A new landmark white paper entitled ‘Agents of Change: The General Counsel role in creating culture and blueprints for leadership’, a joint venture between The Eagle Club and Mishcon de Reya, has highlighted the essential role of General Counsel in eliminating bullying and toxic behaviour in the workplace. The report was drafted in an effort to tackle and reverse the epidemic of bullying and toxic behaviour within the workplace by focusing on leadership. It was initiated by the Eagle Club’s founder and CEO, Lesley Wan after she received numerous requests for help from members of The Eagle Club on how to eliminate toxic behaviour. She describes these requests as “genuine cries for assistance from senior, highly experienced members of the General Counsel (GC) community”.
As the ‘Introduction’ of the report explains succinctly:
“The existence of bullying in a company is a symptom of poor leadership. Bullying, and all the related toxic behaviours that surround and engender it, stems from costly short-termism that can have disastrous consequences for both individuals and organisations”.
What Types Of Toxic Behaviour Did The Report Identify?
The white paper grouped ‘bullying’ behaviours within the workplace into the following categories:
- Overt hostility – shouting, screaming, throwing things, grabbing someone
- Controlling behaviours – treating one member of staff differently from another
- Subtle sabotage – a subtle form of bullying which many often don’t recognise as such, including:
Examples of toxic behaviours include:
- Micromanagement
- Excessive control
- Gaslighting
- Isolation
- Setting someone up to fail
- Lying
- Undermining in front of peers, bosses or clients
- Scapegoating and shaming
- Implementing unnecessarily harsh/inflexible work conditions
- deliberate inaction and lack of support
- Favouritism, and
- Pressuring people to give desired answers
Why The Language Around Bullying Needs To Change
One of the common themes within the white paper is the extent to which behaviours may not be classified by individuals as bullying or toxic when, in fact, they are. As the report explains,
“…many behaviours are subjective, and often defined very differently depending on perspective. Effectively challenging bullying and the related spectrum of toxic behaviours requires taking a holistic, nuanced and tailored approach to the situation at both a personal and cultural level”.
In order to overcome this barrier to positive cultural change, one of the report’s contributors, Executive Coach Dr Catherine McGregor, explains that the focus should be on the behaviours, not the personalities of individuals. She says that labelling a person as a bully or victim is a form of determinism that makes such behaviour part of their identity. This also applies to ‘victims’. As she explains, “By defining someone as a ‘bully’, it also suggests that they are destined to be a bully and that therefore the potential for change is not there. It also suggests that there is a specific kind of person who becomes a bully, rather than recognising that we all have the potential, when subject to certain environments or pressures, to behave in a way that others might perceive as bullying”.
GC’s Role In Overcoming Toxic Behaviour Within The Workplace
The report focuses heavily on the role of General Counsel as ‘agents of change’ in bringing about a cultural change within the workplace to remove toxic behaviour. It also acknowledges that this is not always easy, especially if they encounter ‘pushback’ in terms of adding this to their remit and cultural clashes. To this end, the whitepaper recommends how to change the perception of the GC role, including, amongst other things:
- Moving from a reactive, service-focused mindset to a proactive, strategic-focused one
- Understanding change and transformation, considering the broader business not just in terms of legal
- Fostering great relationships with the CEO, board and executive that you can use to leverage influence in challenging times and
- Understanding the six dimensions of business risk (business risk, personal risk, legal risk, political risk, safety and security risk, reputational risk).
Solving The Problem Of Bullying
As the report explains, ‘solving a bullying problem needs action at every level’; these changes include:
- Addressing remuneration/reward structures that prioritise short-term personal gain
- Changing the ‘long hours’ culture, especially when such hours are unnecessary
- Introducing neutral third-party compliance/support bodies
- Providing better training and coaching for both managers and junior staff
- Independent coaches, trainers and mentors for staff so personal information can’t be weaponised
- Independent routes for whistleblowers
- Leaders recognising their own biases and shortcomings and making an effort to address them
- Starting training people for leadership early
- Making people management skills part of the criteria for promotion
- Creating psychological safety for people to speak up
- Showing that speaking up is effective by sharing results when possible
Final Words
Towards the end of the report, the importance of tackling a ‘profits over everything’ mentality is also raised:
“Time and again in our interviews, one block to tackling bad behaviour was, to put it bluntly, simply greed. Much as most companies’ marketing would deny it, a focus on profits over people is endemic in today’s corporate landscape – but this can have both a personal and a more widespread business cost”….“a focus on short-term profits, individual remuneration and bonuses based on nothing more than financial results can lead to issues being minimised or ignored. In the worst cases – as shown by our interview with Wirecard whistleblower Pav Gill – this can result in illegal actions and intimidation and even the downfall of an organisation”.
The key take-home message of the report is that positive change in removing toxic behaviours is possible, and firms are already achieving success in the UK in doing so. It provides an example of a newly installed CEO in a trading company who has demonstrated a willingness to remove staff (even ‘star traders’) if they are toxic. There is another example of another CEO who put in place a “zerotolerance policy towards safety violations and corner-cutting after a mass casualty event brought home the human cost of such actions”.
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