Out of Bounds

We’re looking for clues from the past so we can prepare to cope with people who are perhaps more volatile and less able to channel their impulses than they used to be.

I promised to write about ways I have seen out-of-control people dealt with. I didn’t say all of those ways are wonderful, but I’ve saved my favorite for last.

Please feel free to add stories of your own along these general lines in the comments below this post.

Who’s Alpha?

Long ago I lost count of the number of times I’ve dealt with people who have I’m Alpha syndrome. They have usually (not always) been men.

You know the type. They’ve always got to be top dog, Alpha over you. They’re demeaning, even abusive, to everyone they perceive as beneath them. Some are sly devils about it and some are overtly nasty.

At one particular job, the Team Leader had driven out every person who had ever tried to become able to do the job in rotation with him. The employer was beginning to feel desperate. If anything happened to him, there wouldn’t be anyone capable of running the facility. I came along and they had me give it a try.

At first I desperately needed Team Leader’s coaching and assistance. After all, he was at the top of the field and I was a newbie by comparison. He was happy then, still essential, still top dog. But after a few months, I began to be competent on my own. That’s when he began attacking, trying to undercut me and make me fail.

On one notable day, he reamed me out in front of my team at the top of his lungs over some silly made-up pretext. I didn’t deserve it, and everybody knew it. Then he walked out. By the rules our employer had set out, I was not yet allowed to run the team unless he was present to observe and stop me if I began to make a terrible mistake. Everything was dead in the water.

While he was out, I thought frantically about what to do.

After half an hour, he returned. He expected me to meekly cower, I guess… but I didn’t. I reamed him out in front of my team at the top of my lungs over some silly made-up pretext, and then I walked out.

By the rules our employer had set out, he couldn’t take over and run the team himself. When I was in charge, he could only observe and advise. Everything was dead in the water.

I paced outside the building for exactly as long as he had stayed away. Then I went back inside and resumed work with the team as though nothing had happened.

He never tried anything like that with me again. In fact, I won the right to lead the team without requiring his constant presence any more.

To me, the general approach here should not be taken as shouting back equally loudly. That incident was the only time I’ve had to do it that way. The key is standing up to the bully.

It’s mostly a matter of firmly saying no to a demand that is out of bounds. One of my clients had a customer with Alpha syndrome. This one was a sly devil, manipulative, sneaky, never a shouter. He started by demanding that my client drop me from leading the project we were doing for him on the grounds that I hadn’t taken the right formal training courses in software at the heart of the project. I shot back that I had been working with the software since before it had any training courses. As a result I knew things about how it worked that the trainers didn’t know and that the project needed, but if he could suggest someone else who could lead instead, I would step aside. He backed down.

Later he tried to bully my client into doing about £25k worth of extra work that his own company was supposed to provide to us as foundation material. He wanted us to do it without any additional charge on our fixed price contract. I said it was outside the scope of our contract, so we would do it if he paid for it. He tried again. I said no.

People never said no to that man. Everyone else in the room was aghast, but held their tongues. I was the only person who had been able to see a tidy way to make the project work and get it done in their exceedingly tight timeline. If the customer shunned us, nobody (including competitors) could do what the customer needed. The bully backed down again.

Personally, I like just say no much better than shouting down the house.

Mad Bomber

After leaving the Space Program, I spent five years on contract to Du Pont working on factory automation. I learned a lot there. It wasn’t all about the technology. Companies, like people, are a mixture of good and bad, and I got to see some of the best of the company as well as a little of the bad.

Every so often big companies swing an axe through the workforce, starting with contractors if possible and tossing out some employees if they must. At one point it looked like some of us on contract were going to be let go.

One of the contractors threatened to bring in a bomb and set it off if he was targeted.

My group worked with his from time to time, so I knew him, although not as well as I knew the people I worked with every day. He had always seemed a little odd, a little off, but not like this!

As anyone would expect, Du Pont turned off his key card access and warned everyone not to let him into the building.

Then they did something I have never seen any other company do for an employee, let alone a contractor. They got professional help for him. Psychological help! After weeks of treatment, he returned to work on his contract. Admittedly everyone kept a closer eye on him than before, but he was back. It all turned out okay.

Ripple Effects

From Du Pont’s perspective, its people had skills and experience. They were not readily replaced. Many of the company’s factories dealt with processes or substances or equipment that could cause harm if mishandled or wrongly designed, so it was important for people to do their jobs well.

While on contract there, I met an employee with a job I have not run into elsewhere. She was in a team tasked with taking care of problems outside the workplace that were jeopardizing an employee’s ability to concentrate on their job. Her team did whatever it took to address those problems, and they didn’t have to be as direct as an employee’s health or welfare. They could be problems with ripple effects on the employee.

If someone in an employee’s family was out of control, that was just as serious as if the employee was in a spiral. The special intervention team did whatever it took to address the trouble. That team even went into crack dens to retrieve addicted children of employees and take them to rehab.

The Special Room

One business owner I knew in the USA had a special room among her offices. She said it was one of the best things she had done to keep her small business running well. It was a room any employee could go to when they were losing control of themselves.

I never got to see it. From what she said about how it was used, I imagine it with soundproofed walls with soothing colors. I imagine a bean bag chair, pillows, harmless throwable things, nothing breakable and nothing I could hurt myself on. People went in there to bawl their heart out, or rant and scream obscenities, or throw things, or beat up a pillow.

This is my favorite of the examples I offer today because it is simple, safe, and offers privacy for meltdown moments. It’s a pressure release valve.

Going Forward

As I said in my previous post, across a portion of the population in both of my countries we face an escalation in volatility and inability to rein in personal behavior. Injuries inflicted by COVID may be a factor, in which case it’s a bit like the violence low level lead exposure used to fuel. That means it won’t go away as quickly as it began. We’ve got to come up with ways to handle behavior that’s spilling out of bounds.

Do you have more ideas or examples about how to do that? Please share in the comments!