Pissed off people can wreck organizations.
And yet more and more people are pissed off. I call them the professionally aggrieved. You’ve seen them on social media, across the political spectrum. They misinterpret, inflate, conflate, attack, defend. High dudgeon is their default mode.
The social media outrage discourse also happens at work. Typing venom into Slack isn’t that far removed from doing it into any social media outlet.
I get the appeal. The swift snark, the brittle comeuppance, the cleverly worded takedown or swift knife thrust of a meme. It’s human to slow down and rubberneck, surveying the carnage, safe in our personal vehicle.
It’s been a rough few years. Many of us are exhausted, on edge. This year, we’ve watched the cascade of layoffs posted on LinkedIn, the relentless drum beat of self-promotion that follows. Real ills proliferate in corporate America; racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, all fueled by capitalism and unalloyed greed.
But when the professionally aggrieved show up at work, they can do real damage. You want to be alert to that and address it quickly.
I want to make a distinction. Organizations that are violating the law or human rights should be held accountable. And if that accountability process includes vitriol, so be it. Labor organizing, protesting policies that harm workers or the community or the environment are all areas where anger can be channeled effectively into action. Racism and other forms of discrimination should always be addressed where possible.
That’s not what I’m talking about today. Today, I’m looking at companies and leaders who are doing a good enough job, taking reasonable care of the people that work for them, and trying to be as fair and equitable as they can be. And someone that works for them gets pissed off, and comes after the leaders and/or the organization in a way that is disproportionate, not meant to generate change, and is inherently destructive.
I’m talking about when the professionally aggrieved spew bile at a workplace.
Vu Le wrote about the wheel of disillusionment and the damage it can do in non-profits for his blog nonprofitaf. It’s a great article.
Vu is talking specifically about a leader who is set on a pedestal, who is looked up to or admired. Something happens that, correctly or not, is perceived to be a stumble by this leader. The wheel of disillusionment describes the step-by-step process that occurs when those narratives fester and can run out of control, and then has useful ways to address the stages in that process.
Vu's article was written in 2018, and I’ve referred to it before, with clients and in my writing, since I think it’s a very useful framework. One of the elements in the cycle he outlines is that trauma is triggered in the people who work at the non-profit who are turning against a leader and that trauma act as fuel for the conflict.
Trauma is something that non-profit leaders often have to watch out for, because a non-profit that employs people from a marginalized communities to help others in that community may have employees who have been victims of the same trauma they are helping their clients sort through.
Corporate leaders don’t traditionally pay as much attention to trauma, or secondary trauma as non-profits. But I would argue that we should since the whole world went through a trauma with COVID. Some communities suffered disproportionately, but we’ve all been impacted in some way.
Here’s the pattern I see.
A worker, often in middle management, takes up an issue. They blow it up. When leadership addresses the issue but doesn’t do what the person wants, they react with rage and attack the leader and the organization.
Unfortunately, when I’ve seen these episodes, they are often started by white women. Turns out, we tend to be really good at being professionally aggrieved.
Let’s say a white women with no children says that the company’s policy of parental leave discriminates against her and she should get two extra weeks of vacation a year to make up for the fact that she will never have a child and never need maternity leave.
She takes this to leadership, and leadership says no. Let’s say it’s a small business, with thirty people. They point out, correctly, that were she to have a medical issue and require time off to deal with that, she would benefit from their leave policy as well. They point out that she hasn’t used up all the vacation she has every year anyway.
But she won’t let it go. She spends lots of time and energy complaining about it, rallying others to her side. A divide begins between parents and potential future parents and people without children. She builds and circulates narratives that continue to get traction.
What is happening here? What could you do if you worked at this company?
I would assume this woman is in some discomfort and try to get curious about what is going on for her. Women are often stigmatized for choosing not to have children. That is true.
People often bring unresolved issues from their childhood to work. Perhaps this woman, I’ll call her Jane, has an old narrative that people who care for her must soothe her and take care of her needs, and when they don’t, she gets angry. She’s not skilled enough to understand how her childhood issues are emerging at work, and she continues to get more and more angry.
What was her experience during the pandemic? Did she lose loved ones? Was remote work especially challenging for her? I remember talking to a friend who said that living alone as a single person in the worst of the lockdown was terrifically difficult.
I would, if I were at this company in leadership, try to be clear about my expectations regarding hearing no and moving on. I would make it explicit. “Jane, I hear that you are disappointed and frustrated. The leadership team considered this issue carefully, and we’ve decided against your recommendations. I need you to hear that no and move on. That means dropping this from conversations at work. No more talk of it in Slack channels, no more petitions. You need to let it go and move on.”
If I were a co-worker, I would stop participating in written or spoken conversation about this. “Jane, I hear that you’re upset, but this is the policy, and I don’t see any point in continuing to talk about it.”
It can be difficult to chastise someone for having an opinion, especially when they talk about their opinion as an identity issue – “you’re not being fair to people who don’t have children.” But don’t ignore this. This situation with Jane is entirely made up, but I have seen organizations where a small difference of opinion metastasizes into all out conflict in a lengthy, morale damaging process.
A positive, healthy workplace with a good culture is a real boon for the people that work there. But there are things that no job can fix or address. Leaders can’t help every person in every way each person wants. Sometimes, employees bring unresolved outside issues to bear and react in outsized ways.
So, watch out for the professionally aggrieved.