I’m lucky enough to mentor some young adults. One (I’ll call them Max) came to me a while ago and described a situation where their boss rang them up and screamed abuse at them for being away on a day when the roster said they should have been working.
Max described the manager getting so loud and aggressive that his voice became distorted over the phone. Then there was a pause, and after the silence the manager admitted they themselves had misread the roster. Instead of apologising the boss asked why Max hadn’t said something and stopped his rant earlier.
There’s a desire in our society to believe most companies exist on a reasonably narrow spectrum with nothing radical at the extremes. But that’s a myth.Credit: John Shakespeare
I gave lukewarm consolation, but deep down I doubted that this had happened in the way he described. It was so unlike anything I had ever heard of or experienced in my career.
Just the other day, another of my mentees called me upset and described a similar incident. Am I just living a sheltered existence? Should I have been less sceptical of Max’s story?
I think you definitely should have believed Max’s story, although I don’t know if your incredulity comes from a sheltered existence. From what you were saying in our longer email exchange, it sounds like you’ve had a varied and interesting work life to date.
As you’ve hinted at in the question we published, however, you’ve had mostly good (or at least neutral) experiences in your time working for others and have been conscientious about treating those who work for you with dignity.
While it’s healthy to reflect on your bad decisions, my advice would be to use less energy on regret and more on affecting change.
Rather than having your perspective narrowed by a lack of experience, I wonder whether your response to Max was more a case of wishful thinking. I think there’s a pervasive desire in our society to believe that, although there are a few bad apples, most organisations exist on a reasonably narrow spectrum with nothing radical at the extremes. They’re neither great beacons of ethics and morality nor are they vectors of the worst societal diseases.
That sentiment is reflected in the platitudes you hear when something awful happens in, for example, the political sphere: that the behaviour of a parliamentarian or staffer would “never be accepted in any other work environment”. This is a reassuring idea – it can be gratifying to point in disgust at a small minority of powerful people and tell yourself “they’re not like the rest of us”. But it’s a myth.