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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, TED Talks Daily listeners, I'm Elise Hu. Today, we have an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective, handpicked by us for you. Many think of bullying as something that only happens when they're in school, but that's not always the case. This week, we're taking a look at workplace bullying with an episode of Fixable.
Social psychologist Amy Cuddy will explain how to spot workplace bullies, and more importantly, how and why we should all talk about them. Whatever you're dealing with at work, a bully, a bad boss, burnout, Fixable is there to help. And it's back for a new season. Each week, business leaders Anne Morris and Francis Fry share real fixes to some of the most common workplace problems.
And if you're listening and have your own workplace issue, you can send in your questions by emailing fixable at ted.com. Find Fixable wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com. Now on to the episode right after a quick break. Frances, today we have the pleasure and the privilege of speaking with our friend and colleague, Amy Cuddy.
Amy is one of these people that she's known around the world. And if you ever walk down a street with her, strangers will stop her and tell her the influence she has had on their lives. It's really quite extraordinary. Yeah, she has this great rock star force for good energy around her, and you really see it in public. I've witnessed those same interactions.
Well, let's give the audience some context for the few people walking the planet who may not know her. Amy is a social psychologist and bestselling author whose work often focuses on bringing large, messy challenges back within our own locus of control. Allowing us to perform better as leaders, as colleagues, even just as humans moving through a complicated world.
Many people will know Amy for her mind-body research on the benefits of power posing.
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Chapter 2: How can we define workplace bullying?
She gave a TED Talk on this a few years ago. It's now one of the most viewed TED Talks of all time, 70 million views and counting. Yeah. Amy and I worked together at Harvard, and so I know firsthand how incredible she is. Her first book, Presence, it changed my life. I couldn't be more excited for her next one, which is coming out literally any day now.
It might even be out by the time you're listening to this. Yes, I'm super excited. And this is what we want to talk with her about today. So the book is called Bullies, Bystanders, and Bravehearts. It's about workplace bullying, what it looks like, how it progresses, how to intervene. We had such a great conversation with Amy that we're actually going to make this into a two-part episode.
So this one will be the nitty gritty of knowing how to spot bullying. And next week, we're going to get into how to stop it. It is so important. A master fixer on workplace bullying. I'm excited to get into it. I'm Anne Morris. I'm a company builder and leadership coach. And I'm Frances Fry. I'm a professor at the Harvard Business School and I'm Anne's wife.
And this is Fixable from the TED Audio Collective. On this show, we believe that meaningful change happens fast. Anything is fixable and good solutions are usually just a single brave conversation away. Amy Cuddy, welcome to Fixable. Thank you. So let's get into it. Okay. And I want to start with some definitions because I think this is a really critical part of this conversation.
What is workplace bullying? Well, let me start by saying that the fundamental thing that separates bullying from other negative forms of interpersonal behavior is that bullying requires more than one person. A lone bully is impotent. And when you look at other forms of really bad behavior, which I'm not saying are less bad— They can be enacted by a single person.
Bullying requires other people to join and to turn on its target. So I'm actually going to read the definition if that's okay. You can use it wherever you want to. But I do think it's so important to get the definition right and for us to have a shared language to talk about this because I think – There's people fear being labeled bullies when they're not bullies.
They're afraid to say something is bullying because it feels so loaded. And so we do need to get it right. So after looking at decades of research on bullying, interviewing hundreds of targets of bullying, having my own personal experience with it, seeing it repeat over and over again, this is the definition that I use. Bullying is a profound, intentional, targeted crime.
Serial and escalating attack on a person's social and professional integrity and viability that's carried out by multiple people. Bullying involves a power differential that favors the bully, but that power differential need not be formal or structural. and doesn't have to exist when the bullying begins. Either way, the gap grows over time.
While bullying tends to be instigated by one person, it is not a single assault perpetrated by only one person. It's an ongoing campaign to shame, humiliate, discredit, demoralize, punish, and socially kill or permanently exclude the target. Wow. I'm just letting that land. I'm letting that land. I know it's a lot. It's a lot. Every word is heavy. Yeah. Let me ask you this.
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Chapter 3: What are the early signs of bullying in the workplace?
She's like, oh, I can completely take this guy down. So I call that recruitment and retention because they're recruiting, but they're also showing – that they retain them by giving them status, awarding them status by promoting the accessory bullies. And so now they've got like a group of kind of minions who will carry out their agenda. And so that's the recruitment and retention.
What happens after that is in some ways – the most painful part of this, the most crazy-making part of it for the target. And this is what I call silencing, but in two ways. The target is silenced both in that they can't defend themselves. If they defend themselves, they're being too defensive and then they're guilty.
If they don't defend themselves, they're guilty because they haven't defended themselves. There's no response or non-response. There's nothing they can do that will be seen as exonerating. And they've also lost their social connections. Completely. This is not like being sick in a hospital bed where people are rallying by you. It's the opposite. People run.
People who you thought would never run, run. You are alone. So I talk about the silencing phase as having two components. One comes from tech, which is denial of services attacks or DDoS attacks. And that's where, you know, the server's being overloaded and can't do its work.
But in this case, what happens is the bully and the accessory bullies, more the accessory bullies start to accuse the target of all kinds of wrongdoings. And so there are all these what I call sham investigations. Right. So whatever you were doing, which might have been defending your work, you're now defending everything that you've done in your professional life.
You've taken the server out completely. So now the person is silenced or made to look just totally incompetent. So they cannot demonstrate their competence. And that is a very powerful tool. I see it all the time. And in the case of the grocery store worker, what this manager did – And remember, this is a guy who just loved his job, took it so seriously. And there is recorded evidence of this.
She started to swap out fresh products for expired products after he left for the night and then say you've let these – people are buying expired dairy products. And so now he's defending himself against this. You can imagine how shocking that would be. I mean, and wait, could I have done that? And if I didn't, like, who would possibly do that?
I mean, he didn't believe that she was doing that to him because who would do that? Right. So it could look like that. Yeah. Wow. Wow. So people are silenced in two ways. They're silenced on their ability to demonstrate their competence and their sort of – their trustworthiness as a professional. And then there's also what I call denial of sanity, and that's the gaslighting. Mm-hmm.
And so that's where you do – you are being attacked from every angle and having people who you once thought were really normal, I mean, certainly not threatening, starting to, you know, say things, post things about you that just are outrageous. So you start to think – I must be losing my mind. And no one is telling you, hey, no, the lights are not flickering.
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