TED Talks Daily - Sunday Pick: How to spot a bully in the workplace | Fixable

Episode Date: September 1, 2024

Each Sunday, TED shares an episode of another podcast we think you'll love, handpicked for you… by us. Today we're sharing a special episode of Fixable, TED's business advice call-in show, hosted by Anne Morriss and Frances Frei.Where do bullies go when they grow up? New research shows they just move from the playground to the workplace. This week, Master Fixer and social psychologist Amy Cuddy joins Anne and Frances to walk us through the strikingly stable patterns bullies follow to undermine and ostracize their targets – patterns that are way more common than you might think. Get part two of this conversation where Cuddy details actions you can take to stop bullies -- and other ways to fix your problems at work -- by finding Fixable wherever you get your podcasts.What problems are you dealing with at work right now? Text 234-FIXABLE or email [e-mail] to be featured on the show.Transcripts for Fixable are available at go.ted.com/fixabletranscripts

TED Audio Collective. Hey TED Talks Daily listeners, I'm Elise Hu. Today we have an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective, handpicked by us for you. Many think of bullying as something that only happens when they're in school, but that's not always the case. This week we're taking a look at workplace bullying with an episode of Fixable. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy will explain how to spot workplace bullies and more importantly, how and why we should all talk about them.

Whatever you're dealing with at work, a bully, a bad boss, burnout, Fixable is there to help. And it's back for a new season. Each week, business leaders Anne Morris and Francis Fry share real fixes to some of the most common workplace problems. And if you're listening and have your own workplace issue, you can send in your questions by emailing fixable at ted.com. Find Fixable wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com. Now on to the episode right after a quick break. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at

our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. AI keeping you up at night?

Wondering what it means for your business? Don't miss the latest season of Disruptors, the podcast that takes a closer look at the innovations reshaping our economy. Join RBC's John Stackhouse and Sonia Sinek from Creative Destruction Lab as they ask bold questions like, why is Canada lagging in AI adoption? And how to catch up? Don't get left behind. Listen to Disruptors, the innovation era, and stay ahead of the game in this fast changing world. Follow Disruptors on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. Can Indigenous ways of knowing help kids cope with online bullying? At the

University of British Columbia, we believe that they can. Dr. Johanna Sam and her team are researching how both Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth cope with cyber aggression, working to bridge the diversity gap in child psychology research. At UBC, our researchers are answering today's most pressing questions. To learn how we're moving the world forward, visit ubc.ca forward happens here. Frances, today we have the pleasure and the privilege of speaking with our friend and colleague, Amy Cuddy. Amy is one of these people that she's known around the world. And if you ever walk down a street with her, strangers will stop her and tell her the influence she has had on their lives. It's really quite extraordinary. Yeah, she has this great rock star force for good energy around her, and you really see it in public. I've witnessed those

same interactions. Well, let's give the audience some context for the few people walking the planet who may not know her. Amy is a social psychologist and best-selling author whose work often focuses on bringing large, messy challenges back within our own locus of control, allowing us to perform better as leaders, as colleagues, even just as humans moving through a complicated world. Many people will know Amy for her mind-body research on the benefits of power posing. She gave a TED Talk on this a few years ago. It's now one of the most viewed TED Talks of all time, 70 million views and counting. You know, Amy and I worked together at Harvard, and so I know firsthand how incredible she is. Her first book, Presence, it changed my life. I couldn't be more excited for her next one, which is coming out literally any day now.

It might even be out by the time you're listening to this. Yes, I'm super excited. And this is what we want to talk with her about today. So the book is called Bullies, Bystanders, and Bravehearts. It's about workplace bullying, what it looks like, how it progresses, how to intervene. We had such a great conversation with Amy that we're actually going to make this into a two-part episode. So this one will be the nitty-gritty of knowing how to spot bullying. And next week, we're going to get into how to stop it. It is so important. A master fixer on workplace bullying. I'm excited to get into it. I'm Anne Morris. I'm a company builder and leadership coach.

And I'm Frances Fry. I'm a professor at the Harvard Business School, and I'm Anne's wife. And this is Fixable from the TED Audio Collective. On this show, we believe that meaningful change happens fast, anything is fixable, and good solutions are usually just a single brave conversation away. Amy Cuddy, welcome to Fixable. Thank you. So let's get into it. Okay.

