It’s one thing to have your policies criticized. To be condemned by your political opponents. To be second guessed by pundits. But it’s another to have pornographic or racist cartoons and bumper stickers, as well as fabricated stories about you circulating freely in the media and on the internet.

That’s what both the Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, and President Barack Obama are putting up with. In Gillard’s case, even though Australians are used to a bare-knuckle style of Parliamentary debate, the vulgar, misogynist attack on Gillard goes way beyond even the most salacious rant. And the racist attacks on Obama, as well as challenges to his nationality, education, and religion are far out of line from simple political disagreement.

Both Gillard and Obama are firsts. They broke through a glass ceiling, And in both cases, right after their election, their countries basked in a post-election glow that quickly dissipated in the wake of reactionary and vicious attacks.

Can they defend themselves? (more…)

Power is not a singular attribute but a tricky intersection between the power of the person and the power of the role. I’ve written elsewhere about this tricky problem of the fit between the power of the person and the power of the role, the interaction of power and status.

Poor use of power most often stems from a dissonance between the personal power of the one in the role and the power of the role itself.

Now a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology shows how this dynamic happens in a research study. The implications of this are vast and useful for everything from ethics in corporate governance to bullying in schools.

What makes it even trickier is that status is not static; it fluctuates depending on many factors. Under threat and attack, our status can go down. In fact, under threat, when triggered, it’s common to regress to the place where we have been hurt or wounded, because that is where we learned to defend ourselves. This is why power needs to come with a User’s Guide: We regress to our place of lowest status, and from there, reach for our biggest rank to defend ourselves.

Bob Sutton, in his blog post 12 Things Good Bosses Believe, emphasizes how the power of a role inevitably creates blind spots. Number 1 on his list:

I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it’s like to work for me

And he concludes with Number 12:

Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.

I like how he says it and shows it so bluntly: power corrupts.

But it is not the power of the role alone. It is the fit between the power of the person and the power of the role. Think of it like clothing. The role or position is a piece of clothing, but the body who wears it has a lot to do with how it fits, to stretch an analogy just a bit. (more…)

As I’ve written about before, solving the problems of bullying depends on the society’s tolerance for abusive interaction. My good friend and colleague, Dawn Menken, psychotherapist and conflict resolution educator, wrote this thoughtful piece for the Oregonian last week. She raises many thought-provoking questions, and asks us to look at how we define bullying. Until we look closely at our tolerance for certain behaviors, we won’t make headway into the problem of bullying.

Cultural tolerance is one part of the problem of bullying. But another is learning how to have healthy and productive conflict. There really is such a thing as a “good fight.” In fact, diversity of opinion, incompatibility of worldviews, and clashes of representational systems increase intelligence. Barbara Strauch, author of The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain said in a recent interview in the New York Times:

One of the most intriguing findings [about maintaining healthy brain functioning] is that if you talk to people who disagree with you, that helps your brain wake up and refine your arguments and shake up the cognitive egg, which is what you want to do.

Last week news broke that 15 year-old Phoebe Prince killed herself after months of harassment and bullying by her classmates at a South Hadley, MA high school. School administrators initially denied knowing anything about it, even though Prince’s mother had complained to school officials, and a renowned bullying expert had been called in to consult on the problem (Coloroso reported that the school had not fully implemented her recommendations: http://thecrimereport.org/2010/04/02/ma-school-where-student-died-hadnt-carried-out-anti-bullying-plan/).

And over the Easter weekend, while many senior Catholics across Europe apologized in their Easter addresses for the ongoing sexual abuse of children by clergy, a senior cardinal defended Pope Benedict XVI from what he called petty gossip and a vile smear operation by the anti-Vatican media. On Good Friday the Pope’s personal preacher, Father Raniero Cantalamessa, compared the criticism of the Catholic Church over child abuse to the collective violence suffered by the Jews. (more…)

Just finished a weekend training seminar on bullying in Auckland, New Zealand. It was terrific to have so many participants there involved in workplace bullying and harassment work. What’s increasingly evident as I tackle this topic around the globe is the role of cultural attitudes. To adequately fight bullying, we have to reduce our cultural tolerance for abusive interaction. Many cultures deride sensitivity and praise people’s ability to “suck it up,” to be tough and strong, and not be “so sensitive.” The tough guy is a cultural icon, the action figure we admire and emulate. But to get underneath the problem of bullying, we need to value sensitivity and respect as much as toughness.

Randy Cohen, the New York Times’ ethicist, recently opined on the court ruling that ordered Google to release the name of the anonymous blogger whose site Skanks in NYC was devoted to slandering a fashion model:

Has anonymous posting, though generally protected by law, become so toxic that it should be discouraged?

This issue has gotten my attention as I’m preparing a workshop on Bullying in the Public Sphere. I often find myself drawn to read comments on news sites, drawn no doubt by the same impulse that makes me crane my neck as I drive by an accident. Unmoderated comment sections provide an un-chaperoned space for every adolescent impulse we’ve ever repressed. The comments rapidly devolve into nasty, name-calling, deliberately inflammatory and hateful. It’s this impulse (what possible evolutionary purpose might it serve?) that the mainstream media depend on for their fortunes, and is no doubt why there continues to be unmoderated comments sections after every article. (more…)

As promised, Iâ??ve been looking at abuse of power, including bullying, ethical violations, exploitation, and conflict of interest. These past few weeks, Iâ??ve been researching workplace and school bullying. I find the topic to be really disturbing. If the literature is accurate, itâ??s a far bigger problem than I realized. Thereâ??s even a newly coined term, bullycide, to describe children who suicide because of being bullied. Itâ??s pretty much accepted that most mass shootings at schools were caused by bullying: the shooters were all targets of bullies who finally snapped.

