Nobody fixes a toxic workplace with training

Happy to be here.

Yeah. so I'll back it up a little and talk about how I started Civility Partners first. I listened to the universe, that's the answer. So I I was internal HR working for a company that had a difficult person, a bully if if you will, and I started getting my master's degree while I was working there, which was always the plan. but the the universe had me in my very first semester in graduate school. I was in ethnography, which is a kind of research where you're the researchers, you know, in it. And my other class was called the dark side of communication and it was about stalking and domestic violence and dark communication. So I'm thinking, you know, as a working grad student, I can I need a topic for both. Classes. So one set of research to write two papers and ended up coming across the phrase workplace bullying. And it turns out there's tons of research on this topic, and America's actually pretty far behind. Europe is much more advanced at looking at what it's off it's often called mobbing or psychological harassment in your part of the world. anyway, so everything I did in graduate school was on that topic. wrote my thesis on that topic and started my business on the other side of grad school and wrote a book pretty quickly called Back Off. and so then I started teaching college as an adjunct or part time professor to, you know, pay the bills while I built up Civility Partners. And eventually I got to a point where Civility Partners was doing well enough that I didn't need to teach anymore.

Yeah. so the book is called Back Off, and I wrote it honestly more for myself. It it was an opportunity for me to take all of the academic information I'd learned about bullying and start to translate it into, you know, more more normal speak. and so I I really did it as a way to help myself process. everything I learned and start to figure out my voice around this unique topic. and secondly, you know, I was right out of graduate school, so I felt like I needed credibility and the book gave me that. So anybody who wants to write a book, recognize it's not, you know, unless it's a New York Times bestseller, you're never gonna make money off of it. But if you're starting a business, writing a book with your point of view However, even if it's short, back off was pretty long. It didn't need to be that long. Even if it's just thirty or fifty or a hundred pages, it's something to give people to say, I know what I'm talking about.

Yeah. So cultures I define it as the way people in your organization understand the w the world around them and the way they behave as a result of that understanding. And culture definitely can feel very abstract. It can feel like something that's hard to get a hold of. but the thing is it exists in your organization whether you focus on it or not or whether you're strategic about it or not. So you might as well be strategic about it and use it as an advantage. And a healthy culture has to be intentional. Just like I mean you think about I know you're I don't know if you have kids or anybody listening, you know, you have to be intentional about parenting. You have to ask yourself, what's the message I need to get across in this moment when the kid's having a a tempered tantrum or when your teenager is telling you about something happening at school. You know, it's it's very intentional what you're thinking about and wanting to make sure you get across and culture's a lot like that. It's you It as an entrepreneur, as an organization that's growing, or even as a manager in an organization, you have the ability to influence culture because culture is about our daily interactions. A lot of people say culture comes from the top. That's BS. It does not come from the top. Certainly, the top can put resources towards culture or not. but Again, culture exists within our daily interactions. So anybody honestly has the ability to influence culture. toxic or unhealthy culture, it's sort of like mold. It starts to grow in the gaps between what leaders say they want to have happen or how they want people to behave, and how the organization actually functions to support that behavior. So we describe culture as existing in the oil, the organization's behavior, individual behavior, and leadership behavior. and so one way to be strategic about a healthy culture is, for example, if you say, I want everybody in the organization to be respectful to each other. But as a leadership team, maybe you let some high performer be disrespectful. Now there's misalignment. And maybe the organization isn't measuring people on whether or not they're being respectful like they would other job tasks or performance metrics. and so that's an example of leaders saying one thing about how they want people to behave, but everything else is misaligned. So they're not setting people up for success for that.

no one's asked me that before. I need to think that through. Honestly, I think it's the way the organization behaves. So the it's just so often organizations say this is what we want, but they have policies or technology or processes in place that really hit in really hinder people's ability to live that, right? So the organization needs to stop and ask itself my favorite question, what are we doing or not doing that facilitates this behavior? That's the twenty percent.

Yep. So we we start with well if you're ask are you asking more about kind of like my sales process or more about our work with clients?