And I want to start with some definitions because I think this is a really critical part of this conversation. What is that bullying requires more than one person. A lone bully is impotent. And when you look at other forms of really bad behavior, which I'm not saying are less bad, they can be enacted by a single person. Bullying requires other people to join and to turn on its target. So I'm actually going to read the definition, if that's okay. You can use it wherever you want to. But I do think it's so important to get the definition right and for us to have a shared language to talk about this, because I think there's people fear being labeled bullies when they're not bullies. They're afraid

to say something is bullying because it feels so loaded. And so we do need to get it right. So after looking at decades of research on bullying, interviewing hundreds of targets of bullying, having my own personal experience with it, seeing it repeat over and over again. This is the definition that I use. Bullying is a profound, intentional, targeted, serial, and escalating attack on a person's social and professional integrity and viability that's carried out by multiple people. Bullying involves a power differential that favors the bully, but that power differential need not be formal or structural and doesn't have to exist when the bullying begins. Either way, the gap grows over time.

While bullying tends to be instigated by one person, It is not a single assault perpetrated by only one person. It's an ongoing campaign to shame, humiliate, discredit, demoralize, punish, and socially kill or permanently exclude the target. Wow. I'm just letting that land. I'm letting that land. I know, it's a lot. It's a lot. Every word is heavy.

Yeah. It's a lot. Every word is heavy. I feel those words and I can see, oh, in retrospect, this was obviously bullying. But in those early stages, that distinction between criticism and early stage bullying, I can imagine second guessing myself in those moments. Most everyone who feels that they're being bullied is actually being bullied. Got it. It is that clear. It's that different from other bad experiences that they've had. But I think that one way to check in with yourself and your interpretation of your own experience is to look at some of the kind of the organizational or cultural or environmental

conditions that lead to bullying, right? Are you in an organization where this might be more likely to happen? And understanding the dynamic with that person that seems to be the primary bully is important. I mean, primary bullies share a lot of common characteristics. Bullies tend to be people who never have enough status and become threatened when someone who they saw as lower ranking than them in the relevant hierarchy suddenly gains more respect. Status. Status both inside and outside that community with an external audience, for example. Status. Status both inside and outside that community, like with an external audience, for example. Okay. That is what sort of triggers the bully. That's what we call crossing the line of resentment. And so a lot of targets, they know it's when I, for example, won that national award in architecture, or it's when I had that duty at work rewarded with an employee recognition.

I mean, whatever it is. I won sales leader of the year. Exactly. Awards, recognitions, things like that are often what I call the critical incident that sort of sets it off. And so also know that this is more likely to occur in organizations that are very hierarchical, where a scarcity mindset is common. So where people are kind of encouraged to be competitive in an unhealthy way. So the more one person gets,

the less you get. That's the mindset, as opposed to sort of celebrating each other's victories. Got it. It's more likely to occur in places where sort of prestige and status are the main currencies. Right? So it's very common in law firms, in hospitals, in academia. And do bullies think they're bullying? What do they think they're doing in these scenarios? No, they don't.

And they're not losing sleep at night. They rationalize their behavior. Either they believe that they've been somehow cheated unfairly out of something they deserved. So they have lower status than they earned. They should have gotten more. Yeah. Or they believe that they're actually like moral crusaders. And they feel that you are casting aspersions if you call

them a bully. And one of the problems for targets is that they do tend to be seen as do-gooders. And they don't want to hurt other people. They don't want to get somebody fired. And they are reluctant to report what's happening. And by the time they do, whoever they're reporting to is likely to turn it around and sort of say, maybe you're the problem. And there's a term for this, DARVO, D-A-R-V-O, deny, accuse, reverse victim and offender. So what happens often with HR, because HR isn't really seeing what's happening. They're not in that department or unit or situation. They're just getting this, you know, this sort of sketch six months later is that they believe that it's some kind of personality conflict and probably you're the problem. Because the bullies are more likely,

and there's good evidence of that, to have established relationships with HR in advance of these things being reported. Like protective relationship. Exactly. Exactly. You mentioned law firms, hospitals. Can you give us a sense of what you believe to be the scale of the problem right now? About half of people will be the target of a bully at some point in their lives. But I think even maybe more important, almost everyone will witness it. And witnessing it causes moral injury. Just to observe it happening unchecked alone causes pain, right? And also normalizes it, and we can go on and on from there. But it is just, it's remarkably common. And yes,

it has become more pervasive. We see entertainers, we see politicians, we see leaders bullying people very publicly with impunity. And, I mean, even, you know, somebody was telling me the other day, she said, don't you think even, like, reality TV does this? You know, like, reality shows are almost all about these ridiculous escalating conflicts over nothing. Like, we're used to seeing people fight and attack each other as entertainment. You know, that's what you're waiting for, you know, and people will post the popcorn-eating meme, like, I'm here for this. Like, it's, you know, it's fun to watch someone be destroyed. So I think it's not just social media. There are so many ways in which media have worsened the problem. Right, right. You have talked about

