How to Cope With a Mean Boss

With my upcoming book, Mean Men, I hope to be part of a shift away from our current climate of mean in leadership culture. Meanness as a strategy for success is finally starting to come into question in the mainstream media. Even Forbes weighed in last week, noting that the extraordinary careers of people like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs happen in spite of their bullying personalities, not because their behavior and the culture of intimidation they create is a tactical advantage. But as much as things might be changing in our cultural discourse, mean men still run amok in the real world. And while there’s hope that more and more employees will be able to leave when the men in charge get mean, that’s not always a possibility. So what can folks who find themselves stuck between a mean man and a hard place do to preserve their sanity? Are there ways to, at the very least, blunt the impact of these characters?

Psychologists have been developing specific strategies that help others buffer and deflect the full-on abuse that mean men display when left unchecked. These strategies will not transform aggressively controlling behavior, but they will put boundaries around it.

A near-universal trait of mean men is that they are deeply manipulative. They distort reality, making those around them question themselves and their perceptions: it’s a mean man’s world, and we’re all just living in it. But while we can depend on them to deflect blame, criticize others’ work, and grab the credit that others deserve, we can also be proactive in minimizing the effects of their emotional attacks.

Andrea Kimble,* a senior manager under the infamous Dov Charney who I interviewed for my upcoming book, survived by physically avoiding her unpredictable boss and minimizing one-on-one communication whenever she could. She strategically planned her workspace and her workday so as to always have allies around her when she thought Dov might appear. She even had colleagues give her a heads-up if they knew Dov was on his way to see her so that he couldn’t have the upper hand of catching her off guard.

If you’re not able to physically separate yourself from your boss, detaching emotionally can be a good technique for getting some internal distance. Viewing your situation from a fresh perspective so you can see your circumstances objectively puts you in a better position to consider options than getting overwhelmed by how you feel. The emotional part of your brain requires balance with its rational part so it can cool down, calm down, and strategize.

To practice, take a moment to assess your feelings when you’re agitated but are not in a situation where an immediate response is required—for example, when you’ve received an upsetting e-mail from your boss but are not in the room with him. Take an inventory of the situation by going through the following questions:

1. What’s happening right now? Write down what you see, hear, and feel.
2. What are the facts? Assess your personal (and organizational) needs in the moment, and quickly summarize how you are being treated as a result of trying to get those needs met. What are you trying to accomplish? What do you need to get it done?
3. What is he doing? Identify how he is acting and what you think may be sparking his toxic behavior. Don’t try to psychoanalyze him; the best you can do is find the “triggers” that set this behavior off.
4. What am I doing? Determine as best you can your role in the situation. List how you are reacting (behaviorally and emotionally) and how you have reacted to this same or similar behavior in the past. This is usually the toughest question of the five to answer.
5. What are my options? Write down some concrete actions you might take to help the immediate problem. As easy as it may be to find rational answers, it can be just as difficult to act on them.

When a situation causes us emotional pain, our natural reaction is to blame the obvious offender and not do a gut check to see what we may be doing to contribute to our own pain. Looking more rationally at our own role in—and vulnerabilities to—the situation can give us points of leverage for reducing the impact of mean behavior. These kinds of coping mechanisms are not a long-term fix, but they can certainly help you hold on to your sanity and values until you can seek greener pastures. I’ll be exploring additional strategies for dealing with mean in the blog posts to come, so stay tuned if you need some support.

*name has been changed

This post originally ran on my blog on July 20, 2015.

What the Seahawks Can Teach Us About Combatting Mean

It’s hard to think of an organization more rooted in the kind of toxic masculine stereotypes that typify the mean man than the NFL. And yet, one of its most successful franchises of the last few years, the Seattle Seahawks, serves as a prime example of authentic leadership at its best. “The hero and the psychopath may be twigs on the same genetic branch,” wrote the late David Lykken, a University of Minnesota professor of psychiatry and psychology. When we look at it this way, it’s unsurprising to see this dichotomy playing out on the football field: the beating heart of American hero worship. It’s true that both the hero and the psychopath possess a fearless temperament. But whereas the successful psychopath is the product of a culture in which meanness has run amok, the hero gives us insight into what it looks like to be successful without resorting to meanness.

