¶ Intro / Opening
I value the face-to-face conversation , especially , especially when there's conflict , when there's some sort of like . I don't like this person because what I like to achieve within a person who has an inside conflict with someone else is to make the person aware that these emotions are there .
Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience is to make the person aware that these emotions are there . Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience . I'm your host , manya Chilinski , and my guest today is Birgit Pohl . She's a leadership coach and an engineering leader . She coaches people and trains organizations in creating high-performance teams .
We talked about compassion and leadership through the lens of bullying in the workplace . You're going to find her perspective really interesting . Thanks for listening . Hi , birgit . I'm so excited that we are going to be talking today .
Before we dive into the topic at hand , I would like to know what's one thing that you have done in your life that you never thought you would do .
Thank , you for being here
¶ Compassionate Leadership and Workplace Bullying
first , manja , that's a really interesting question . I started out as a graphic designer and I thought this is something that I really want to do . I really fought going into this direction and then , once I had the certification for this profession , which is a full education , I thought after a couple of while I need to do something else .
I didn't think of that , of changing career , but I did . And then I thought of where should I go , and thought about it could be economy . It could be mathematics , because I went into higher education . It could also be computer science . I studied for a couple of years . I didn't finish it because I found myself being a software developer already .
I achieved my goal of becoming a software developer without the bachelor's degree , and then the journey didn't end it , so it still changed .
The only stuff that I thought was becoming a graphic designer , and then I thought I didn't think of becoming a software engineer , and then I didn't think of becoming an engineering manager , like a boss of someone , a leader .
But I did so . You're living the life you never thought you would do , exactly . That is quite interesting . That is interesting and it leads us into our topic today , where the theme this year is compassionate leadership and compassionate workplaces .
And you think a lot about training people to be better managers and bullying in the workplace , and I guess let's just get started with what is workplace bullying ? What does it look like ?
I have experienced bullying even at school , so I'm very much sensitive to it . And I have experienced bullying also at the workplace the same things or the same themes . Like you would exclude someone from a group , you would try to punish them . At school it was like calling names , making some fun over someone .
But at school it was like calling names , making some fun over someone , even being physical with someone right , hitting someone and stuff . And at work I come to experience almost the same . For me , the physical stuff has been left out , but I know of some cases where physical harm has been done . Nonetheless , the psychological harm is also hard enough .
So let's also talk about that . And this starts with just by being there , by being present , and someone doesn't like you being there . So imagine someone has lost their own position and you come in instead of them and this is an unfortunate event that actually also has happened to me . So it could be anyone .
This was even a hard race to get into this position , because some other people who applied for the same position were as good as I am , maybe even better . Who knows ?
Anyone could have been bullied in this position by the person who lost this position , so it could be men , women , whoever but also as a woman in tech , by my sheer presence as a woman , right , I have been bullied just by being a woman . And how does it look like ?
People constantly tell you that you have no knowledge , that you're completely wrong , and well , the only thing that might work or not is the looks . So they also focus on how you look right .
So , making comments about the look , I had that as well , knowing you , know yourself , because you track your work , you do the work and you do it well , that the work you're doing is actually pretty good . And I also had cases where I said like .
So I had lots of complaints from men about my work not being done well , my thoughts and strategy not being done well . As a collaborative person as I am , I thought okay , we can work together , so maybe you have an idea how we can make this better .
And in the end , these men didn't come up with a better idea or with an idea at all , but followed the strategy that I have suggested .
Yes , that's so frustrating . Of course , I can hear it in your voice and I can understand .
I've experienced a few of these things that you're talking about and , as someone who works in tech , you are in a field that's traditionally male and still largely male and it feels like perhaps being a woman in tech is feels like a threat some not all of the men in those environments can I ?
can I put this into context ? This , this uh comment that you had like the woman as a threat in the male-dominated world , especially in the tech field , is a quite interesting one , because tech has started out as being female dominated in the history , and that's quite interesting .
