Chetan Dhruve returns to his series on bad bosses, this time delving into the issue of ‘victim-hood’, pointing out that the ‘powerlessness’ of employees is not being given the legitimacy or seriousness it deserves.

In a previous article, I commented on systems thinking and bad bosses, and why we shouldn’t blame individual bosses for bad behaviour.

Say someone comes to you in HR and pleads: “My boss is bad, please help me.” Do you immediately respond: “Sure, we’ve got that covered”, and whip out the policy document entitled ‘victims of bad bosses’? No. Why not? Because there’s no policy.

We all know that bad bosses exist. So why isn’t there a policy? Simple: organisations do not officially recognise the existence of bad bosses, and by extension, their victims. If you have a bad boss, complaining is what you’re absolutely NOT supposed to do. Complaining is not only considered unwise, it’s dangerous – you commit the ultimate sin of turning yourself into a victim.

Once you’re a victim, you’re labeled whiny, weak and needy – a loser. Once you’re a loser, it’s only a matter of time before you’re thrown out. Hence we unconsciously imbibe the attitude of ‘don’t complain about your boss’ or ‘it must be my fault’.

This is not only crazy, it’s delusional. Let’s take an example. Say you’re mugged and assaulted at knifepoint. The instant that happens, you’re the victim of a crime. You can chant ‘I’m not a victim’ till you’re blue in the face, but that won’t change reality.

Management jargon

Alternatively, you can choose to dress it up quite reasonably and beautifully in non-victim management-jargon terms: ‘I was confronted with an aggressive individual bearing a knife, so I proactively opted to give him my wallet, and by my passive behaviour, volunteered to be assaulted so as to not put my life at risk.’

But deny it or dress it up, you’re still a victim. Even though you may want to delude yourself, society recognises that you can be the victim of a crime and makes a big deal about it. That’s why we have protective and retaliatory powers in place – the police, the criminal justice system, and so on.

More than anything, a victim is someone who has less power than the assaulter in a given situation. The mugger had a knife and you didn’t, and he abused that power. That made you a victim.

When we say, ‘don’t be a victim’ or ‘don’t carry a sense of ‘victimhood’, what we really mean is one of two things: either protect yourself from becoming a victim, or having been a victim, don’t continue to behave like one.

Protecting yourself means getting some power for yourself in advance – and not continuing to behave like a victim means using whatever retaliatory powers you have.

In a boss-subordinate situation, there’s a deliberately engineered power imbalance straight up front. It’s critically important to understand that you become a victim the instant you become a subordinate. Whether or not your boss is good, you’re a victim. How so?

There’s a West African proverb that states: “Speak softly but carry a big stick”. Your boss may be nice and soft, but you know he’s carrying a big stick. You do not typically carry an equally big stick. Whether or not you’re beaten with the boss’s stick, the threat of the stick makes you a victim.

Abuse of power

This may sound like a wild exaggeration, but it’s only because we’ve set our standards abysmally low. Boss behaviour isn’t considered bad until the abuse of power is extreme. So the mere threat of power abuse hardly gives you permission to call yourself a victim. Nonetheless, you are a victim.

Having said all this, obviously you can quit. The number one reason that people leave their jobs is a bad boss. But in quitting, you exchange one person with a big stick for another person with a big stick. Unless you’re independently wealthy, or have the means and the family backing to start a new business or career, you’re trapped.

The situation is similar to that of women trapped in marriages in earlier times, even in Western societies. Women were meant to get married and stay married. Religion didn’t sanction divorce or, if it did, society stigmatized divorce, religion put the husband in charge of the wife, and women had no legal or economic protection. When women walked down the aisle, they walked into a system with a deliberately engineered power imbalance. Abuse was a common result.

Theoretically, women could walk out of their marriages. They were adults who could think and act for themselves. But did they walk out? No. Why not? Because of the way things were set up, women had no choice but to remain victims. Crucially, they weren’t allowed to call themselves victims because ‘that’s how things are.

Complaining about your husband was close to blasphemy because the husband was the God-appointed leader. Husbands didn’t think they were abusing their wives, because it was their duty to keep their wives in line through any means they deemed appropriate. In short, both husband and wife conspired to deny the reality of abuse.

How did that change? Just as the first step away from alcoholism is to admit to being an alcoholic, the first step that women took was to admit – and get men to admit – that women were victims. Without this admission, nothing would have changed.

Similarly, the first step for organisations to take is to admit that bad bosses and their victims exist. Why is this so hard to do? To answer this, let’s look at the issue from a systems perspective.

In what system is complaining about your leader considered a bad and dangerous thing? A dictatorship ‘fear’ system. In what system is being able to complain about your leader considered a good thing and astonishingly, even a sign of the system’s robust health? A free system.

So we’ve got things all wrong. Complaining or being able to complain about your boss should be a good thing, because it would mean you’re working in a free system. That complaining about your boss is considered a bad thing reveals an unpalatable truth: we work in ‘fear’ systems. It’s time we stopped deluding ourselves.

See also:
My boss is (still) bad

Chetan Dhruve is the author of Why your boss is programmed to be a dictator (published by Cyan/Marshall Cavendish). You can contact him at chetan@cvdhruve.com or visit his website at www.cvdhruve.com