NYC team building for low morale

I read an article last week in The New York Times, and it’s been on my mind all weekend – enough that I’m writing about it now. It’s about a lawsuit by a former employee at a venture capital firm, ostensibly about gender discrimination – more specifically, it’s about a “culture of confidence,” and how women are at an unfair disadvantage.

This “culture of confidence” depicted in the lawsuit is characterized as a workplace environment dominated by interruption.

Let me just say, I hate being interrupted. It’s truly my biggest pet peeve – I hate all forms of it, be it interrupted when I’m speaking, reading, writing, working, sleeping or any other activity which I am focused on. I know my position is a difficult one to have, especially in the 21^st century – how often during the day are we interrupted by Emails, texts, phone calls, tweets and, in my case, two young children (one of whom is currently home sick – it’s taken me about 10 times as long to write this post as it normally would). When done inadvertently, interruptions are at the least a distraction and an annoyance which breaks my concentration. However, when done deliberately in the way depicted by this article, it’s infuriating.

The former employee talks about actually receiving company-sponsored TRAINING in the art of interruption. When someone interrupts you in the workplace – especially someone in a position of authority, and ESPECIALLY in public, such as in a meeting or conference call – what are they really doing? It goes beyond simply being rude, which most children are taught interrupting is; no, when done in this context, the interrupter is making a power move. To cut someone off mid-sentence, mid-thought, is to say, “what you have to say isn’t nearly as important as what I have to say – you’re most certainly wrong, and I’m most certainly right.” It’s unquestionably a form of bullying and workplace intimidation.

Prior to starting TrivWorks, a New York City team building company specializing in workplace morale, I worked at several large prestigious nonprofit cultural organizations in Manhattan. At one of these august institutions was someone who had spent her entire career there, and after 30+ years she had ascended to become the second in command. She was brilliant and fully immersed in the day-to-day operations, and never forgot a thing – which, by default, meant that she and she alone was the final word when it came to the right and wrong way to do everything within the organization big and small, as well as what had and hadn’t transpired there over the previous three decades.

She was also a Type A personality, who had to be right.

This made for a bad situation if you were, say, a junior staff member who hadn’t even been alive for as long as she had been working there, and dared to open your mouth in a meeting. She would cut you off mid-word and tell you that you were wrong, plain and simple – no room for debate. It would happen one-on one as well as in meetings of up to 50 people, each time causing extreme humiliation and frustration, because what was I going to do – argue with her? Not only is she EVERYONE’S boss, with the power over things like advancement, salary, and whether you even get to keep your job, but she’s a genius who’s been doing this since the beginning of time.

And she knew it.

It wasn’t just to me, of course – it was to everybody. By stopping people right in their tracks with a forceful interruption, she would catch the speaker off-guard, and then insert her own thought or opinion – which, of course, was the only right one. It happened at every meeting which she was present, and it was horribly demoralizing.

So to read an article in The New York Times that there are companies out there actually TEACHING their employees the “art” of interruption, it really struck home for me. This, along with other recent high-profile cases of workplace intimidation and bullying, continues to make me wonder: what kind of workplace environments are we actually seeking to develop here? Is it really necessary to prove your dominance over those who are weaker than you, in order to accumulate and maintain power and status? And are we headed towards an office place characterized by rudeness, nastiness and interruptions?

Boy, I sure hope not.