It's thought that it would be a low paying job , but at some point it was also quite interesting for men to come into this place and Somehow they made it in a way that it's only complicated and complex work and women , who back then were supposed to like they , were thought to be not as intelligent enough as men and , by the way , we have studies that tell
otherwise , we are equally intelligent . They excluded the women more and more . It became a high-paying job and now that women are invited into the workforce again , we have this insecurity , this change and transition in the workforce , not only in tech but also in other fields .
And this is also where we can come in and dive in the entire dynamics of how a man might feel and how a woman might feel when there is this type of dynamics like the change and transition inside an environment .
Right , absolutely . Now , as you are talking about bullying and what you have experienced , I'm thinking this is , I'm picturing in my mind . These are team members , people that you work with , be a team lead , or it could be a supervisor . So is that something that happens , that you're bullied by supervisors or managers , and what does that ?
look like . That's a quite interesting point you say , because I myself , I have experienced bullying by team members as well as from managers , in a position as a team member , but also as a manager myself , but also as , like , the most executive person in the workplace .
So when I start like , try to create a startup , being one of the founding members , you also get people who would like to be founding members as well , but they are not in the board basically . So from different angles and perspectives , you have this kind of dynamics , especially
¶ Establishing Workplace Culture to Prevent Bullying
when people have some sort of idea about you that you shouldn't be there , so they want you to go away . Yes , exactly right . And how does it look like ?
Let's , let's imagine , because this is how my life looks like from a middle management perspective yeah , it doesn't need to be me who's being bullied , it can also be someone else who's being bullied , but it can be me . They're really different perspective as a manager , how you tackle bullying and how you experience bullying .
So bullying like when someone tries to bully me as their boss , then it's a political game . Their boss , then it's a political game . So it's like a game .
So what I have experienced is that when team member go to my boss , so I'm the team member's boss and the team member goes to my boss in order to talk about me , but in a bad way , especially when you try to be a compassionate leader . A bad way , especially when you try to be a compassionate leader as well as like being people focused leader .
It's really hard to come to know when someone tells you that you are forcing people into something . This is where you kind of see the conflicts of like someone is making up things and even my bosses have figured out of . Like someone is making up things and even my bosses have figured out .
Yes , this person is making up things because they admitted it , but still the game plays out as the gamer wanted to have it , and that's also a really interesting dynamic , wow .
As a manager yourself , or if you're thinking about the leaders in the company , folks who are above you on the career ladder . What can be done to build an environment and build a culture that discourages bullying ?
That's a really important question . I find we talk about culture and the experience that I got , not only being a software engineer , but also before that and being a leader , a manager , people manager , and also experiencing how I am being played out as my boss was played out as well . The culture is very important .
When we talk about culture , we also talk about values and the values they describe a certain framework of how we want to behave inside the company . So , for example , we have the word kindness and respect and transparency .
These could be three values that one company could establish inside the organization and , of course , you have to have some sort of clarity of what it means and what it means in a certain context . When it comes to the team and collaboration , we need to describe what it means , like the kindness and the respect and transparency .
And when we see that someone , for example , is not going directly to like let's say , let's take me as an example To me in order to like , openly give feedback works directly to my boss in order to like talk about me this could mean that maybe the kindness , the respect and the transparency have a conflict with this action , and so the boss , like my boss in
this situation could then say hey , we have a framework of how we want to behave . Let's take this , I take you with me and we have a direct face-to-face conversation with each other . And this is something that I establish , especially even if I don't have these values from a company .
I value the face-to-face conversation , especially when there's conflict , when there's some sort of like .
I don't like this person , because what I like to achieve within a person who has an inside conflict with someone else is to make the person aware that these emotions are there and so that this person can work it out themselves , because the person who is affected by these emotions is not their To work it out . Right , right .
Now you mentioned feedback , so you're talking about somebody jumping over you and complaining to your boss without talking with you directly , and that makes me think about the performance review mechanism and the 360 degree reviews .
I had a circumstance in my corporate past where somebody did not say something to me and then , specifically at performance review time , said something that was months after the fact and there was no opportunity for me to respond to it , and they specifically said it as a way to derail my performance review , and it worked .
It did exactly what they wanted it to do , and so I'm curious about that . Those performance reviews and the 360 degree getting feedback from one's colleagues . That seems like it could be very fraught .