and written about bullying often following a pattern. So talk to us about the pattern and why it's so stable. So what I think I found most surprising, upsetting, and also validating as I've been working on this book and interviewing targets is how predictable and stable the anatomy and physics of bullying are across situations. It doesn't matter if you are working in the dairy aisle at a small grocery store in a small town, or if you're a celebrity, or if you're a nurse, it works the same way. So what tends to happen is that, as we already discussed, you have a person who has some power and views the world as fundamentally hostile. That's one of the characteristics that bullies share. They have a scarcity mindset. They believe the world is fundamentally hostile. They tend to be overplaced relative to their actual abilities. Not always,

but they tend to be. And they have this deep, deep hunger for status and recognition. So what tends to happen is the target has some kind of success or recognition. People notice the target for doing something well. That target then gains respect or status not just inside the organization but also with people outside the organization. So I'm going to use the example of the target who came in and they wanted to say hi to him. When a new manager came into town, she was very threatened by how much people liked him. And so for her, people coming into the store and saying, hey, can I see, and I'll use the name Michael, can I see Michael? We just want to say hi to him. That really bothered her.

He had crossed the line of resentment. And then she started to, and this is what happens next, to do little tests to figure out if she could get away with bullying him. And that's what bullies do first. And often those tests fail and they move on to another target. And so this is something that I want people to notice. These are little slights, like little comments in front of other people to humiliate the target. Those are what I call bully tests. Sometimes they fail and people are like, nah, bro, that's not cool. Like, you can't do that. When that happens, they're like, fine.

You know, they stop, they move on to the next person. And then in Michael's case, what were those tests? Well, he was very fastidious about his job. He did his job perfectly. And he was a rule follower. And there was a mask mandate by this grocery store chain. And he followed it. And she did not like that.

And she saw him as a, you know, as a do-gooder and as, you know, a problem for her because he was following rules that she wasn't following. He was not giving her a hard time about it, but she would start to make fun of him in team meetings. And other people, you know, other people just let it go. It escalated, but those were the early things that happened, which hurt him, but he didn't see what was coming next. So the bully essentially tests to find out socially if they can get away with it. And if nobody checks them, then they move on to the next stage. Yeah. If no one checks them, they move on to the next stage. If people do check them, they move on to the next target. Got it. Got it. So they're going to move on in one direction or

the other. Either way, bullies are going to bully. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. So that's a bully test. And I want people to, as they learn about how it unfolds, see all of the opportunities where they might have been able to step in and do something so small to stop it from escalating. Yeah. To see those bully tests and just say, really just to say, that's not cool. Yeah. That sometimes is enough for somebody who the bully admires to say that is really powerful. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty.

Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. Okay, so I'm a bully. I've tested, you know, whether I can get away with it. I haven't been checked, so I'm moving on. What happens next? Well, the bully uses the fear of a threat to the community in order to rally supporters. But the threat that they use, that they propose,

is what I call a decoy threat. It's not a real threat. I mean, we saw this used in like a lot of political strategists have used decoy threats in place of what they actually felt threatened by, which was, you know, black people or women, right? So they couldn't reveal what the actual threat was. And the actual threat still wasn't a real threat. It was their own perception of a threat. The decoy threat is something that's socially acceptable, right? So the decoy threat might be, I'm going to switch to another case, a woman who was bullied by a famous tech bully in the kind of Gamergate era, one of the early victims of the misogynistic bullying of women in tech in the early 2000s.

She was beloved. She taught computer science classes, but she also had a blog that people loved. And she was just a very warm, friendly person and very smart. And she did moderate comments on her blog. And she was very open about that. She's like, this is my home, and I won't allow people to be cruel to each other. She was gaining so much popularity that this bully who really, who was just very threatened by her, he used that to say that she was a threat to a free and open internet. And that, at that time, she said, isn't just like kicking a puppy. It's like bagging up all the puppies and the kittens in the world and throwing them into the water and drowning them. Like, it was the worst thing to be a threat to a free and open internet

at that time, was seen by people in tech as the worst thing you could do. The truth was that he was deeply misogynistic and very threatened by her popularity and just her good-natured-ness. And so that's the decoy threat. And so people will fall in line behind that. And then he'll use examples that support his claim that she's a threat to a free and open internet, even though she really isn't. So he's already distorting the facts. Does he know he's distorting the facts? Yes. I believe most do, at least at some level. I believe some really know what they're doing.

