Didier Lombard and Differentiating Between Being Tough and Being A Bully
Around 2010, a major telecommunications company named France Telecom was ready to downsize. To stay competitive in the global market, they would have to fire 22 thousand workers, which was 1/5th of their 330K employees. But there was a problem with firing that many France Telecom workers; The CEO couldn't do it. Not because there was a moral objection and not because he couldn’t bear to let 22,000 people become unemployed. The CEO, Didier Lombard, couldn't fire 1/5 of his workers because they were legally protected.
You see, France Telecom started its life as a state-owned company before it rebranded to Orange went public. Once it emerged on the global market as an international mobile network, the employees stayed protected by law, as did their state guarantee jobs. Yet, they were trapped inside a company that was now competitive, lean, and multinational. In addition, by 2005, the company was 50 billion dollars in debt.
Didier needed to get rid of enough employees to fill a significant outdoor Amphitheatre, legally protected employees. This meant, in Didier’s mind, he had to get tough. Like Jeff Benzos and Steve Jobs tough. So, Didier told his managers to get tough, to lean on their employees and make them miserable. Kick them out of their offices, move them to new job sites, harass them, bully them, and make them want to quit. Make them so miserable that they would rather die than stick it out. Or, as Didier said in 2007, “By one way or another, by the window or by the door.”
It was a good tactic. It was efficient, tough, and like any good capitalist, it could have worked. Except, its pressured employees started leaving through the window. The bullied employees began killing themselves, blaming the company for almost every death. One man, a 28-year-old, would hang himself with an internet cable in his garage wearing the company t-shirt. But nonetheless, the CEO stayed tough. In the end, 35 protected employees would end their lives, directly blaming France Telecom. This was before the public and the police began looking into Didier and his harsh ways.
As Americans, we all have romantic notions about being tough. Ideas about having grit, being the man or woman who takes what they need, and is confident to face down anyone who stands in their way. Even people in authority need to be tough from time to time. Managers, parents, doctors, police, etc., need to be able to summon that toughness to prevent letting their children, patients, and clients, from walking all over them. But what about workplace bosses? What about CEOs who literally hold all the keys? Are they being tough, or just mean? Is there a difference? Today we're exploring the line between tough and mean. We want to identify when it's justified for a boss to chew you out for your own good and when they're doing to be a bully.
Myth 1: Mental toughness, meanness, and toxic masculinity are three terms that get confused with each other all the time. So today, we're going to define toughness and talk about why it's important.
For today, we're going to get into individual toughness, how important it is, and how it helps you build you as a character. But we're also going to focus a lot on when it becomes mean. With that being said, we are going to talk about individual toughness first and why it's essential for people to have. According to Scientific American, they identify the state of being tough enough to withstand adverse conditions or rough handling. They looked at athletes and coaches and wanted to see if toughness is something you learn or are born with.
They found that athletes themselves say that mental toughness affects 50% of their performance and their coaches say that mental toughness affects 83% percent of their performance. And among all factors, they rated it the most critical set of psychological characteristics in determining success. They say that self-confidence, attention control, minimizing negative energy, increasing positive energy, maintaining motivation, attitude control, and visual imagery are all key factors in toughness. This is the theme in today's episode, that positivity is really what separates toughness from meanness.
For more clarity, a recent study by Felix Gillian and Sylvan Liberty compared levels of mental toughness from the athletes to non-athletes. They distilled it down into this for these four major traits: hope, optimism, perseverance, and resilience. Now, I understand it more like an umbrella term. We treat toughness like it's one state of mind. But really, it's several.
Now, the study above also found that we get tougher as we age. According to this research, toughness comes with age and maturity. You are able to stick to things better than when you were younger. You don't quit on things so soon as you age. Because of this and everyone having it developing continuously, it means that toughness is not just for athletes; it's for everyone. It also helps with resilience against stress and depression, and it's generally a positive activity. Being tough means that you have to be positive, and you have to anticipate a worthy outcome.
Myth 2: Skilled CEOs aren't just being mean for the sake of meanness. If it feels like they're bullying you, they must be doing it to get the best out of you.