We’ve examined on this blog numerous organizations in which mean rules and no one takes action, where the combination of outsize ambition and lack of empathy causes suffering. But what does it look like when ambition is channeled appropriately? When risk is part of the game but it’s not everything? When people are treated as people, not objects?

The Seattle Seahawks have an organizational philosophy that closely mirrors the cultures and practices of the Best Companies on Fortune’s list and gives us a peek into the potential antidote for organizational meanness. And nowhere is meanness more pervasive and tolerated than in professional sports. When considering potential draft picks (job candidates in this context), the Seahawks look at the language used by the players and cut from the pool those who lean on negative language or finger-pointing. They want a culture of accountability and optimism, and they start by getting the right people in the room.

The team’s coach, Pete Carroll, seems the antithesis of what we think of when we picture NFL coaches, screaming on the sideline, veins bulging, faces red. In a style that belies a fervent commitment to winning, Carroll is all about encouragement, not laying blame. He gives the individual men on the team the freedom to be themselves and sees himself as on a constant journey to identify and maximize the uniqueness of every player and coach. He is committed to a nurturing environment that allows people to be themselves while still being accountable to the team. This is a leader who recognizes that the best results will come from having happy, healthy men on his team. Carroll incorporates meditation and yoga into the team’s workouts, and yelling and swearing are strongly discouraged.

The top-down civility of Pete Carroll has a tremendous effect on all of his staff as well as his players. Tom Cable, the former coach of the Oakland Raiders with a colorful mean-man past, changed his coaching style after working with Pete Carroll as the assistant head coach and offensive line coach. “If I go ballistic on a guy because he dropped his outside hand or missed an underneath stunt, who is wrong? I am,” Cable says now. “I’m attacking his self-confidence and he’s learning that if he screws up, he is going to get yelled at. If you make a mistake here, it’s going to get fixed.”

Compare this with a speech given during the 2013 Rookie Symposium by Chris Ballard, former director of player personnel for the Kansas City Chiefs, who told the newly minted young players, “Nobody cares about your problems. The fans don’t care. The media doesn’t care. And ownership doesn’t care. They care about results.” This speech is hardly surprising in the no-whining-be-a-man culture of the NFL, but it’s still shockingly callous considering that it was delivered a scant seven months after a member of that same NFL team, Jovan Belcher, shot his girlfriend nine times before driving to the team’s facility and killing himself in the parking lot.

So what are the implications of the Seahawks’ unique culture of getting results while making the players’ health and well-being a top priority? Namely that being civil is not only better, but more effective. This idea, encouragingly, is starting to catch on. As many mean men as I’ve encountered in my work, I’ve been pleasantly surprised over the past few years by certain clients’ sensitivities to rooting out abusive management. Many civil entrepreneurs running firms in aggressive industries—such as hedge funds and tech companies—were shocked to discover the abuse that some of their senior managers heaped on employees. It doesn’t take a mean CEO to create a toxic climate given the proclivity of certain industries to attract mean men like jackals to fresh meat. But if the situation is flipped in these aggressive fields and the leader is civil, then the abuser is often rooted out and crushed.

In professional worlds where meanness is more than tolerated, leaders like Pete Carroll give us hope for change. If a pro football team can make it to the Super Bowl on the tailwind of civility, imagine what other organizations might accomplish.

How to Create Boundaries with Your Ruthless Boss

During my time at the Austen Riggs Center, I learned much from the experienced clinicians there about dealing with a host of difficult personality types. A recurring theme in my research and interactions with therapists there, and in my consulting work, is the need to create boundaries. It’s healthy to have good boundaries with everyone in our lives, even those we love, but when it comes to having them with an abusive boss, it’s crucial to our survival. Setting boundaries is much easier, however, with your garden-variety passive-aggressive types and narcissists. Mean men have a tendency to see a boundary as a challenge to defeat, at least initially. Because of their tendency to be manipulative, it can be especially hard to hold the line.

