What to do if you're a victim, I need you to respond neutrally. All right, remove the reward. And you do that by responding neutrally and putting them on notice that what they did was not okay. That's not how people behave in this office. That's not very, you know, we treat people in this office, respect, whatever the phrase is that you're going to use, be consistent about it. Alright, report and document everything.

And I mean everything and as real time as possible. Understand that this is a process that's going to take place over time and you need to be consistent and persistent in it. expect it to get worse over time, expect the retaliation documented and respond to it in real time as it occurs, and do not stop until it stops. Right. Once you trigger an extinction burst, you need to see it through to the end and to stop in the middle because it gets harder because you're experienced retaliation is allowing the harasser to win and that sets you up for You've got more views. So once you've started this understand you need to take it to completion.

And you're going to do that by remaining common neutral. As hard as that is going to be in the face of the retaliation. You're going to be the professional person, you're going to report and document everything. And I mean everything, every little thing. And then just be consistent and persistent until it stopped. If you're a manager, believe the victim, right?

We don't have an over reporting problem with bullying. We have an under reporting problem. The reason we have an under reporting problem is most times people report something and then things get worse and nothing happens. All right, so believe the victim assume that if the victim is telling the truth, and there's possibility they're not but if they're telling the truth, by virtue of them having reported it, they could experience retaliation. So you need to monitor what is happening next overtime. This is not a reported and forget it.

This is I just had This reported, I need to start watching this dynamic more closely to see if retaliation occurs, because it's probably going to occur. All right, you need to be working with the victim and the accused, right the the alleged victim, the alleged bully, to be documenting all of this dynamic, and then don't get mad at them when they do that. All right, because this requires consistency over time. And it's much better to put the time in and get that bandaid ripped off quickly than it is to drag this out by not wanting to pay attention to it. Because when you don't want to pay attention to it, you create a variable situation for both the victim and for the bully and you're making the behavior worse, not better. Better to just you're the manager, it's your job.

Get in there, start monitoring the behavior. Look for the pattern of retaliation, see if it occurs, make sure that the alleged victim knows that you need them to be telling you if retaliation occurs. Otherwise, you can't deal with it, and that they should expect that to happen, but that you're on it. So please tell me, you need to be consistent with your consequences. You need to be consistent and making sure the alleged bully knows that you're monitoring them, and that they're not getting away with it. And you need to document everything.

Even if your victim is not documenting everything you need to as the manager, because this is critical to establishing that that pattern pattern of behavior, that is harassment, you need to document all conversations that take place. What was said when when was things reported to you? What did you do in response? Because a lot of times what will happen is if a victim thinks you're not doing anything, you end up in court, and you need to be able to prove Yes, I took this report, and this is what I did in response to it just because they don't know what I did in response, doesn't mean I didn't do something so document it so that you can do that. And don't be lenient. I know you want to be lenient because you want To be compassionate but lenient secrets variable reinforcement variable reinforcement makes things worse.

If it turns out that this is a misunderstanding, it's an interpersonal dynamic that went astray. Again, the leniency doesn't help you fix that. Right? It just makes things worse, you need to get in there and take it seriously and fix it and pay attention. And I recommend I actually have like a longer course for managers. But what I recommend is that you give both victim and the alleged victim and the alleged abuser, the same advice which is what normally happens is someone alleges bullying and then the bully alleges that the other person is lying and blah, blah, fine.

You don't know which is true and what is not give them both the same advice. You need them to report and document everything. You need them to look out for retaliation and report to you when that happens. You're giving both of them the same advice. The one that's able to follow it is probably the victim and the one who's not going to report anything, is the one who doesn't want Get caught in most cases, all right. It is more compassionate to be strict when it comes to inappropriate behavior.

Because what that does is it gets you through the extinction process quicker. If you are strict, that doesn't mean you're going to punish them. It just means you're going to be consistent in how you respond and in consequences that you provide. To recap, the key to understanding why it's so hard to get bullies and harassers to stop is to understand how we unlearn behavior. workplace bullying and harassment does not arise out of thin air. These are behaviors that are learned and rewarded for the lifetime of the aggressor.

I work, I worked in grade school. You know, these behaviors if you've got someone who's bullying in the workplace habitually, not just like a interpersonal conflict gone wrong, but like an actual abuser. If it worked in grade school for them and it worked all the way through high school, they get to the workplace, they don't just magically stop doing this for some Serial harassers, people who are doing this habitually. And for the fun of it, this sort of behavior is adaptive to them. This is how they get what they want. It works for them.

That's why they do it. And when you encounter someone like this, you pretty much have to assume if it's happening, it's not new behavior. It's happening because it's learned behavior, that they have been rewarded that for this for a really long time, which means when they stop getting away with it, they're going to behave very, very badly. And you need to be prepared for that to happen. You need to expect it to happen. bonus if it doesn't, but it could happen.

So be prepared for it. And, and then document appropriately. The other thing you need to understand is this is part of a behalf. If this is a pattern of behavior, and for them. They don't have a single victim. There's probably multiple victims, but only one had the courage to come up and tell you about it.

All right. By the time these things are reported to managers, it's already assumed problem in most cases, most people are not just randomly reporting these things, they only come when it becomes unbearable. Okay, so in order to get it to stop, several things have to happen. These things are what is known as extinguishing behavior, it is standard operant conditioning techniques, you have to stop rewarding the unwanted behavior, you have to increase the cost associated with performing the unwanted behavior. That's not the same thing as punishing them. You have to roll right out the blowout by being 100% consistent, not providing a reward despite the repeated aggressive attempts to get the reward.

You ideally want to reward the good behavior, right? So if someone's just misguided and they're not really, really bad, but they're just kind of doing something that's inappropriate. You want to find out what it is they're trying to accomplish by that and give them an alternate way to get that that's more socially acceptable and professional like you want. This is where coaching comes. For managers, right? And then you want to nip in the bud any future attempts to re establish unwanted behavior.

All right. And we do this because even though behaviors extinguish, that's kind of a not quite totally true term, because they could come even if they stopped and it's not working, they might come back periodically and see if it does work. This is habitual behavior. Just as smokers relapse and heroin addicts relax, bullies will sometimes relapse as well. And so you have to kind of monitor them more closely in the future and not give them an opportunity for a relapse to set in and get re established. Okay.

Um, I want to thank you for taking the time to view this course. Um, I have more detailed information about all of these things. If you have kids, for instance, that are being bullied, I have a book for them. I have a lot of free resources on my website, the bully vaccine for them. I do have more comprehensive courses for, for managers on exactly how to do this in real life, how to do investigations and things like that. And other courses over at humanist learning systems calm now if you have any questions be sure to ask them of me we have discussion forums in the online courses so ask away thanks so much