Overcoming Ethical Bullying | Shaul Shalvi | TEDxBGU
Translator: hila scherba Reviewer: Nada Qanbar Thank you. (Applause) Welcome. When we think of bullying we often think of kids using emotional and physical aggression against other kids to make them do what they want them to. But could it be that adults bully as well? And if adults bully, could it be that they're using more implicit ways, more subtle and sophisticated ways to get others to do what they want? Could it be they pose a dilemma for other people? "Be a team member, be one of us, or follow your own moral beliefs and even the law." And since people really want to be part of the group and show their loyalty, they will do a lot to be team members, even break the rules and lie. I call it 'Ethical Bullying', and the question is, how can we overcome such ethical bullying? Now, it's important to distinguish between two types of bullying - explicit ethical bullying and implicit ethical bullying. The explicit type is the type of bullying that we know from people like Lance Armstrong or Bernie Madoff; Lance Armstrong, in order to win races, bicycle races, bullied his team members to take performance enhancing drugs, according to their testimony, he just told them to. And similarly, Bernie Madoff bullied his employees to do all kinds of financial tricks, like backdating stock options in order to generate more profits for the company, and make investors pour more money into it. In both of these cases, the bullying was very explicit. The person on the top was telling the people in the group what to do, He told them - "Break the rules." But ethical bullying needs not be so explicit, it could also be more implicit. For example, when a boss reads into an annual report and doesn't like the numbers, so he goes to the accountant and says: "Can you take another look at these numbers, please?" And the accountant goes and then takes another good look for a day or two at the numbers to see if they add up correctly, and he comes back to the boss and says: "I've checked, the numbers add up." And the boss would look at him, unhappy, and say: "Can you please double check?" Right? not saying anything explicitly, this person is not saying: "Change the numbers," just: "Check again," sending an implicit massage that things can look better. Let me give you another example, that I recently heard from an employee of a big cellular company. So in this cellular company, mid-level managers would define the targets for the sale representatives to sell as many extended packages as they could. They had a target - sell 90 extended packages per month and you will get a team bonus. Well, that sounds fine, right? we want to motivate employees, and we would give them a goal that they need to reach, but there were two problems with this goal; First, each team of employees would get per month only 70 new clients, so even if they would sell extended packages to a hundred percent of these new clients, they would not hit their goal. So problem number one: The goal was completely uncalibrated to reality, the other problem was that employees had no clue about these facts, so there was no transparency. So when you take lack of calibration in the goal and lack of transparency, that's when things go wrong. So, how do employees solve such a puzzle? Right? They want to get the bonus. Well, I asked: What did they do? they would work really really hard the whole month, and sell as many extended packages as they could, and they would reach the end of the month and they would sum how many extended packages they managed to sell, and see the difference, and then they would sign existing clients into these extended packages without letting them know. So if you have a basic package, paying a flat fee for your cellphone every month in this company, suddenly, you've been signed to a much more expensive package, and you don't know about it, and most likely, you will not find out, because who checks their cellular phone bill every month, when it's a fixed, flat rate? And, moreover, like for the few that did check and find out, they would call the company, and they would get to this manager and they would say, "okay, no worry, we'll compensate you somehow," So, the company would make a lot of profits, undeserving profits, by sending these implicit massages to the sale representative, hit the target, you can do better than that, you can do better than that, but not knowing that they in fact cannot if they do things by the rules. Let me show you how we study implicit ethical bullying in our lab. we bring participants, study participants, into the lab, twenty at a time, and we sit them behind computers, and they are paired with another person, they don't know who this partner is, but they know that there is a partner, one is labelled A, the other is called B. We give each one of them a dice, A rolls the dice and reports the outcome, B learns what A reported rolling, rolls a dice as well, and reports the outcome. If both report the same number, they get this value in euros, so if A reported rolling a five, and B reported rolling a five as well, each get five euros. If A reported rolling a one, and B reported rolling a one as well, they each get one euro. If they report different numbers they both get nothing. Now, we have no clue what participants are really rolling, but we do know statistics. This is what happens if participants are honest, on the X axis you would see the six possible outcomes that A can have, from one to six, on the Y axis you see the six possible outcomes that B can roll, from one to six, and we asked the computer to generate numbers honestly and plotted these numbers on the screen. You would see that whole cells are the same, so the likelihood that A rolled a two, and B rolled a three, is just as likely as the much more profitable 6,6 option. Let me show you what happens when twenty real individuals play this game for twenty times. (Laughter) Statistics are not needed. What we see here are many more reports on the diagonal, doubles being reported, and especially the most profitable 6,6 option. Let me show you how this game develops. So in this situation we have two players, one that can set the stage by rolling high numbers, and the second that can get the job done by reporting a double. Now, on the X axis you can see the twenty rounds that we have, and on the Y axis, the six possible outcomes. A circle is the report of A, and an X would be the report of the second person, and as we can see here, on the first trial, A reported a six, B matched, on the second trial, again what do you know, A rolls another six, and B, perhaps thinks about it a bit, rolls another six. (Laughter) We had those dices adds, reporting 20 times double six, we called them 'The Brazen Liars', those who shamelessly maximize profit without even thinking about the rules. But there are other types of individuals. For example, you might have situations in which one person is setting the stage all the time, so A reports twenty times 6, but B reports, apparently, honestly, reporting ones and twos and threes, at other times, we have a person A, that is not willing to set the stage, reporting all kind of outcomes, you see the circle appearing on ones, twos, threes, etc, but B hits a double in every single case, he gets the job done. Let me show you how implicit ethical bullying is shaped in the most beautiful way In this specific dice add in the first five rounds A was reporting the value four, and B matched, by that alone you understand that B is probably a very eager person that wants to make money, and if you'd try to put yourself in the shoes of this B person you might be quite upset, because we're leaving money on the table by A rolling his 4's. So you can imagine how upset this second person was when on the next round again A rolls a 4. What could B do without saying anything explicitly, well he can report a 6, sending and implicit signal, you can do better than that, and indeed, on the next round, A improves a bit, he goes to 5, B decides not to push it, and match, and in fact, that happened in the rest of the rounds. (Laughter) So what you see here is by sacrificing one round, and sending a massage to the other person, B was able to push this person to lie more. Let's go back to our example. In this cellular company that we've been talking about, we had a problem with the mid management that defined an uncalibrated goal; They said to sale representatives, "Please try to sell 90 extended packages per month," knowing that there are only 70 new clients that this team receives, leading to this Implicit bullying and leading the sale representative to bend the rules. Let's assume that the managers of this company and the people investing in this company and most employees in this company, want to do honest business, like most people. What could be done about it? The key term that I would like to use is calibrated transparency; They can sit down and talk about the fact in a transparent way, because once they do that and they say to everyone, "There are only 70 new clients per month," clearly, the defined goal will be uncalibrated, and they could choose a more calibrated goal, for example, sell extended packages to 80 percent of your new clients, this is a calibrated goal that could be met honestly, it does not require bending ethical rules. Let me finish off by saying that adults like kids bully others, but adults do it in a more implicit way, a more sophisticated way, adults send others this massage, if you want to be a team player, if you want to be one of us, if you want to show your loyalty, you need to do everything, including bending ethical rules and lying, and if you want to avoid our organizations from turning corrupt we should verify that we sit down, calibrate our goals to whatever is feasible, and talk about the facts in a transparent way. Thank you. (Applause)