Overall, you actually want a tough boss because a tough boss looks forward to having that toughness positivity. They have that future view and understand that as long as everyone has the fortitude and the stick-to-itiveness to do it, they will protect you. They're not going to step down and let you get walked over or taken advantage of. According to John Hopkins University, tough bosses are objective and fair, have self-control and unemotional under pressure, are performance-focused, and organizationally oriented. These were their identifiers in differentiating a bully versus a boss who is being tough.
On the other end, let’s talk about bullying. According to Psychology Today, a bully's job is to erode self-confidence and everybody to maximize negative energy, and it sounds like what Didier did. He was not a tough boss but a bully. Stressing people out is not performance-based; it's cruelty. According to John Hopkins University again, they identify a bully boss as someone who misuses power and authority. They focus on personal self-interest instead of the organization, have emotional outbursts, and are inconsistently and unfair. So, no, not all bosses have your best interests in mind, and France Telecom is a prime example of that.
Have you ever had a job where you don't know what will happen next, where your boss is going to be next, or what department you are going to be in? It's stressful. So many people are made to relocate and change their jobs because of this reason. There was a sociologist who worked with the employees during the big suicide wave and actually testified against France Telecom, describing it as a process of humiliation. Even though those employees were protected, they use bullying to make them think that their job was in jeopardy. The sad part is that many places do this. Maybe not to that same extent, but it does happen.
Fun Fact: As far as women bullying goes in the workplace, a Forbes called “Women Bullied At Work" found that women bully other women up to 80% of the time. This means the targets they're picking are usually other women.
Myth 3: Is there a secret to staying tough? Is there a secret to hanging tough without becoming the bully?
We want to end the show by telling people how to be positively tough, how to really get that grit without becoming a bully. I tried to find this from the best sources I could. In summary, I found an article on how to build mental toughness, and this comes from the University of Pennsylvania. They started working with their psychology department, and the idea was they were going to roll out a new program for the entire US military. It would be a training system for mental toughness. They say that mental toughness comes from thinking like an optimist, which is something we already mentioned. They say people who don't give up have a habit of interpreting setbacks as temporary, local, and changeable. They also note that the people who encounter adversity think to themselves that it's going to go away quickly.
During this study, the Sergeants were asked to analyze their beliefs and emotions about failure and avoid describing failure as permanent, pervasive, or out of control. Overall, you can make your emotions more defined. You can get them to the point where you look up a thesaurus to find out exactly what emotion you're feeling. The better you feel, the quicker you come out of rejection or pain. This also looks very similar to toughness. If you can identify that something is temporary and can do something about it, your toughness increases tenfold. So that's something to keep in mind, that the more emotionally mature people are and able to handle a lot comes from them being able to identify the situation for what it is.
Final Thoughts
Every one of us born on earth has to get tough at some point. The gentlest soul you've met in the supermarket has survived something. The most passive people you come across at concord unimaginable challenges. But toughness isn't just an honorary virtue in the human repertoire; It's a requirement. Toughness and grit pay off in the end. Even the core values of toughness: hope, optimism, perseverance, and resilience are each a key component to being the best possible you.
Toughness with dignity is ultimately an umbrella virtue, and yet workplace bullies, managers, and CEOs sure like to hide behind toughness whenever they start laying people off. They talk about toughness when they cancel bonuses or when they sell off company stocks. And we, the public, are perfectly willing to watch them bully their own labor. We call it toughness. We give them a pass and see it as being mean in the name of profit.
The best way you can arm yourself against meanness masquerading as toughness is to identify toughness by asking, “Am I being bullied because someone likes welding power over me, or am I being worked by a tough boss who would never flunk their power if they could avoid it?” If you happen to be the one wielding power, ask yourself the same question. Did you punish the employee because you can or because you need results?
For those working stressful jobs out there, please, if a bullying boss has you on edge and you feel like it might be too much, seek help. You are not your job. You are not your position. Seek help by contacting a lawyer, a third-party mediator, or a healthcare professional. You can't always leave it to human resources to solve bullying. Take it from the France Telecom employees who sought help from the head of Human Resources, Olivier Barberot, who was also one of the managers found guilty and sentenced for bullying.