A business is a system of relationships. Individuals
within the company system also come from
another, called the family system. These family
systems are all different, and each one has its toxic
patterns. These harmful patterns carry over into the
corporate structure and act as a pathogen to the system,
which causes the system to become sick and function
poorly.
I never really understood what I am about to tell you
as a child or young adult, but I experienced it in many
different contexts throughout my life from my father. His
behavior was abusive and caused me unnecessary stress.
My father carried this behavior into the business systems
he created, and an employee once sued him for creating a
hostile work environment. He was found guilty.
An instance of lost keys led to a long-repeated, unaddressed
pattern of in-office abuse for the author.
It started with car keys…
One morning when I was 25 years old, I arrived at work
at 6:00 a.m. in a good mood. My father and I were equal
partners building a new business in Atlanta. As I was
filling out a work order for an insulation crew, my father
came into my office, and said:
Father: Where are my car keys?
Roger: I don’t know.
Father: What did you do with them?
Roger: I have not seen your keys and did not move
them.
Father: Yes, you did. Where the @#$%! did you move
them?
Then he flew into an uncontrollable rage, blaming me
for something I did not do. A few minutes later, he found
his keys, which he had misplaced, but never apologized.
Whenever my dad got stressed, he would escape into
Roger Daviston
President
The Daviston Group
Customer Relations
A Culture of Blame,
Belittlement and Punishment
blaming others for his problems, rage at them and never
apologize. It was the big elephant in the room about
which we never talked. We always swept it under the
rug, merely hoping it would go away. It never did.
In clinical psychology, this pattern follows the characteristics
of an “alcoholic family system.” While my dad
did not drink and was not an alcoholic, the pattern was
the same. The family does not talk about the alcoholic,
much like we did not talk about my dad’s rage. We all
lived in fear of when he would explode. My dad escaped
into blame and anger, much like an alcoholic would turn
into drunkenness for relief.
It’s interesting to note that when a person rages,
they generally feel depressed afterward, much like an
alcoholic feels after a binge. The rager does not like his
or herself, but can’t help the behavior.
The owner of a company who allows this type of behavior
(explosive anger) creates a hostile work environment,
where words and actions negatively or severely
impact another employee’s ability to complete their
work. Please note that any employee can create a hostile
work environment; it’s not only the owner.
Explosive anger shuts down everyone’s brain and
severely impacts the team’s ability to do anything for
the rest of the day. After this explosion from my father,
my outlook and how I felt about him and the business
went down. My performance suffered, and he continued
to harass me with his accusations and blame when I
wasn’t guilty. He created a hostile work environment 35
years ago, and it caught up with him and lawsuits, etc.,
cost him a lot of money in his old age.
Your workplace
Are you working in a culture of blame? Let me illustrate
a mild form of the blame game. I built a call center that
functions as an extension of a company’s customer service
department so the company can be open, book and
dispatch calls 24 hours a day and on holidays. It doesn’t
take messages, and it is not an answering service. The
team learns a script, and for the most part, they stay onscript,
but not always because they are human.
I wrote the script so that it is not assumed every call is
urgent and instead we get the customer’s expectation about
when he/she would like a technician to come out. Then we
book the call based on his/her expectations, not ours.
In the script, we also ask the system’s age because systems
over 10 years old are like gold. If you are primarily
an air-conditioning company, you know full well how hard
it is to make ends meet while transitioning from a mild
winter to hot weather.
22 ICM/March/April 2021