You don’t need to announce to your boss your desire to set boundaries—and in many cases you shouldn’t, as it may only raise his defenses, provoking aggression. Boundaries are more about your own behaviors than those of others. Sometimes, nonverbal cues can be extremely useful. When you let certain phone calls roll over to voice mail or wait to respond to e-mails at particular parts of the day, you’re setting boundaries. When you leave the endless heap of work-related Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn notifications for the next day, you’re setting boundaries.

When Disney and Pixar president Ed Catmull began working with Steve Jobs, he picked up quickly on Jobs’s controlling and often confrontational style. But he ended up managing Jobs by intentionally avoiding those situations that had a pattern of leading to conflict. For Catmull, managing Jobs was all about timing, not avoidance. Eventually, he’d get back to Jobs with an answer or other response but not until he believed Jobs’s toxic energy had been depleted on the subject.

Boundaries are especially important when dealing with disordered personalities. Sometimes, active listening is not enough to quell a conflict with the more difficult types. As much as I depend on this technique in my professional work and personal relationships, I’m always intrigued by its failure with those displaying psychopathic traits, as subclinical as they may be.

A consulting client of mine, Aaron,* who definitely fit the profile of a mean man, was in an abusive relationship with his girlfriend, Lisa,* that showed no signs of getting better until she began to set boundaries. Near the end of their relationship, Lisa learned from a counselor that implementing boundaries could bring down Aaron’s rage level. When he acted in an inflammatory manner, she would simply refuse to engage. When he started screaming, she would stay in her own psychological space, barely listening to him while she resumed doing other things. When he tried to start a fight, she would respond with something along the lines of, “I don’t know what triggered this mood you have, but I know that I’m feeling okay.” And then she would leave the room. With her boundary firmly in place, Aaron’s maladaptive way of seeking control lost steam; he got less relief from screaming or being irritating. Her refusal to engage with his irate behavior left him swimming in his own swamp.

Mean men require considerable stimulation in their life. Simply put, they become bored more easily than the rest of us. A mean man often experiences an extreme type of boredom that best be described by the French term ennui: an oppressive boredom that often leads to lethargy. Drama is a mean man’s recipe for staving off ennui, but it requires an audience and perhaps an additional actor or two. As the drama begins, he feels invigorated and alive. Control and manipulation can empower a mean man, especially when he can successfully elicit the emotions of others. Crazy as it may sound, he thrives on this drama, regardless of what it is, as long as he sees it as a result of his actions, a sign that the world revolves around him.

Having the key to a victim’s emotions is just what the mean man needs to feel in control. Manipulation is a form of success for a mean man, and he must create drama in order to achieve it. The more reactions he sees as a result of this drama, the more he craves it, and an addiction begins to grow.

But what happens when the reward for drama stops coming? What if the person who consistently reacts to his wrath chooses to disengage like Lisa did with Aaron? More often than not, the person with psychopathic tendencies, the mean man, will become bored, and we know how intolerable that is for him. If those around him show no emotion, he may decide it’s not worth creating the drama if he gets nothing from it.

This strategy—essentially to become boring to him—is a highly effective way to create a boundary. Employees of a tyrannical manager can set boundaries merely by taking away the usual satisfaction he gets from seeing them afraid and upset. When he sees these reactions dwindle, his power is challenged, and he will soon grow bored.

If you are cursed with a boss like this, you must at some point consider more seriously an exit strategy. While boundaries can “shape” some elements of his repulsive behavior, you will not stop it; you will not change him. Assuming you don’t want to be a leading character in this melodrama, start with boundaries and then determine how to get off the stage with him. Permanently.

*Names have been changed.

The Banality of Meanness

Mean. Uncivil. Abusive. Controlling. All of these words could easily describe Barry Freundel, Mark Driscoll, and the other men I’ve discussed on this blog. In my countless interviews with victims of mean, an even more sinister descriptor emerges: these guys aren’t just jerks; they’re evil. Looking at our last two case studies of Driscoll and Freundel, we find it’s not so hard to make the leap. These are men who invoked the divine for their own selfish ends and caused a great deal of pain and suffering in the process. But where exactly is that line between bad and evil?