I do believe that he knew he was distorting the facts, but also had convinced himself that it was the right thing to do. So they aren't fully aware of what they perceive to be the threat to them, which is women in tech. But they know it enough to know that that threat is not going to allow them to enlist people, that they need something else to get people on board. So there's the decoy threat stage. Right. What's the next stage? So after they've done the bully test and they've tested the decoy threat to see if people will get wound up about it,

you know, can they virtue signal, can they stoke moral outrage? Yes. Okay. Then they move on to what I call spotlighting, stigmatizing, and shaming. And throughout the book, I try to point out how bullies use a lot of the social psychological principles that can be used for good for ill. And so when you look at the research on fundraising, say, we know that people are much more likely to give money when you focus on an individual victim. And you spotlight that person.

You elicit sympathy for that person. If you say a million children are sick, that's not as motivating to people as let me show you this one child who's sick. That motivates people. It's the same with bullying. If a bully says, well, these people are doing something that hurts us and we need to take them down, that doesn't do much. But if you say that one person, she's the one doing it. And so that's the spotlighting. So now you really start to bring more attention to that person, whether it's in real life, in meetings, online, wherever it is. You bring more attention. You could go, you know, I don't mean to be a nag about this, but I have noticed that this person, right?

So you keep bringing attention back to that person. You then get enough sort of traction where people are going, oh, wow, maybe something is going on there. Maybe she is wrong. Maybe she is bad. Maybe she is hurting us that you've then stigmatized that person, right? So now that person is, you know, not to be associated with, to not be given opportunities. And you've also shamed them, right? So now, even if they know full well that they haven't done anything wrong, it is impossible to not feel shame in this situation. It's impossible, especially when the targets are more likely to have friendly universe worldviews, right?

Like, to feel that the world is fundamentally friendly. If this is happening to them, well, they must have done something to deserve it. So now they've been, you know, the spotlight's fully on them. They have been stigmatized, and they've been shamed. So that's the next phase. And they're experiencing shame, self-doubt, all the things that human beings are going to experience in that situation. They are being just overtly shamed and they are feeling that shame. And that makes it hard. That's where you really start to take their voice away.

Because they're less likely to use it now. Right. I mean, the outcomes of shame are just not good. It's not a good tool, you know, to elicit a sense of shame. And so they start to become silenced. You then see bullies start to really recruit people. And they do that by giving them status for signal boosting them. All bystanders have the potential to become what I call accessory bullies. And the accessory bullies tend to be people who have less status than the bully, who also feel they've been slighted or the world hasn't been fair to them. And they're also, they're both, they respect the bully a little bit. They kind of look up to them, but they also fear the bully. And they know they can get status with them if they signal boost them. So they start to mindlessly signal boost them, even when they have not checked the facts. People who really know better, and I'm talking, you know, obviously in academia, you see it happen all the time. But even journalists,

I've seen, you know, science journalists, for example, who really look up to a particular academic, and they will signal boost that bully without checking the facts. They just go with that story. And what did this look like, for example, for Mike? I'm still hanging out with Michael in the dairy aisle. What did this look like out in the wild? So in that case, when the spotlight was on him, there was this stigmatizing, the shaming. So he was starting to be more silent. and the rest of the people working there were starting to kind of fear her but also kind of admire her strength. And I don't like to use that word, but that's how they perceived it. They started to see that that was the winning team. Right.

Right? Michael was not the winning team. It didn't matter that the town liked Michael. He was going to lose. In a world of winners and losers. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So they start to align with and laugh at her jokes about him in front of him, not in front of him.

So she's become emboldened now. She's like, oh, I can completely take this guy down. So I call that recruitment and retention because they're recruiting, but they're also showing that they retain them by giving them status, you know, awarding them status by promoting the accessory bullies. And so now they've got like a group of kind of minions who will carry out their agenda. And so that's the recruitment and retention. What happens after that is in some ways the most painful part of this, the most crazy-making part of it for the target. And this is what I call silencing, but in two ways. The target is silenced both in that they can't defend themselves. If they defend themselves, they're being too defensive,

and then they're guilty. If they don't defend themselves, they're guilty because they haven't defended themselves. There's no response or non-response. There's nothing they can do that will be seen as exonerating. And they've also lost their social connections. Completely. No, this is not like being sick in a hospital bed where people are rallying by you. It's the opposite. People run. People who you thought would never run, run. You are alone.

