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Stopping Sexual Harassment: Strategies for Transformational Leaders, with Gretchen Carlson, Journalist and Advocate, Author, Be Fierce
Unfortunately, in our culture in America, in our workplaces, there’s some weird thing going on where we protect predators. What I have found out since my story broke is that it’s not even the moneymakers, it’s the low level employees that we will protect. We demonize the women who have the courage to come forward, and we protect the assaulter, the abuser, the harasser at great lengths. So I think there are a couple of strategies that companies can do to try and improve this.
Put women in higher positions
One individual is not going to be able to change an entire corporate culture. We have to all decide together that we’re going to do this together. You know, not only women banding together, but men banding together. And I’ve often said that women alone can’t solve this problem. We need men to help us.
And this is where it gets into a tangled web, because it’s not just about harassment. It’s about men putting women in higher positions so that harassment doesn’t happen. Because guess what doesn’t happen when you have more women at the vice president level, for example? Harassment.
So it’s really the responsibility of men who are in the majority of top positions and companies to hire more women, to pay them fairly, to promote them, to give them a seat in the boardroom. That’s really the first way that we’ll start to eradicate this problem.
Set the tone
The buck really stops at the person at the top. I would recommend to every CEO–and by the way, since most fortune 500 companies are still run by men, 95% of them, this is mostly men that I’m speaking to. They need to set the tone immediately with all their employees and hold meetings, either small kind of meetings or everyone all together and say that this is not acceptable behavior in this workplace. And the buck stops with me. And in fact, I’m going to celebrate people who have the courage to come forward. And more importantly, I’m going to celebrate people who see this and witness this happening in the workplace, and they also come forward.
What we have working right now, across America, are a lot of enablers and bystanders. And most of the time, those are other men who see this activity going on. And when the person at the top sets a tone of a toxic environment and the enablers and the bystanders don’t say anything about it, it becomes the norm within that company. It’s like a kid taking a cookie out of a cookie jar and not getting caught. The next time they take two. And the next time they take three. This is how we create these incredibly toxic environments. Because if it’s starting at the top and then everyone’s enabling it as it trickles down, it just becomes the norm. So imagine the difference if you flip that on its side and the person at the top changes that tone.
Make it safer to come forward
The way in which we currently allow people to come and complain usually is to go to human resources, and I advocate in my book Be Fierce that maybe that’s not always the best place to go to. Because quite honestly, HR Departments are there to protect the company, not necessarily to protect every employee’s concern. So I advocate for some sort of an ombudsman or an independent contractor where employees would feel safer in coming forward. Or at least have more than one department or unit where a person can come forward. Maybe they don’t feel comfortable with that.
I mean, I’ve heard horror stories where people go to complain and then the first thing they do is set up a meeting between the complainer and the harasser to try and work it out. I mean, that’s not how you fix this problem. Or immediately, there is this reaction of, well, we’ve got to get rid of her. We’ve got to figure out how to move her on out, because she’s a problem. Or we got to move that guy. So we just shift them around. We’ve seen that happen in other parts of the world.
Revamp employee training
So about 10 years ago, I would do sexual harassment training at my place of employment. Actually, in person. It would be a full or half day seminar where you would actually look at case studies and try to figure out what sexual harassment was. And then over time, that just went to the computer. And so you would do like a compliance program on your computer. And we all know how we do those things. We don’t pay attention to them, right? We just go click, click, click, click. So nobody’s learning anything. And I often have heard now in my research that a lot of people just had their assistants fill out this stuff for them, so they’re not even looking at this information.
Plus, even if somebody is paying attention, they’re not teaching the right tools to fix the problem. We really need to be focusing harassment training on giving the courage to the enablers and the bystanders to stop being those two things. What I’ve learned is that it’s almost as tough for a bystander to come forward as it is for the actual victim. Because guess what also happens to bystanders when they find the courage to come forward? They are promptly demoted, blacklisted, and fired.
So if we change the training within the company to celebrate that person who comes forward, or to at least give them the tools to know how to come forward and how that benefits the entire organization, then we completely shift the blame and the guilt of this issue in the right direction.