We often characterize evil as an aberration of human nature because it’s so difficult to rationalize. This difficulty of getting our brains around evil behaviors often leads us to create narratives around those responsible. Perhaps, we suspect, the evil is in response to unbearable circumstances a person may have experienced earlier in life. Or maybe the person is a psychopath, is innately evil. To this way of thinking, the evildoer is damaged or crazy or both.

But there’s an alternate school of thought that tells us that evil might not be such an aberration after all.

In her groundbreaking 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, philosopher Hannah Arendt tried to reconcile the actions of Adolf Eichmann—a Nazi SS lieutenant colonel and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust—with Eichmann the person. In her reporting on his trial, she makes a highly controversial argument that remains polarizing to this day: neither Eichmann nor his fellow Nazis were motivated to commit their acts out of hatred and malevolence. Rather, they were the result of lack of thought, imagination, and memory. Eichmann, she adamantly believed, was incapable of empathizing with his victims’ suffering because he lacked the judgment needed to perceive it. He was not smart enough to think for himself and therefore was “just doing his job” as he claimed in court.

Arendt enraged many people with her views on Eichmann as being “ordinary.” She resisted making an explicitly psychological analysis of him in her lengthy report of his 1961 trial. Her assessment was that Eichmann’s ability to do evil came from his inability to think from others’ points of view or to have an internal dialogue with himself. Evil itself was banal, she said, in that it was “thought-defying.”

Her conclusions were profound. People who do evil are not necessarily monsters; sometimes they’re just bureaucrats. The Eichmann she observed on trial was neither brilliant nor a psychopath. He was described by the attending court psychiatrist as a “completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am after examining him.” Evil, Arendt suggested, can be extraordinary acts committed by otherwise unremarkable people. All of the court psychologists who examined Eichmann pronounced him “normal.”

Still, one wonders what could possibly have been going through Eichmann’s mind to allow him to commit such atrocities. How is it that this seemingly normal German bureaucrat could be swept up in the tide of Nazism to become one of history’s most hated and perplexing criminals? What explains the participation of thousands of ordinary Germans just like him in the events of the Holocaust, from concentration camp guards to civilians who turned a blind eye? These questions broaden to become both more personal and more universal, and therefore more distressing, as we ask ourselves, What would I do if faced with these circumstances? Would I act for good, or would I succumb to evil?

Two years after the trial, Arendt reflected:

The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, that is, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words of others, or even the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.

Arendt had a supporter in Richard Sonnenfeldt, the chief US translator at the Nuremberg trials. He too believed that Eichmann and his peers seemed without intellect or insight, distinguished only by being susceptible to flattery and ambition. “Dictators have no peers,” he said at the time. “Only sycophants to do their bidding.”

Arendt felt very keenly that what really connects us to one another is the commitment to try to see the world from others’ points of view—not to subscribe to their points of view or to merge with their points of view, but to be able to walk around and see what the world looks like from where they’re standing. She was all about dialogue. In Eichmann’s case it was precisely the incapacity and lack of interest in that perspective that she found to be at the core of Eichmann’s banality and Eichmann’s evil. It was his thoughtlessness, his inability to think from any other point of view but his own.

While Arendt and others argue that evil is banal, empathy is not. It is not common to all, pervasive, ordinary, or unremarkable. If you are capable of empathy, you may assume that most people are capable of it. You take it for granted that what you see and feel is obvious. It is not. Someone who is capable of empathy is at the upper end of psychological health. Empathy, some experts suggest, may even be relatively rare.

Could it be that knowing how to skillfully practice empathy is the key to minimizing and managing mean?