So I talk about the silencing phase as having two components. One comes from tech, which is denial of services attacks or DDoS attacks. And that's where, you know, the server's being overloaded and can't do its work. But in this case, what happens is the bully and the accessory bullies, more the accessory bullies, start to accuse the target of all kinds of wrongdoings. And so there are all these what I call sham investigations. So whatever you were doing, which might have been defending your work, you're now defending everything that you've done in your professional life. You've taken the server out completely.

So now the person is silenced or made to look just totally incompetent. So they cannot demonstrate their competence. And that is a very powerful tool. I see it all the time. And in the case of the grocery store worker, what this manager did was, and remember, this is a guy who just loved his job, took it so seriously. And there is recorded evidence of this. She started to swap out fresh products for expired products after he left for the night. And then say, you've let these, you know, people are buying expired dairy products.

And so that now he's defending himself against this. I mean, you can imagine how shocking that would be. I mean, and wait, could I have done that? And if I didn't, like, who would possibly do that? I mean, he didn't believe that she was doing that to him, because who would do that? Right. So it could look like that. Yeah. Wow. So people are silenced in two ways. They're silenced on their ability to demonstrate their competence and their sort of their trustworthiness as a professional. And then there's also what I call denial of sanity, and that's where you do – you are being attacked from every angle and having people who you once thought were really normal, I mean, certainly not threatening, starting to, you know, say things, post things about you that just are outrageous. So you start to think, I must be losing my mind. And no one is telling you, hey, no, the lights are not flickering. You know, the lights have been on this whole time. You're right. No one's telling you that.

You are alone and you are starting to feel that you might be crazy. And so then you become a bit neurotic, right? And you might seem paranoid, but actually it's justified paranoia. So then people start to, even the people who might've been supporters start to go, I don't know, like maybe something is off about this person. So now you're seen as not competent and also not sane or sort of trustworthy in that other sense. I'm scared to ask, is there another stage after this? So after the silencing and then the threatening and harassing, you're utterly dehumanized. You've now been fully ostracized by your community that you once loved, a community that you identify strongly with, that you were proud of your work in that community.

The final act is disappearing. And the bully, in order to justify all of this terrible behavior, they sort of have to fully silence and deactivate the person. And like I said, but most people who are bullied in the workplace leave. The estimates are above 90%. A lot of them are fired. A lot of them choose to leave. A lot of them are moved to other departments or even just to other buildings, which is a weird but common tactic. Some just leave public life, move to another place. The rate of stress-related illness is remarkably significantly higher for people who've

been targets of bullying. Some people choose to end their lives. And so the final act is disappearing. And I find that terrifying and heartbreaking. And that can't be. We cannot allow that to be the final act. Wow, Frances, what a powerful conversation. Indeed. And again, listeners, that is just part one. We're going to do a part two where we really get into the agency we all have to make progress on this issue. One thing I've been thinking about, Frances, is that we know from our own experience with our boys is that this is a big issue at the elementary school level. Even at the high school level, it's quite discussable. And it seems like we have this assumption that the problem somehow goes away, that these dynamics and human behaviors,

by the time we get into adulthood, you know, problem has been solved. Like the adults show up in the room and there's no more bullying. And I think one of the things that's really powerful about Amy's research is that she reveals that this is far from the truth. Yeah, I think that in elementary school, it's absolutely fine to discuss it. In fact, we should discuss it. And we all know that bullies, bad guys, targets, victims. When we get to adulthood, not only is it whispers that we talk about it, but it isn't clear to me that we code bullies as bad guys as adults. In fact, I think the vernacular we use for the targets, it's not victims. We somehow think that they're the problem and they're the squeaky wheel. And so it's not just the bullies that want to disappear them. It's then a whole increasing class of people that feel inconvenienced.

They want to disappear them. So I'm really looking forward to part two, where we can learn what the role for all of us has in this situation. Okay. So everyone, please join us. Come back next week for the solutions part of this conversation. Don't miss it. As always, please reach out to us if you have a workplace problem you need help solving. We can't make the show without your submission. So if you've been hesitating to get in touch, just know that you're helping us out by being part of the conversation and every single person who hears you bravely work out these issues

on our show. Reach out at fixable at ted.com or leave us a message 234 fixable. That's 234-349-2253. We like text. We like voice memos. We like live conversation. Give us a call. By the way, we got a great email from one of our listeners. Hello, Grace. Thank you. Who shared some fantastic resources on mental health at work after hearing our episode with Lauren Cohen. We'll link those resources in the episode description. Thank you, Grace, and everyone else for being part of this conversation.

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