One of the big controversies in the topic of bullying concerns attribution, or the causes of bullying. Here the research splits into two camps. One camp attributes internal or innate causes to bullying, such as a personality disorder. The other camp points to external (or situational) attributes: upbringing and social forces, group dynamics, socialization, etc.

A lot of what Iâ??ve read on childhood bullying posits external causes to explain why children become bullies. Thus, prevention focuses on creating empathy in children, teaching conflict resolution skills, and raising children to feel empowered, responsible, and empathic. Workplace bullying, however, is often explained in terms of internal attribution such as an underlying personality disorder, and prevention focuses on law, workplace tolerance, organizational norms, and policies. In the literature, the terms psychopath and sociopath crop up frequently, even though there is no hard evidence that bullying is a mental disorder. Even so, the tendency to diagnose it persists. Bullying, like so many other things that fall outside the bell curve of acceptable human behavior, is medicalized.

We used to use moral discourse; now itâ??s medical or psychiatric discourse that banishes criminal behavior and violence to the margins. Putting things into the medical model, as an aberration or disorder, is a way of containing the anxiety we feel over the incomprehensible cruelty that humans are capable of. For instance, Hitler is often called a sociopath, and those who did his bidding are said to have fallen under his hypnotic spell. It may be clinically the case, but it also obscures the fact that Hitler had many helpers. Was every German who followed Hitler a sociopath, or an anomaly?

Foucault famously said, weâ??ve come to view criminal as â??a kernel of danger, representing a type of anomaly.â?? I call this the â??lone gunman theory,â?? which states: some deranged wacko unlike you and me is responsible. Yet the truth is, none of us is too far from bullying behavior. Milgramâ??s well known experiment which measured the willingness of people to obey authority, even when it conflicted with their conscience, shows how amendable we are to so-called sociopathic tendencies. Seeking the cause of bullying as an internal attribution might help create workplace and school guidelines to prevent and curtail bullying, but it wonâ??t do enough because the question itself reflects a worldview that bullying is not a feature of human experience but a deviation from it. If on the other hand, we saw it as a continuum of behavior we are all capable of, we would learn, from an early age, how to deal with those tendencies in ourselves and others.

Bullying is abhorrent, but it is not an aberration of the human condition and calls for no special explanation. We all have bullying impulses â?? whether or not we act on them, or more accurately, to which degree we act on them. Bullying is defined as the use of power to hurt, demean, ridicule, abuse, torture, mistreat or exploit someone else to promote oneself at the othersâ?? expense. Is it not in our human nature to want to get our way no matter what? To exploit anotherâ??s weakness for our gain? To use emotions – pressure, guilt, threats â??to get our way? Isnâ??t mocking someoneâ??s point of view in public a form of bullying? When I tune in to Fox News or CNN, and watch political pundits hammering away at each other, or read comments on my favorite blogs, I find it rife with bullying.

The Workplace Bullying Institute has a simple explanation for what causes bullying: bullies bully because they can. There is a German expression: Gelegenheit macht Diebe (Opportunity makes the thief) There is opportunity and reward for those who use power to exploit others for their own gain. So bullying as a behavior cannot be addressed in isolation from the school, organization or society that promotes and rewards that use of power, competition and exploitation. Bullying is a use of power, and a poor one at that. If there is a disorder at play, it might just be a social one to which weâ??re all prone to varying degrees.

I’m in Florida, visiting my parents on the Gulf Coast. When the plane landed in Dallas/Fort Worth, for the stopover, and again in Fort Myers, the ground below looked, well, scratchy. In contrast to the loamy and verdant patch of land I call home, the earth looked threadbare, like an old quilt that had seen better days. And it’s not just the geographical landscape in Portland that’s different. There’s a cultural landscape in Portland, in Multnomah County, Oregon that is markedly different from many parts of the country.

These thoughts bring me back to the question of power. Because in that luxuriant landscape of Multnomah County, it’s easy to get myopic, to think about the problems of power and leadership in more benign terms. My goal here is to look at how we use power, how and why we use it poorly, and how we can use it well. And yet, the question nags me, is it that simple? What about blatantly abusive, even evil uses of power? Can we really learn how to use power like we learn how to ride a bike, or does power truly have a corrupting influence? I’m not sure it does. Maybe the already corrupted tend to seek power. Because not everyone in a high rank position abuses power. Which lends weight to the argument, to use gun advocates’ phrase, that it’s not power that abuses, but the person. Or perhaps it’s a problem of scale, that because of their high profile, leaders’ egregious acts of abuse are more visible.

So, over the next few months I’ll be looking at the more difficult sides to power, whether there really are certain factors related to high rank that alter behavior, or even personality. One of the difficulties in tackling this question is that it’s often answered by those who have been hurt by power, so we seldom hear the story from both sides. For this reason, I like to consider power a problem of scale – even in a small way, if we have misused our power, we can shed light on this question: how if it all has power itself contributed to its abusive use?