Your Personal Career Defense Toolkit
Talking about your experience and being open to other perspectives is the most important way to make change. Be open to other people disagreeing with you, but stick to your perspective if theirs rings false. Talk about your experience of sexual harassment as if talking about it is a gift to your listener. It is. Below are my initial steps in how to address workplace harassment. These steps, and those to follow on this blog and in my book Career Defense 101, are intended to pr
Diagnosis: Creating and Administering a Cultural Health Survey
The first step toward a healthy workplace culture is diagnosis, which can be done by conducting a Cultural Health Survey. I am not going to walk you through exactly how to create your own Cultural Health Survey because there are so many different, practical ways that it can work. You could send a text message or an email with the right questions. You could use a form like Google Surveys, Survey Monkey, or WuFoo. You could do a Facebook poll if that’s the way that is easiest f
Identifying Allies, Building Support, and Reclaiming Power
After you assess your situation and identify unacceptable behavior, the next thing to do is to identify the allies around you that will support you. You don’t need to build a formal group or have meetings or anything, just be specific about the people around you whose opinions you trust and provide you support. Even if your list only includes your cat, put her on there. An ally is someone you can tell about your experience and get realistic feedback and perspective from or so
How Leadership Affects Long-Term Efficiency
When you hire someone to do a job for you, you probably just want that person to do their job so that you don’t have to worry about doing it. Those of us who have trained another person know it is not that simple. We invest more at the outset in training a new employee in order to save countless hours and allow company growth later – that is the tradeoff. The same is true with finding out about cultural health problems employees are experiencing. It is an initial investment a
You Are Here*: Labeling the Problem In Your Workplace Culture
I remember that when the harassment I was experiencing was at its most extreme, I lost all ability to even appreciate a warm house on a rainy day. My entire body was consumed with fear about harassment and despair about who I was and what I deserved. I was afraid all the time. Understanding the law and how it applied to my situation was no help in reducing my fear – instead, it added a level of pressure and confusion because it is impossible to get a straight answer about how
3 Steps to Creating Healthy Workplace Culture
Diversity of identities and perspectives is good for problem solving, for reaching new audiences, good for business, and is essential in a healthy workplace. Even if you are starting with a homogenous workplace now, using my steps of diagnosis, appropriate confidentiality, transparency, and power dynamics facilitation will make your workplace safer and more productive and set the groundwork to hire employees to increase diversity. They will also allow you to become the type o
The Inclusive Leader: Honoring Perspectives and Owning Biases
When I am at speaking events, I often get questions like, “What about people who are just misunderstanding and unreasonably interpreting innocent behavior as harassment?” or, “How is your process going to help me know who is right and who is lying?” People (men and women) remind me that the accused are “innocent until proven guilty, so how do we balance that with supporting victims and not go too far? On the other hand, you may have followed social media hashtags like #MeToo,
Sexual Harassment and the Law
Let's dive into Strategy 1: Law. Whether or not you are asking in the back of your mind, “Do I have a legal case?” it will help you to have an understanding of what the law can do for you – and what it can’t – in order to end harassment in your life for good. Because I don’t know your story, and I may not work in your state, this is not legal advice. This is a very, very rough description of how the law works federally and in many states and what it protects. Protections arou
Seven Strategies to Stop Harassment and Advance in Fulfilling Work
It is important to be deliberate and strategic in the way we talk about and deal with sexual harassment. In Career Defense 101 (my first book), I explain the seven strategies I use in teaching my clients how to defend their careers from sexual harassment so that they can advance in fulfilling work. Those seven strategies are... Strategy 1: Law. When women do not understand how the law applies to their particular situation (or whether it applies at all), they often accidentall
Opportunity, Inclusion, and Growth
Many employers believe they are working toward solving discrimination by simply hiring a “diverse” workforce, and that is a great first step. Most of the early legal work in Civil Rights has also been to provide opportunities to groups with disadvantaged characteristics so that they have the opportunity to participate in areas they had been banned from (for example, owning property, having careers, and voting). The problem we’ve seen with this is that it is one thing to hire