Strength in Numbers: Lessons from the Downfall of Mark Driscoll

First, I have a confession to make. I know I promised you a full-on mean woman this week, but when I reexamined my top candidate, she simply didn’t fit the bill. The woman in question has done some reprehensible things, to be certain, but held up next to men like Charney, Arnell, and Jobs? She’s a pussycat. The challenge to find a major league mean woman is telling, but I vow to keep working on it. For now, I want to return my focus to combatting mean. The strategies I’ve shared so far have been geared toward employees of mean men who find they’re unable to leave their situation as immediately as they’d like and need some coping skills. But what happens when it’s not just your financial and career well-being that’s threatened by the mean man but your entire community, and your friends, family, and faith are on the line?

Mark Driscoll started a Bible study class in his home in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle in 1996. By August of 2014, he’d grown his operation, Mars Hill, into a megachurch, at its height counting thirteen thousand attendees across five states. He preached to a packed crowd at Seattle’s CenturyLink Field (home of the Seahawks), guested on prime-time national television, threw out the first pitch at Mariners’ baseball games, and turned his brand into a franchise. Brand is Driscoll’s word, by the way, not mine. Among the other Mars Hill pastors, he would often refer to himself as “The Brand,” making it crystal clear that Mars Hill would always be about “me in the pulpit holding the Bible.”

His precision branding, matched with his ability to scale his enterprise, would make any business entrepreneur blush with envy.

Driscoll appealed to the young families who showed up to worship with him in jeans and flip-flops, those disenchanted with more established versions of organized Christian movements. Known as the “hipster pastor” with his charismatic, edgy rhetoric, dressed-down blue jeans style, and family of seven, Driscoll knew and embodied his market. He had a reverence for Jesus and a seeming irreverence for everything (and everyone) else. He enjoyed being outrageous, and it worked for him. Yoga, for example, was “demonic.” Increasingly, his writing and sermons took on strong misogynistic overtones: he famously called America a “pussified nation” and claimed that mainstream Christianity characterized Jesus as “an effeminate-looking dude,” and a “neutered and limp-wristed Sky Fairy of pop culture.”

Driscoll declared that anointing a woman as an Episcopal bishop was akin to choosing “a fluffy baby bunny rabbit as their next bishop to lead God’s men.” He joked onstage that wives who denied their husbands oral sex whenever it would please them were sinful, his unique interpretation of a verse from the Song of Solomon.

His outward style charmed many, but behind the scenes, he was often vicious, abusive, and controlling. Those who disagreed with him were shunned by the church, ensuring that other members would know what was in store if they came forward.

Fearful of his influence, many church members felt forced to complain indirectly or through third parties. But Driscoll’s strategy for defusing the discontent was to claim that he wasn’t sure how to respond since his dissenters remained anonymous.

Singularly, disaffected congregants felt powerless against the megachurch, a dynamic Driscoll was counting on. What he underestimated, however, was what would happen when they banded together.

As complaints about Driscoll reached a fever pitch, a large crowd started protesting during Sunday services, holding signs reading “We Are Not Anonymous.” Others started to directly and openly call for Driscoll’s resignation.

After eighteen years of stunning growth at Mars Hill, the groundswell of disgruntled congregants began to drive other churchgoers away. Within months, attendance and giving had plummeted so fast that church elders announced it would have to close several Seattle branches and cut its staff thirty to forty percent.

Driscoll had a knack, like many mean men, for deflecting blame. In 2013, Christian radio host Janet Mefferd accused him of plagiarizing fourteen pages of his book A Call to Resurgence from another preacher. She pushed Driscoll during an interview to be contrite. He apologized but peppered his concession with indignation.

He got in yet more book-related trouble in 2014 when he was accused of misappropriating $200,000 in church funds to get his book Real Marriage on the New York Times bestseller list via shady marketing tactics.

Each new accusation emboldened more critics, and by August 2014, Driscoll was hounded by the new accounts that emerged almost daily of his bullying, abuse, and outrageous behavior with congregants.

Driscoll resigned in October 2014 amid allegations of emotional abusiveness, plagiarism, and misogyny—with congregants fleeing to other houses of worship or losing faith altogether.

