than those two topics.
Like its cousin, sexual harassment, workplace bullying blossoms in a work environment that chooses not to stand for anything, meaning it has no workplace values which it asks staff to follow. As hideous as workplace sexual harassment is, it’s prohibited by law. That’s not the case with bullying, particularly if your bully is clever enough to divorce bullying from gendered stereotypes, meaning your bully isn’t only targeting young women, but is instead an equal-opportunity jerk.
But enough background, what I really meant to write about was how I admire my colleague. She held herself together–fortunately there was a third party present–and displayed neither her anger nor her pain in front of her bully. Nor did she cave and concede to what the bully wanted. She’s a strong person, not a frightened, wilting flower, and contrary to the memes and metaphors in films and novels, it’s strong staff members who are frequently bullied. So…. if there’s a bully in your museum workplace, what should you do?
If you’re a leader:
- Recognize what bullying does to your workplace culture: It creates a toxicity that’s quick to take over. And if you don’t stop it, you’re part and parcel of that toxic culture. Maybe you got into museum leadership with loftier aspirations than arbitrating personnel disputes, but understand your inaction costs your museum money. Why? Because bullying victims quit. And before they leave, they take sick days and time off for therapists, because coming to work fills them with dread. That costs your organization money too. Bottom line: happy staff are productive and creative; bullied staff are fearful and angry. You choose.
- Acknowledge how important trust is: If, as a leader, you let a staff member come to work every day vulnerable and unprotected, they will cease to trust you about everything because they see your museum or heritage organization through a scrim of injustice.
- Remember this isn’t about you: Do not impose your own narrative and biases on your staff’s experiences. If you’re a 50-year old white woman, you have no idea what it’s like to be a 24-year old woman of color or a Latinx gay man. Respect what your staff tells you. It’s likely you haven’t walked in their shoes.
- Acknowledge bullying as a work problem: Talk about it with your whole staff. If you and your HR department don’t feel comfortable discussing workplace bullying, find someone in your community–a counselor or therapist–who specializes in bullying in group settings and have them talk to staff.
- Work with your staff, board personnel committee, and HR to create a museum values statement: Discuss what norms your ENTIRE staff want to live with and draft your values statement. Are you eye-rolling? Well, imagine how much easier it would be to speak with the staff bully if you had a values statement. Your workplace is a community. And a collectively agreed-upon set of norms that’s in the employee handbook, there for all to see, defines acceptable community behavior.
If you’re a staff member:
- If you’re witnessing behavior, but not reporting it, you’re enabling it. Talk to the victim, tell them how uncomfortable and distressed you are for them, and that you hope they’ll report it, but if they won’t, you will.
- If you’re a victim, marshal your personal resources: Do you have access to a therapist or counselor? Do you have friends and family who are good listeners? Make sure you know how your workplace expects you to report bullying.
- Know the rules: Understand the policies and procedures that govern your museum or heritage organization. Know where they are written and how to access them. Is there any mention of bullying? If yes, how are those situations supposed to be resolved? If there are no instructions, and you’re charting unknown territory, use the Workplace Bullying Institute Resources to help make your case in the strongest manner possible.
- Does your organization have a values statement? If yes, has your bully violated any part of it? Every state has a different take on bullying. Know the law (if there is one) where you live.
Bullies are everywhere. Sadly, working in a fancy museum with a huge endowment doesn’t guarantee anything except you likely have access to an HR department, and working in a small one only guarantees you know the whole staff well, not that there isn’t a bully among them. Preventing bullying, like so much else about creating humane museum workplaces, depends on all of us. We need to be kind, empathetic, to support one another, to look out for one another. You’re not just a curator, an educator, a media specialist, an exhibit designer, you’re also a colleague. When one of the team hurts, you all do.
