When Bernadette Boas was given a pink slip from her very lucrative, global vice president type of role, she was happy.
But she didn’t understand why, so she decided to do some self-reflection.
“I was that bitch with the walls up, and there was no internal dialogue going on at all,” she says.
She recognized that her ruthless attitude had taken a toll on her health, as her body was mocking symptoms of a heart attack because of the stress and angst she was experiencing. She also saw that she had all the luxuries of life, but she didn’t have the things that really mattered — loving relationships and warmth.
“When I realized it was because of that nasty attitude, I was horrified at how many people I had hurt over the years,” she says.
She decided to write her book, “Shedding the Corporate Bitch,” as an apology to all the people she’s hurt over the years and to address how people can shed the ruthless leadership shell.
Smart Business also spoke with her about how business leaders can more effectively handle difficult people in the workplace.
How do you recognize toxic behavior in your team?
Any good, aware manager is going to see that an individual within their team or department or organization is toxic. It’s whether or not they’re willing to address it and not just look at their productivity.
For instance, that attitude for me produced a lot of great results for our customers. Our customers appreciated the fact that I would go at it with my own internal team and fight for them, and therefore I and created a lot of great results. But internally, what I did was create a lot of toxic environment among our organization.
The manager, they know when they have someone who is toxic, so they have to confront it and address it. When somebody is toxic, there’s something underlying that. There’s something underneath that. When someone is productive and good at what they do and is very much a leader but is taking on these attitudes and mindsets, they’re doing it for other reasons. Businesses don’t want to get under the covers and play therapist. When you think about coaching and why coaching and executive counseling is so effective, it’s because they are addressing that underlying motivation and underlying agenda underneath the behavior. Managers just need to pay attention to it, confront it and then just recognize that it could be easily addressed once they do — it’s not a lost cause when you have that individual. It doesn’t automatically mean they have to be fired. It just needs to be addressed.
How do you effectively address it?
Often times the person afflicting on to other people, they don’t really see it. They don’t see they’re being as damaging as possible. Some of them breed off of it. They love the idea that they’re intimidating people or they’re making people uncomfortable or they’re demanding. At the same time, they’re not seeing what it’s doing to themselves personally and professionally. A lot of times it’s confronting that. If someone had confronted me, I’m a smart woman; I would have woken up to it eventually. I would have saved a lot of the personal and professional damage I did to myself.
Unfortunately, a lot of companies don’t do a lot of training and coaching on managing people in difficult conversations in the workplace. They need to arm their HR organization or their managers with the tools to sit someone down effectively and needs to facilitate a dialogue with someone. Depending on that manager’s own personality, some can just call you out on it right away. Some will just sit you down and say, ‘Look, you’re hurting yourself in your career with the attitude you’re bringing to the business.’ Other people aren’t very good at dealing with confrontation. They may need training or have someone in the HR to facilitate and mediate that type of conversation.
Very simply too, performance reviews, [need to be] done more regularly and effectively. They have performance review processes but they’re done reactively — they’re not proactive with a purpose or effective to where it shifts or creates change in that individual. Unfortunately, a lot of companies fall short on being able to leverage those opportunities where they sit down and have a conversation with their employees or managers to address those kinds of issues. That’s the time to do it — whether it’s during the process or a one-off because of an issue because someone is creating havoc within the organization.
How to reach: www.sheddingthecorporatebitch.com