Driscoll ultimately wasn’t taken down by the church’s governing body but by those who—in small groups or individually—found their power in numbers and through their collective voice of public dissent. Driscoll’s charisma and normally effective ability to flip he blame to deflect culpability was drowned out beneath the indignation of those he’d harmed.

Sure, there were Christian media heavyweights calling him out for plagiarizing others’ work and his smarmy misogyny. But what brought him down was his arrogance and abusiveness, as well as those current and former followers who shouldered the risk of condemnation from others and stood together and exercised their power.

The pattern of abusive behavior employed by mean men to get and retain power means that there will inevitably be a long line of victims in their wake. Alone, each victim may feel powerless, but together—as we saw with Driscoll and with the recent Bill Cosby imbroglio—they can be a powerful force.

More Strategies for Coping with a Mean Boss

The comments section of last week’s post included some impassioned responses. There were tales of bad leaders, incompetent HR departments, and mean bosses—male and female. As much as it’s important to address the cultural change that’s needed to stop mean men (and women) from getting a free pass, let alone encouragement, to behave as they do, mobility in one’s career is a considerable privilege. Whether it’s because of shifts in the industry you work in, your family situation, geographical location, or any number of other factors, leaving a bad boss isn’t often an option. Certain workers in highly sought-after professions and in particular circumstances (skilled software engineers in San Francisco, for instance) may be able to be as picky as they like, but we all have bills to pay. Many employees have to stick it out until they have better options to choose from, and even those of us with a great deal of autonomy in our work come across mean men from time to time. I may not report to a mean man, but I’ve worked with plenty of them and have learned to get in their heads to better negotiate my dealings with them. When I feel myself getting emotionally wrangled into a client’s need for control and desire to manipulate, I redirect my thinking from how he’s pushing my buttons to what might be pushing his. As I’ve discussed, the need to control is often fear based. In the mean man’s mind, he’s protecting himself from perceived threats to his fragile internal self-control system.

But manipulation or control through verbal abuse takes two, regardless of who is at fault. “He acts mean, and I respond to his meanness,” is how we might sum up the situation. But seizing opportunities to break the dynamic between a mean man and his target may require turning attention inward. You may need to look at the elements that have led you—usually unknowingly—to participate in this lopsided exchange.

This isn’t to say that victims should be blamed. But over the years I have seen many cases in which someone unconsciously gives a mean man an opening for his controlling and manipulating behavior to manifest. If you’ve been in these situations, you may not realize in the moment that someone’s demands are unreasonable and that giving in to them will pull you into a toxic tango. You may believe that in responding to your boss’s demands, you’re just being a good employee. You may even be fully aware of the abusive behavior but unable to resist it; your reactions feel automatic. Chances are there is also a considerable power imbalance between you and your boss.

We all have many layers of personal history that affect how we respond to abusive behavior: the way we were treated as kids, our self-image, the burdens we carry from our past. The behavior of those around us can tap into a pure, raw emotion that has been stored away and simmering for some time. We all have our buttons that get pushed. Some of us have more buttons than others; some of us have buttons that need barely a tap to engage. I have learned to control my emotional reactions to these men by consciously thinking about the needs that drive them to act so inexcusably. Often, I find myself thinking how pathetic their internal machinations must be in that moment, how their sense of helplessness and vulnerability (despite their tough exterior) is probably a theme in their daily lives. Trying to get inside their heads always helps me get inside my own; I’ve learned to better understand my own buttons and what happens when they get pushed. An awareness of this cause and effect often tends to provide me greater control in the midst of managing, say, a malignant narcissist.

What are the triggers that show someone’s vulnerability to these men? Psychologists have identified a few of the most persistent personality characteristics:

• Very high need for approval
• High level of self-doubt
• Low tolerance for conflict; strong desire to keep the peace
• Fear of anger
• Tendency to take responsibility for others’ lives

In moderation, these are typically admirable traits; they can also set us up for potential abuse.

Building off my strategies from last week’s post and asking, “What is my part in this? What button is being pushed by this troubled person?” can be a difficult but empowering exercise. It can help you find your own reactive patterns to situations in which there is an imbalance of power and you are faced with someone’s attempt to control or manipulate you.

