Virtue-signalling victims and toxic underlings
How employers can protect themselves
Thanks to all who responded, either privately or publicly, to my request for thoughts on how to solve the problem of the toxic underling. Lots of great suggestions, indeed too many for just one article. So this isn’t comprehensive, and I’ll be returning to the topic in future issues.
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As I discussed at some length previously, the problem originates from a cultural shift that attaches status to being a victim. This victimhood culture coexists alongside the older honour and dignity cultures, and even if one way to gain status is to adopt victimhood, it is not the only one.
People can and do still gain status from demonstrating honour or dignity: displaying their skill at difficult activities, their fine personal qualities and so on. But the lure of victimhood is that it’s much easier. I don’t mean that it’s a pleasant experience to actually be victimised; I mean that it is entirely within the capacity of anyone to adopt a novel gender identity, declare yourself a member of one of the unverifiable sexual minorities or self-diagnose with a mental-health condition. And you don’t need to change your behaviour at all.
But there are also ways that people can gain status and a sense of belonging that are not purely, performatively identitarian, and yet do not require exceptional skill or training. Things like volunteering to clean up a beauty spot or hand out parcels at a food bank; taking on a lay church role like Sunday school teacher or usher; or organising sponsored runs for a charity will all grant a person status in the eyes of their community.
As one reader said, “gaining respect is broadly accessible through service”. By modelling this in our own lives, both by doing these things ourselves and by admiring other who do them, we suggest another path towards status for people who might otherwise feel that victimhood is their only viable option.
A second set of suggestions starts from considering graduates, specifically. If you have been involved in any way in hiring them over the past two decades or so, you may have noticed a significant shift in the way they act towards and talk about employers. A friend of mine who leads a human-resources department dates the inflection point very precisely to 2010—she works in the UK; it may have been earlier in the US.
Before 2010, my friend says, when she would ring a recent graduate to tell them they had been offered a job, they would be straightforwardly ecstatic. They would thank her effusively, rush to return paperwork to her and generally act as if they couldn’t believe their luck. After 2010 they might still be very happy to have the job, but they acted a lot less like the pleasure and privilege was all on their side.
Both during the selection process and afterwards, graduate job applicants now ask a ton of questions that suggest they are suspicious that the company may not stack up. What is the mentoring scheme like? Does it have this, that and the other affinity group? What about in-service training courses? And, more recently, what has it done to indicate its sincere support for Black Lives Matter or to mark Pride month? To (wildly) misquote JFK, they have shifted from asking what they could do for their employer to asking what their employer could do for them.
The funny thing, my friend says, is that these young people don’t actually turn out to be any more pro-social or particularly likely to engage in these various schemes, which were all started because this generation seems to demand them. The shift can’t be because these young people have many more options than earlier generations, and could afford to be pickier—in my friend’s industry, quite the reverse is true.
Young people know that the economy is tilted against them, that many young graduates do jobs that do not require higher-level education, and that their taxes support pensions and health care that are more generous than they will receive when it’s their turn. That has probably made the idea of company loyalty less appealing. But my friend thinks the main reason recent graduates ask this sort of question is that they are taught to at university, in work-readiness or interview-prep sessions.
Some of the things companies do to respond to these requests are beneficial—I’ve been involved in improving induction and mentoring schemes in several workplaces. But many are outright damaging. Employers should be a lot more cautious about adopting workplace policies drawn from what applicants and new hires say they want, and should instead think about what their aims are, and tailor their policies to fit those aims.
Take affinity groups. These have become a conduit for some of the worst bullshit in workplaces, in part because they seem to think they “own” all policy to do with their interest group and companies lazily accept this, rather than seeking to identify the genuine needs of the group in question and then considering whether it is actually the role of the company to satisfy them.
I know from talking to people in several media companies, including Sky and the BBC, that their LGBT affinity groups expect to have input into any stories about LGBT issues, and can sometimes exert veto power over stories they don’t like. Those in the civil service seem to be just as bad.
The LGBT affinity group within the Department for Education recently published a hyperbolic and entitled open letter, in which it calls draft guidance being drawn up by the Cabinet Office on the use of single-sex spaces in government offices “transphobic”. This hardly suggests that its members can be trusted to maintain their statutory duty to be impartial as they work on the long-awaited trans guidance for schools.
As for reverse mentoring, I don’t think there’s anything wrong in principle with the idea that people can gain useful insights about their companies and generally learn from more junior people as well as more senior ones, especially as technology reshapes the world. I suspect that most older people think that’s the point; that youngsters can get them up to speed with social media, or whatever.
But many younger people seem to see reverse mentoring as a way to interrogate their elders on their positions regarding culture-war issues—gender-neutral toilets; preferred pronouns; Black Lives Matter, Brexit, Trump and the rest. And then they try to instruct their mentees in how to avoid wrongthink, or they make HR complaints if that doesn’t work.
As with affinity groups, I’d advise either working out what precisely is the aim of any reverse-mentoring scheme and writing precise specifications that match that aim, or else dropping it entirely. What doesn’t work is reverse mentoring for the sake of it. Policies that have no clear goals are the easiest to subvert.
When applicants ask about a company’s position on the causes of the day, whether Black Lives Matter, Trans Pride or anything else, the best way to respond is simply: it’s not part of what we do here, and we have no position. There are plenty of people who are not racist but disagree with the worldview and protest methods of the Black Lives Matter movement. And you can think trans-identified people deserve all the same human rights as everyone else without signing up to the reality-denialism (obviously). The same applies to all sorts of contentious issues, such as abortion rights, gay marriage, Brexit, the death penalty, vaccine policy or open borders, unless these are actually part of its mission.
When I say this, people often seem to think I must be a reactionary in every possible respect. As it happens, I’m not—but anyway, I would have every right to be and still be gainfully employed. On every one of these contentious issues, there are wildly differing views that fall under the rubric of “worthy of respect in a democratic society” that is used to determine whether, in British law, a belief is protected under the Equality Act. And on every single one there are significant numbers of people who hold the most extreme views in either direction.
If you’re a women’s centre or evangelical church you will have a position on abortion, and won’t want people to work for you unless they agree with that position. If you’re an accountancy firm, commodities trader or carpet warehouse, there is no need for you to have an institutional view. More than that, treating people worse because they hold any specific position on abortion will be unjustified belief discrimination. It’ll also be a recipe for workplace conflict.
I’d extend this to all displays of allegiance to non-core ideas or positions at the institutional level. I wouldn’t fly the rainbow flag or mark Pride Month in any way. I wouldn’t do land acknowledgements or take a knee. And to be clear, this isn’t just “anti-woke”: I’d do nothing special for International Women’s Day or Remembrance Sunday either. Fine for individual employees to choose to wear rainbow lanyards or poppies or Suffragette ribbons—although if the employer has a strict uniform policy, also fine to ban all such adornments even-handedly.
If this was the up-front rule, it would save everyone a world of trouble and grief. Employees wouldn’t feel offended that their own particular cause wasn’t marked if they knew it wasn’t specific to them. By never starting on the ever-escalating treadmill of signalling their right-think on any and every issue, employers would be blessedly free to get on with whatever it is they actually do. And by telling potential hires up-front that they don’t give room or headspace to taking positions, they might, with luck, deter precisely the sorts of hires most likely to cause them trouble—and attract the ones who just want to get on with the job.
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I’ll pick this up next week, unless news intervenes. In the meantime, keep your suggestions coming!