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An upstander is someone who intervenes. An upstander is the opposite of being the silent bystander. What can we do to be upstanders instead of silent bystanders? If you are in a situation where you want to be an upstander, you have five different responses.
The first, of course, is to respond directly to what happened, to the disrespectful attitude and behavior. A friend of mine told me a story about going into a meeting with a colleague of his who was a woman and another colleague who was a man. His colleague who was a woman had the expertise that was going to win his team the deal. So when they went into this meeting, she sat in the center of the table. He sat to her left, and another guy sat to his left. And when the other side came in, the first person who came in sat across from him. The next person sat across from the guy to his left, and then everybody else filed on down the table, leaving his colleague, the woman, dangling all by herself. She started talking as the meeting got started. And when the other side had questions, they didn’t direct them at her. They directed them at him. And the third time it happened, he stood up. He looked at his colleague and he said, “I think we should switch seats.” That was all he had to do to totally change the dynamic in the room. That’s awesome if you can do that. But sometimes, you can’t think of what to say, or sometimes, it might even feel like you might do more harm than good if you disrupt the situation directly.
You can also delay. And by delay, I mean, just check in with the person who was on the receiving end of the disrespectful attitude or behavior later. An example of why this can have such an important impact comes from a story from my career. I was giving a presentation to a big team, like five thousand people. And the leader of that team, I was with two colleagues, and the leader of that team introduced us. He introduced my first colleague, shook his hand, introduced my second colleague, shook his hand, introduced me. I stuck my hand out for him to shake it. And instead of shaking it, he grabbed it and he kissed it, kinda leaving spit on the back of my hand. So that was gross. That was not ideal. But what was even worse was that not a single person, not a single one of those five thousand people came up to me later and said, “Oh, that was weird. Do you want a little hand sanitizer?” And then I started kind of gaslighting myself. I was like, “Am I making too big a deal of it?”
You can also just create a distraction. Spill your coffee if you have to. Sometimes that will give the person who is harmed by the disrespectful attitude or behavior the beat that they need to sort of regain composure. You can also delegate, catch someone else’s eye. One of the many advantages that upstanders have is that there’s usually a lot of them. You’re usually not alone. So find someone else. Maybe you’re not the right person to be the upstander in the situation, but there’s probably someone else who is.
Last but not least, you can document what happened. If it’s legal where you are, you can film it. But you can also just write down, you can always write down what happened. But remember, the person who was harmed gets to own that documentation. Consult with them and ask them what they want you to do about it. So these are the five things that you can do to be a great upstander. You can disrupt directly. You can delay and check in with the person harmed later. You can create a distraction. You can delegate upstanding to someone else, or you can document what happened. Five Ds.