How to Cope with a Mean Boss

With my upcoming book, Mean Men, I hope to be part of a shift away from our current climate of mean in leadership culture. Meanness as a strategy for success is finally starting to come into question in the mainstream media. Even Forbes weighed in last week, noting that the extraordinary careers of people like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs happen in spite of their bullying personalities, not because their behavior and the culture of intimidation they create is a tactical advantage. But as much as things might be changing in our cultural discourse, mean men still run amok in the real world. And while there’s hope that more and more employees will be able to leave when the men in charge get mean, that’s not always a possibility. So what can folks who find themselves stuck between a mean man and a hard place do to preserve their sanity? Are there ways to, at the very least, blunt the impact of these characters?

Psychologists have been developing specific strategies that help others buffer and deflect the full-on abuse that mean men display when left unchecked. These strategies will not transform aggressively controlling behavior, but they will put boundaries around it.

A near-universal trait of mean men is that they are deeply manipulative. They distort reality, making those around them question themselves and their perceptions: it’s a mean man’s world, and we’re all just living in it. But while we can depend on them to deflect blame, criticize others’ work, and grab the credit that others deserve, we can also be proactive in minimizing the effects of their emotional attacks.

Andrea Kimble,* a senior manager under the infamous Dov Charney who I interviewed for my upcoming book, survived by physically avoiding her unpredictable boss and minimizing one-on-one communication whenever she could. She strategically planned her workspace and her workday so as to always have allies around her when she thought Dov might appear. She even had colleagues give her a heads-up if they knew Dov was on his way to see her so that he couldn’t have the upper hand of catching her off guard.

If you’re not able to physically separate yourself from your boss, detaching emotionally can be a good technique for getting some internal distance. Viewing your situation from a fresh perspective so you can see your circumstances objectively puts you in a better position to consider options than getting overwhelmed by how you feel. The emotional part of your brain requires balance with its rational part so it can cool down, calm down, and strategize.

To practice, take a moment to assess your feelings when you’re agitated but are not in a situation where an immediate response is required—for example, when you’ve received an upsetting e-mail from your boss but are not in the room with him. Take an inventory of the situation by going through the following questions:

1. What’s happening right now? Write down what you see, hear, and feel.
2. What are the facts? Assess your personal (and organizational) needs in the moment, and quickly summarize how you are being treated as a result of trying to get those needs met. What are you trying to accomplish? What do you need to get it done?
3. What is he doing? Identify how he is acting and what you think may be sparking his toxic behavior. Don’t try to psychoanalyze him; the best you can do is find the “triggers” that set this behavior off.
4. What am I doing? Determine as best you can your role in the situation. List how you are reacting (behaviorally and emotionally) and how you have reacted to this same or similar behavior in the past. This is usually the toughest question of the five to answer.
5. What are my options? Write down some concrete actions you might take to help the immediate problem. As easy as it may be to find rational answers, it can be just as difficult to act on them.

When a situation causes us emotional pain, our natural reaction is to blame the obvious offender and not do a gut check to see what we may be doing to contribute to our own pain. Looking more rationally at our own role in—and vulnerabilities to—the situation can give us points of leverage for reducing the impact of mean behavior. These kinds of coping mechanisms are not a long-term fix, but they can certainly help you hold on to your sanity and values until you can seek greener pastures. I’ll be exploring additional strategies for dealing with mean in the blog posts to come, so stay tuned if you need some support.

*name has been changed

Can We Protect Those Who Confront Mean Men?

We’re all privy to the dramas of mean men as they unfold in the media, but what about when those offenses happen closer to home? What if it’s you or one of your colleagues suffering at the hands of a mean boss? How do you call them on it . . . and who do you call? What may be the consequences of blowing the whistle? The intricacies of whistleblower protection in the United States came to the public’s attention in 2002, when the exceedingly bad behavior of a group of rogue top executives at Enron begat the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. This act provides protection to employees who decide to blow the whistle when they have evidence of illegal conduct.

