08 230816 Holding Abusers Accountable
Meredith HolleySep 20, 2023 at 11:19 pm30min
Megan Goering Mellin
Today we are talking about holding abusers accountable in the workplace. This is something that vexes a lot of us, you know, we encounter a behavior that we really wish we had not encountered, we get into a situation that does not represent how he wanted it to be. And now it is time, it is time to try to figure out what to do. And so here comes the idea of accountability. How do we hold other people to a vision of the thing that represents what we wanted to have happen when it is clearly kind of off track. So I'm very excited to get to dig even more into this idea of accountability today and to zero in on how we can think about it in the workplace. This is one of the biggest topics that I feel like we all agree is missing, like we know that this is a missing piece in our leadership dialogue. But where did I really want to drill in today to how you see accountability? Specifically, how you utilize it in a workplace, both from kind of like your legal training and your coaching perspective. And then what kind of mental models we can put in for accountability that allow us to deal with abuses or really aggressive behaviors when they show up? So
Meredith Holley
yeah, I mean, I think the topic of accountability is really important. And honestly, when I'm working on the legal side, you know, when I've represented employees who have been fired for an illegal reason, or harassed at work or discriminated against at work, almost universally what they say, you know, no employee wants to sue their employer, no employer wants to be sued, right. So there's like this shared pain around this issue. But what employees say to me universally is I don't want this to happen to somebody else, they want to protect the next person coming forward. And in order to protect the next person coming forward, or the next vulnerable person in this situation. What they say is this harasser this abuser, this discriminatory person needs to be held accountable. But I think that in that we don't have a great or specific idea of what that means. And for a lot of people in that position, it feels like they're going to be on a TV show. And there's going to be a judge who says, Yes, you were this harasser was wrong, and you were right. And now you're going to be safe. And I'm going to keep everybody safe. And in real life, that's just not really how the legal system works at all. And so it can feel really defeating and really punishing for people who really just want to keep other people safe, and really just want to make a positive difference, to be seeking accountability and feel like it's a moving target that they can never get. So this is how I sort of started thinking about accountability and why I think it's important to a little bit to make some small shifts in how we even describe accountability and think about it and be a little more precise about it. And to me, I think we've described this in the past. But accountability comes from the word to count in Latin, and it just is math, it is the math of I took this action and got this result, or I didn't take this action and got this result, this other person took an action and got this result, or they didn't take it and they got a different result. So when when we're thinking about holding other people accountable, holding abusers accountable, a lot of times what we're asking for is for the abuser to agree that they engaged in certain behaviors, and then they got certain result, or we want the broader public, we want to judge we want a jury. We want social media to agree that this person took this action and got this result. A lot of times we also want other people to agree that it was bad. We want other people to agree. They took this
Megan Goering Mellin
or something. What did you say? Like social validation? Or here's the other people agreeing that does feel important?
Meredith Holley
Yeah, yeah. And so. So I think that it's if we're looking for accountability for abusers, if we want to hold them accountable, I think it's important to really get clear on why. What are we looking for? And how is that going to change our reality and contribute to our reality. And that's not to say it's a bad goal, or anyone shouldn't have that goal. Honestly, I was telling you this before we started recording, but I was watching I was rewatching Ted lasso last night. And there's this scene where Rebecca and Kaylee are in the bathroom and Rebecca basically says, But what about thinking about your boyfriend's accountability? Is he able to be accountable? Because that's really the most attractive thing In a man, and I think like, when we're wanting to hold abusers accountable, sometimes that's actually a gift to the abuser, we're wanting them to be a better person, and we're wanting society to contribute to them being a better person and growing. And sometimes we do want to make that contribution. And other times, we want to let abusers face whatever karma is going to bring to them and let it be in their box. But I don't think that there's anything bad about wanting to hold abusers accountable, I think that it can be like a very generous, very, like a way to contribute.
Megan Goering Mellin
Yeah, I get a lot of good intentions for contribution,
Meredith Holley
and like a way to really contribute to our communities like it really can be motivating to want our communities to be safer and better places. Yeah.
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