Брене Браун - Daring Greatly

Corporations have their own struggles. The Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI) defines bullying as “Repeated mistreatment: sabotage by others that prevented work from getting done, verbal abuse, threatening conduct, intimidation, and humiliation.” A 2010 poll conducted by Zogby International for WBI reported that an estimated 54 million American workers (37 percent of the US workforce) have been bullied at work. Furthermore, another WBI report revealed that 52.5 percent of the time, bullied workers reported that employers basically did nothing to stop the bullying.

When we see shame being used as a management tool (again, that means bullying, criticism in front of colleagues, public reprimands, or reward systems that intentionally belittle people), we need to take direct action because it means that we’ve got an infestation on our hands. And we need to remember that this doesn’t just happen overnight. Equally important to keep in mind is that shame is like the other “sh” word. Like shit, shame rolls downhill. If employees are constantly having to navigate shame, you can bet that they’re passing it on to their customers, students, and families.

So, if it’s happening and it can be isolated to a specific unit, work team, or person, it has to be addressed immediately and without shame . We learn shame in our families of origin, and many people grow up believing that it’s an effective and efficient way to manage people, run a classroom, and parent. For that reason, shaming someone who’s using shame is not helpful. But doing nothing is equally dangerous, not only for the people who are targets of the shaming but also for the entire organization.

Several years ago a man came up to me after an event and said, “Interview me! Please! I’m a financial advisor and you wouldn’t believe what happens in my office.” When I met Don for the interview, he told me that in his organization you choose your office each quarter based on your quarterly results: The person with the best results chooses first and sends the person in the desired office packing.

He shook his head, and his voice cracked a bit when he said, “Given that I’ve had the best numbers for the past six quarters, you’d think I’d like that. But I don’t. I absolutely hate it. It’s a miserable environment.” He then told me how after the previous quarterly results were in, his boss walked into his office, closed the door, and told him that he had to move offices.

“At first I thought my numbers had dropped. Then he told me that he didn’t care if I had the best numbers or if I liked my office; the point was to terrorize the other guys. He said, ‘Busting their balls in public builds character. It’s motivating.’ ”

Before the end of our interview, he told me he was job hunting. “I’m good at my job and even enjoy it, but I didn’t sign up to terrorize people. I never knew why it felt so shitty, but after hearing you talk, now I do. It’s shame. It’s worse than high school. I’ll find a better place to work, and you can be damn sure that I’m taking my clients with me.”

In I Thought It Was Just Me, I tell the following story about Sylvia, an event planner in her thirties who jumped right into our interview by saying, “I wish you could have interviewed me six months ago. I was a different person. I was so stuck in shame.” When I asked her what she meant, she explained that she had heard about my research from a friend and volunteered to be interviewed because she felt her life had been changed by shame. She had recently had an important breakthrough when she found herself on the “losers’ list” at work.

Apparently, after two years of what her employer called “outstanding, winners’ work,” she had made her first big mistake. The mistake cost her agency a major client. Her boss’s response was to put her on the “losers’ list.” She said, “In one minute I went from being on the winners’ board to being at the top of the losers’ list.” I guess I must have winced when Sylvia referred to the “losers’ list” because, without my remarking at all, she said, “I know, it’s terrible. My boss has these two big dry-erase boards outside of his office. One’s the winners’ list, and one board is for the losers.” She said for weeks she could barely function. She lost her confidence and started missing work. Shame, anxiety, and fear took over. After a difficult three-week period, she quit her job and went to work for another agency.

Shame can only rise so far in any system before people disengage to protect themselves. When we’re disengaged, we don’t show up, we don’t contribute, and we stop caring.On the far end of the spectrum, disengagement allows people to rationalize all kinds of unethical behavior including lying, stealing, and cheating. In the case of Don and Sylvia, they didn’t just disengage; they quit and took their talent to competitors.

As we assess our organizations for signs of shame, it’s also important to be aware of external threats—forces outside of our organizations that are influencing how both leaders and employees feel about their work. As a teacher, the sister of two public school teachers, and the sister-in-law of a public high school vice-principal, I don’t have to look far for examples of this.

Several years ago my sister Ashley called me crying. When I asked her what was wrong, she told me that the Houston Chronicle had published the name of every schoolteacher in the Houston Independent School District along with the bonus they received based on their students’ standardized test scores. I hadn’t seen the paper that day and I was stunned. And I was also confused.

“Ashley, you teach kindergarten. Your kids don’t take the tests yet. Is your name in there?”

Ashley explained that her name was in there and that the paper reported that she got the lowest bonus available. What they didn’t report was that it was the highest bonus available to kindergarten teachers. Imagine doing that—reporting everyone’s salaries or bonuses and moreover reporting them inaccurately—to any other group of professionals.

“I’m in a total shame meltdown,” Ashley said, still crying. “All I’ve ever wanted to do was to be a teacher. I work my butt off. I’ve hit up everyone in our family for money so I can buy school supplies for the kids who can’t afford them. I stay after and help the parents help their kids. I don’t get it. There are hundreds of teachers like me, and do you read about that in the paper? No. And it’s not just about me. Some of the very best teachers I know volunteer to teach some of the most challenging students without any thought about how it’s going to affect their scores or bonuses. They do it because they love their work and they believe in the kids.”

Unfortunately, the “Scarlet Letter” approach to teacher evaluation is not just happening in Texas—it’s become an accepted practice across the nation. The good news is that people are finally daring greatly and speaking up. In response to the New York State Court of Appeals ruling that teachers’ individual performance assessments could be made public, Bill Gates wrote this in a New York Times op-ed: “Developing a systematic way to help teachers get better is the most powerful idea in education today. The surest way to weaken it is to twist it into a capricious exercise in public shaming. Let’s focus on creating a personnel system that truly helps teachers improve.”

When I posted Gates’s op-ed on my Facebook page, many teachers left comments. I was moved by this response from a veteran teacher: “For me, teaching is about love. It is not about transferring information, but rather creating an atmosphere of mystery and imagination and discovery. When I begin to lose myself because of some unresolved pain or fears or the overpowering feelings of shame, then I no longer teach … I deliver information and I think I become irrelevant then.”