Yes, they are. Okay, I'll start with the sales process, I guess. yeah, so I I really get a lot of leads by speaking, doing podcasts and webinars, getting my message out there about what I think about how culture works, you know. and then we'll get the the email that someone's interested in talking to us because they have some problem they'd like solved and they think we can solve it. so I have a a teammate here, Rebecca. She does a discovery call to find out kind of more about what's going on. And often she ends up s trying to set them straight a little bit. So for example, people will call and say, We want to do a training around a respectful work environment, and she'll say why and they'll say, We have, you know, a department that everybody's kind of being disrespectful, there's some conflict in there. And so then she's able to say, well, a training's not going to solve that problem. They already know how to be respectful. They're choosing not to because of the organization. So she starts to set them straight so that when then the second call is the call with me, where it's more of a strategy call. And now they've been primed to know that I can talk to them about training, but I'm going to try to talk them into something that's more of a solution than the one they had in mind. So that's really a brainstorming call. just hearing more about things and talking through different options. and then from there we send a scope of work and then we have a third call to kind of finalize that scope of work and and maybe they say, No, we really just want to do the training and it's like, okay. or they'll say, Thank goodness we're not doing the training, let's do all this other stuff. so once a client says yes, it in terms of culture transformation, we start off with discoveries. So just to keep using that example, we would probably do some listening sessions in that department, find out what's going on, why people are being disrespectful towards one another, find out what role the organization plays in that. And then we're able to create a report and with a ton of recommendations for the organization. We also have our own proprietary survey. So if it's a large enough department or the whole company you know, we also want to do that survey. And our survey is called a climate assessment. It looks at a variety of constructs. and then from there we engage with the client for about two years and help them implement their roadmap to changing culture. And really our goal is to teach them how to get control of their culture, how to see it as a strategic item on their strategic plan and how how you can make it not abstract, you know how you can really quantify it, measure its usefulness to the business and all of the things.

Yeah, just like that. They both they both s had a representative that saw me speak at a conference. Chevron was interesting. They actually that that project was every year Chevron brings all of its HR business partners from all around the world to do a con like an internal conference for all of them. And so they asked me to be a a speaker there. So I ran a workshop on bullying and what it is and how to coach people who are bullies and taught Chevron's HR business partners how to manage bullying. And then NASA, similar there they have an ombuds program and the over at NASA they asked us to also train the ombuds there at NASA how to detect bullying, how to help people learn to stand up for themselves, how to help people navigate that situation, basically.

Yep, almost. Dang near, yeah. b dream big. Dream big. I think I even to this day, my own not like I believe in myself and I believe in my team and we've come a long way. I'd like us to be a lot bigger and I recognize that I it's my own self-limiting beliefs. It's hard to imagine being a $10 million consulting firm, you know, and it's not about the 10 million. It just means that's more workplaces we're influencing. and it's hard, you know, people tell me all the time I'm a really great speaker. And someone told me the other day, you should be charging 20 grand for your speaking gigs. And it's like, really? You think so? You know, so and that's not a great reaction. So the, you know, think big and recognize your value and St stay in your lane. You know, we focus on broken toxic work environments. We're not all things to all people. we don't compete on price. If somebody asks in that discovery call, you know, in the the first call, what's the price? The answer from Rebecca is we don't compete on price. And if that's part of your decision, you know, I'm not gonna move you on to the next round or the next call. so that that's my answer. But Know that if you're the expert on the thing, then you're worth something, whatever that topic is that you're the expert on, and believe in yourself and believe people will pay money to get access to whatever solution you're offering.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and it's about value, right? And so we try to talk a lot about that. And we'll we during our sales process try to really help companies see how much they've already spent on the problem. And so sometimes, you know, they say, Never mind, we're just we don't have the budget or the time right now. And so then I'll respond and say, Yeah, but we just talked about how you've already spent a million dollars on this. Are you sure that's the answer? or yeah, if it's training and they say, well, we're just gonna go to the cheap cheaper option, it's like our training brings a lot of value. We don't just show up and train, we have a whole there, it's a whole thing. it's all about helping you shift culture, even if it is just just one training. so like if the goal is just to drop knowledge on people that they'll never talk about again, then fine, go with that cheaper option. If the goal is to actually change behavior, that's what you're paying for. It's not the training, it's the outcome.

Yeah, you know, civility partners is ever evolving and I think my goal for the next twelve months is to hone in on the value that we bring, potentially I don't know. I saw a webinar the other day and she was talking about kill the baby. Like if you have too many services, then it's hard to sell any of them. So that definitely stuck in my head because we have a variety of avenues. So yeah, just I'm gonna continue to move outside of the business so that I can build the business and do speaking gigs and be the chief cheerleader for civility partners and I'm really working on handing my operations over to my ops person, which can be hard. It's so easy to just like, I'll do this. But really, really, really trying to pull away from that. So

Yeah, so s incivility and workplace bullying tends to exist in certain industries more than others, though any industry certainly can have it. healthcare, higher ed, government tends manufacturing or construction, that kind of blue-collar sector, tend to be where there's more toxicity. but our clients have ranged from restaurants to hotels to IT to software development to aerospace, you know, we we've really been in a variety of industries over the years. Where there's people, there's problems.

Yep. you can find Katherine Mattis if you just Google me. Our website is civilitypartners.com. My newest book is on Amazon. It's called Navigating a Toxic Workplace for Dummies, which is a a series of books that Wiley puts out, the Four Dummies series. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm everywhere.

Thank you.