Joan Baldwin
Image: johnhain / Pixabay
In Post Image Credit: WilliamCho / Pixabay
https://www.dandalaw.com/personal-injury-of-workplace-bullying/
Take Another Look: Leadership Matters’ Top 2019 Posts
Posted: December 31, 2019 Filed under: Leadership, Learning Organizations, Museum, museum staff, Museum wages, Nonprofit Leadership, Organizational Values, Workplace Bullying, Workplace Values | Tags: Leadership, museums, nonprofit Leave a commentOur first post of the new decade will premiere next week. In the meantime, here are Leadership Matters’ top five posts since our beginnings seven years ago. And fair warning to all museum leaders: the top post since 2013 was “The Silent Treatment and What to Do About It.” There’s something sad about that, but without further ado, here they are to ponder and enjoy.
1. The Silent Treatment and What to Do About It.
2. Leadership and Workplace Bullying
3. Museum CEO — Lowest Full-Time Staff Salaries
4. Why is Museum Definition So Important?
5. Making the Moral Argument for Museum Pay
6. And as a bonus, our post,Museums as a Pink Collar Profession, made the American Alliance of Museum’s top-10 posts for the year.
Best wishes for the new year and the new decade.
Joan Baldwin
Managing Museum Workplace Conflict
Posted: August 19, 2019 Filed under: Communication, Leading Across Organizations, Museum, museum staff, Nonprofit Leadership, Workplace Bullying | Tags: empathy, kindness, Leadership, nonprofit Leave a comment
Recently I heard a story about a colleague’s child who was bullied at school. As heartbreaking as the actual bullying was, the more alarming part of the narrative was the school administrators’ reaction. They took the position that unless an adult witnessed the bullying, it didn’t happen. Sadly, this behavior affects not just middle school students, but working adults as well. It’s a neat trick, saying that something didn’t happen unless you’re there. It diminishes the victim, making her feelings and experience invisible. Imagine how much of life you could relegate to the “not my problem” column if you said, ‘Well, I wasn’t there, so it didn’t happen.’
How many of you have finally summoned the courage to see your executive director about a workplace conflict only to be asked “Well, have you tried talking to Jane?” as if talking wasn’t the thing that brought you to the Director’s office in the beginning? And how many of you who are leaders have responded with some version of “Well, I’m sure John didn’t mean it that way.” Really? If you need an explanation of why that’s a completely useless sentence, read on.
In the for-profit world, experts tell us as much as 42-percent of workplace time is spent trying to resolve conflicts, and their resolution can involve 20-percent of a leader’s work week. To my knowledge, no one has studied whether the museum world’s statistics are similar, but even if museums are half as conflict ridden, that’s still eight hours a week of open disagreement, passive aggression or conflict avoidance.
And to all the museum women out there, know that workplace disputes, especially those pitting one woman against another, hurt you more than disagreements involving your male colleagues. Why? The short answer is there is a lot bias about women in the workplace, but to begin, men and women judge conflict between two women more harshly than between a man and a woman or between two men. Men’s arguments are not termed ‘cat fights,’ for example. Men are expected to be aggressive, and forgiven for being rude, while women are expected to play nice, be nice and smile, and a woman’s “nice” facade may mask anger and back biting. Further, women perceive other women as more judgmental than men. As a result, they avoid female colleagues in an effort to sidestep perceived judgment.
So what’s a leader to do in the face of workplace conflict?
- Model the behavior you want: If you get angry, direct your anger toward situations and things rather than people and their personalities.
- Treat everyone with honesty and respect. When you meet with disgruntled co-workers, be impartial. If it appears you’ve already sided with one of them, your attempt at mediation will die on the vine.
- Don’t let conflict fester. If you get wind of a problem, sit down with your team members sooner rather than later.
- Talk to your staff not just about what they’re doing, but how they feel about what they’re doing. Perceived and real inequities create stress, which prompts conflict.
- Remember to listen, and when beginning conflict resolution, remember to promise confidentiality.
And if you’re a staff member?
- Treat everyone with honesty and respect.
- Try not to take sides. This isn’t 8th grade. Strong bonds between co-workers may force colleagues to take sides, choosing one faction over another.