Whistleblower legislation is not new. The Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 covers federal whistleblowers; the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 covers employees of publicly owned corporations; and in 2014, protection was significantly widened by the US Supreme Court to include private corporations functioning as subcontractors to publicly owned firms.

Still, all this legalese provides little comfort to the individual who is working in an organization that fails to meet these criteria for protection.

The ethics violations that are most frequently reported are not confined to obviously illegal acts such as financial fraud or safety violations. The Ethics Resource Center notes in its 2011 National Business Ethics Survey that the top unethical workplace behavior cited was misuse of company time. The second and third most frequent forms of misconduct reported were abusive behavior and lying to employees.

Patricia Harned, the center’s president, says that although abuse is not often labeled unethical, it is the number one reason people leave their jobs.

It gets worse.

Whistleblowing is on the rise, but so is retaliation. According to the Ethics Resource Center’s report, more than one-fifth of employees interviewed—two times as many as reported in 2007—said they had experienced negative consequences for reporting workplace misconduct. Some were simply given the cold shoulder, while others were passed over for promotion.

And it gets worse still: in 2011, 31 percent of whistleblowers said they received physical threats when outed, compared to 4 percent in 2009.

Retaliation against whistleblowers doesn’t just threaten individuals: it threatens our culture. To curb this egregious behavior, we must attempt to do all of the following simultaneously:

• create a system and a process that fosters the exposure of abusive behavior
• protect the whistleblower
• ensure that the information gets to the proper authorities

One major obstacle to employees of entrepreneur-driven firms safely and securely naming or ousting mean men is that they have no “big law” backing. Many of these firms lack a strong internal system of checks and balances, and higher-ups simply don’t know what’s going on day to day in the ranks. In these cases, implementation of a 360-degree review or upward review process, where employees rate their managers, can help.

In 2013, I was asked to consult for an aggressive sales-driven firm with a mean entrepreneur at the helm. This man hoarded as much control as possible, and in the arrogant style typical of so many mean men, he believed he couldn’t lose.

A few years earlier, he had created a board that he planned to use whenever he needed to. Believing that his new board members would be happy simply to take a directorship fee and add some gravitas to meetings, he was shaken to discover that, in fact, they had a very low tolerance for behavior that could damage their company.

When word about his toxicity began to trickle in from reliable sources, action was taken. I helped set up a full management assessment process, and the company swiftly kicked this individual to the curb. Nobody has looked back since.

Another organization I worked with recently was founded by a brilliant entrepreneur who many considered demonically possessed by the will to achieve. He worked nonstop in a cutthroat industry, and yet, unlike our arrogant control freak above, this man expected and fostered civility. He promoted the notion that if you treat employees with respect, they’ll do their best.

This man wasn’t threatened by the idea of implementing a system of checks and balances; in fact, he invited me to create one that was anchored in the values he aspired to for his firm. Employees participated enthusiastically because they felt safe and empowered. The culture quickly became even healthier, with everyone, literally, reaping greater net profit.

There is no singular silver bullet to address mean men who are in positions of power. Context-specific solutions work, but they must be organization-specific and leadership-specific as well. Clarity about the values that undergird the firm’s culture, along with a zeal for actually instilling those values, must exist. Consequences for breaching civility must be meaningful in order to bring about cultural change.

Leaders who tend not to play well with others tend to play even worse when cornered or exposed. And according to the numbers above, these leaders are getting away with committing abuse upon abuse now more than ever before—despite whistleblowing legislation and the increased public awareness of bullying.

Setting up better internal systems of checks and balances will help ensure that whistleblowers do report. How can we expect brave whistleblowers to put their careers—and sometimes even their well-being—on the line if we don’t have their backs?

The deeper issue here, however, is the culture that permits these abuses to run rampant to begin with. When mean men are excused for egregious behavior by their boards as long as they have a solid bottom line, when they’re given a pass from the media for as long as their success holds, and when we explain them away as fragile, emotional geniuses, we’re giving them the green light to treat people however they see fit. And we all need to blow the whistle on that.