Humiliation Driven Underground

Today’s “Cubicle Culture” column in the Wall Street Journal
is on “Office Tormentors.” Jared Sandberg points out that, because public
humiliation has become taboo at work, it has been driven underground, but it is
still plenty horrifying. I agree that some of it is going underground, but there
is still plenty of public humiliation too – as my last post showed.  Or if you want to see some systematic
evidence, read the research on nurses, who are among the most consistently
oppressed workers. One study of 175
registered nurses found that approximately 60% had been verbally abused, yelled
at, and insulted by a physician at least once every two months. A larger study
of 1100 American nurses found that 97% were victims of verbal abuse.

But Sandberg’s point about subtle humiliation is well taken.
Sometimes it happens when people treat you as invisible. Other times
humiliation “goes underground” when people use teasing rather than blatant
insults. The best description I’ve ever seen of the damage done by “friendly” teasing
is in the late Gordon Mackenzie’s masterpiece Orbiting
the Giant Hairball.  When I was writing
Weird
Ideas That Work, I read this little gem over and over again, for general inspiration,
and to quote little gems like this one. Gordon MacKenzie was known as the “Creative
Paradox” during his years at Hallmark Cards and he often ran creativity works. In
Hairball, he describes a woman who, “with a bashful eagerness,”  began a sketch that showed how she felt about
herself, the Management of Information Systems group she was part of, and
Hallmark. As I said in Weird Ideas, ‘Her
co-workers reacted with a “rowdy taunting” about her lack of drawing skills;
she quickly changed from looking eager to looking hurt, and then “After an
apologetic explanation of her drawing, she scurried, eyes down, back to her
seat.”’

In many organizations, people would be allowed to get away
with such nastiness. To his credit, MacKenzie
confronted the group with about the demeaning behavior. He said to them:

“Teasing
is a disguised form of shaming… I suspect that when you teased this woman, it
was an unconscious effort to throw her off balance – to stop her from risking,
which she was most clearly beginning to do. Why would you want to do that? …[B]ecause we don’t want to admit to
others or ourselves that we are trying to stop growth, we disguise our shaming
as teasing – ‘all in the spirit of good fun.’ ”