The thing is , with the performance review , you might get some sort of transparency and knowledge , but I'm very much on your position , on your side , when it comes to these kind of situations . It is a game . It is being played as a game .
It is being played as a game to kick after people and is being played as a game in order to like put yourself in a good position and , by the way , this is also something that I teach my team members , with a side note to like please play it with goodwill , because I still look into how you collaborate with each other .
Yes .
But generally entire mechanism and the frameworks behind it . I don't see how this can create really good results that you can trust . So for me it's a total gameplay and this is the short version and I so around that I create a framework for execution of like .
We have a role description of what is the next promotional level where people could be promoted to and what is the current , and we measure the people on the current and see where the people meets expectation on the next level in order to be promoted , and I also tell them what are some examples that could give us some results to this and this .
I like this measurement because it gives some facts , but then comes all the context of like the other people . There's 360 degree feedback .
This is the most critical part where I see , okay , this is where the gameplay comes in and as a manager , I need to put this feedback also into the feedback cycle for the person and I know that this is just a view of someone else on this person .
It might not be true , it might be super false Because especially and actually it doesn't matter if people are on-site or off-site they have some sort of collaboration , they have some sort of worldview and they have their own worldview and they measure the person against their own worldview , and so it is super difficult for me as a manager to create some sort of
clarity as soon as the 360 degree opinions come in . It's not even data to me .
I know it's nice ideographic data , but I'd rather focus on the will and the will of self-reflection of the person itself , especially with the framework that I'm creating and the clarity which means we have some data points measuring against the person , person success and the person success is . Here are some examples . This is what I did .
Example example , example yeah , if there's some sort of conflict , we measure behavior , which I find also quite I don't know if management should measure behavior , because it's some psychology thing . I think this is something that should be temporary . It should not be put in an evaluation , it should be put into the team should resolve this together .
It's not the responsibility of one person , it's the responsibility of the team to get the understanding of each other and understanding of each other's worldviews and therefore resolving also the conflict , which means the minimum criteria I think a person should have is the openness in order to resolve this conflict .
I think this is the one behavior that I would measure .
And that is one that can be difficult for folks , especially when it can be difficult to be open when somebody is giving you some constructive criticism . Birgit , as we get to the end of the podcast , what advice would you give managers or leaders to building a workplace that , as much as possible , prevents or minimizes bullying ?
So the first thing is to establish these mentioned values . So first of all , I would say get the team together . So let's assume that the organization doesn't have values yet and they're hopefully still small enough to invite everyone to create these values together .
And so when the team comes together and they all have the ability to talk about how we want to work together , they can define that into a meta layer and say okay , these are our four or three words that describe our values , and at this level , I don't think that they need to measure it .
They just need to uphold themselves to these values as they grow into a scale up . Then it might make sense to also measure against these values as they grow and to a scale up . Then it might make sense to also measure against these values , because what also happens is that people forget about these values .
They're hidden somewhere on a website that no one reads and they are not communicated well . So this is the second thing that I would recommend to keep recommending them , to keep upholding them to the values .
Wonderful . Thank you so much for sharing your perspective and a little bit about your own experience , and then tell us a little bit more about what you do and how our listeners can reach you if they want to learn more .
I do leadership training and consulting , so consulting is especially for the companies and leadership training for the individual leader . And you can reach me on LinkedIn and also on my website , birgitpohl . com or leadersandmakers . com .
Wonderful and I will include links to that in the show notes to make it easy for anybody to find you . And Birgit , thank , make it easy for anybody to find you . And Birgit , thank you so much for being a guest today . This was such a great conversation .
Thank you very much for being here .
Thank you for listening . I'm Manya Chylinski . I help organizations analyze their culture , focusing on building environments where well-being and resilience can thrive . Through this process , we identify areas for growth , develop strategies and create the necessary changes to build healthier , more supportive organizations . If you're ready to make a change , I'd love to connect .
If you haven't already done so , please subscribe , rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or your listening platform of choice . It really helps others find us and if you want to continue the conversation , connect with me on LinkedIn or visit my website , www . manyachylinski . com . Thank you for being part of this journey with me .