- Don’t let conflict fester. If you’re having issues with a co-worker that don’t go away in a day or two, talk it out with your department leader or ED.
- Try not to personalize conflict. This isn’t about you as much as it’s about work. Keep your focus on what you’re asked to do.
If you’re a museum leader, can you ignore conflict, believing that unless you see people yelling at one another, your workplace is a little Nirvana? Of course. You can follow the path of the middle school teachers in the opening story, but unlike middle school students, your staff chooses to work for your organization. If coming to work leaves them psychological wrecks, they may quit. And conflict is costly: It jeopardizes projects; stressed employees may take sick days; and conflict leads to costly resignations. And, while engaged workers make everything easier, toxic ones cost your museum money. In one for-profit study from Harvard, a toxic worker cost her organization $12,000 annually, while an engaged worker added $5,000 in terms of productivity.
Museums aren’t the high-paying stars of the non-profit world. They get by, in part, because staff has a deep love for art, science, and human experience, translating them into something experiential and understandable, and, more recently, engaging communities they serve in dialog, story telling and knowledge sharing. But organizations who don’t pay well must compensate in other ways. Creating work places where it’s fine to disagree, but where bullying and toxic behavior aren’t tolerated is a small step toward building healthy museum work environments. #bekind.
Yours for a conflict-free workplace,
Joan Baldwin
Women and Anger, continued….
Posted: September 24, 2018 Filed under: Leadership and Gender, Museum, museum career, museum staff, Workplace Bullying, Workplace Values | Tags: career, equality, nonprofit, soft skills, women 4 Comments
As I’ve said before, we have a lot of loyal readers, but they only occasionally comment. So since several of you remarked on last week’s post, I thought I should respond. Here’s the line that caused a few of you to grit your teeth: “It took generations for this gender divide over anger to grow, and it’s not going to go away this year. That means if you’re a woman or identify as one, you need ways to navigate the moments when you are angry.” You see that as problematic because I’m asking women or those identifying as women to change rather than demanding the system change for them.
First, let me be clear: I don’t think it is women’s obligation to bend to a system that, in the worst cases, stymies advancement through bullying and sexual harassment, and in the best cases advances women with the albatross of a pay gap. That said part of what’s wrong with the workplace isn’t just that angry women are treated differently than angry men. It’s that women’s emotions at the office are workplace nuclear waste. They never disappear. In my experience, months after being angry a woman staff member can be reminded of how emotional she is in an annual evaluation. For many women, this is akin to being slapped. As a result, they get angry and emotional which is exactly what the often male, sometimes bullying, boss expects.
So do I think women should walk on egg shells? No. But what are the consequences for a woman who stands up in a meeting and implodes? Not applause. Nope those go to her male colleague for “showing emotion.” Even if there’s grudging agreement that a woman did and said the right thing, I believe she may be haunted by her behavior. She’ll be tagged as the women who cries. Or shouts. Or looses her temper. All I’m saying is, if a woman is going to take that risk, she needs to have thought through the consequences. Because women being angry won’t change the system. Men and women need to see women’s anger differently and that will take time. My cautionary statements are there to protect women from pushback in the meantime.
One of the ways change may happen is when women leaders model (and talk about) behavior they want in their staff–both men and women–with the idea that cooling off first, and thinking about what you want to say versus what you need to say, are behaviors everyone could and should use.
*****
This week will find Leadership Matters (Anne Ackerson and me), along with our colleague Greg Stevens, Program Director for Seton Hall’s MA in Museum Professions, leading the Leadership Forum that precedes the AASLH Annual Conference in Kansas City. We’re focusing on three big challenges for 21st-century leaders: Empathy as an Essential Leadership Skill; Whether Museum Leaders Treat Staff as Assets or Liabilities; and How to Create Museum Careers that are Part of a Continuum of Practice. It’s a lot, but we know the folks who signed up are full of ideas, and we applaud them and their organizations for supporting them in taking the time to think about not just what they do, but why they do it. Stay tuned for our update from beautiful Kansas City.
Joan Baldwin
Leadership Matters 