It feels like every week brings another bad workplace story. Last week, Rolling Stone published a piece about Jimmy Fallon creating a toxic workplace environment on his show, Late Night. The piece included numerous reports from former and current employees, with no one willing to go on the record to say even positive things. After the story broke, Fallon and his producers apparently scheduled an all-employee Zoom meeting, in which he apologized for his actions and said that it was never his intention to create a toxic workplace environment.
You know what? Without knowing much about the dude—other than his epic failure to realize that he was on a date with Nicole Kidman, still one of the funniest interviews I’ve ever seen in my life—I believe Fallon. I believe that Fallon had no idea that his moods—which are apparently very up and down—were having such an impact on staff. And even if he did have an idea of how his moods were affecting others, I’m guessing that he thought that people could simply shake it off—because in the context of relationships, work or otherwise, that’s often an assumed underlying expectation of employees. If someone snaps at you irritably in the meeting, I don’t know anyone who thinks it’s a reasonable response to then go to HR and complain about it. One is expected, in work settings, to process those types of interactions within the context of a relationship that one either has or doesn’t have with that person. As the secretary to my boss told me, when I was very much younger than I am now, “You’ve got to toughen up a little, honey. Sometimes people are going to act like jerks.”
I am in no way advocating that we—the collective, Internet “we”—absolve Fallon of responsibility. I think that the higher up one goes on the totem pole, the more responsibility one bears for not only creating a productive and congenial working environment, but also for being aware of ways in which they are succeeding, and ways in which they’re not. Clearly, Fallon was not as aware of the atmosphere on set as he should have been and certainly, the frequent turnover on his leadership team was a screaming red flag that maybe, just maybe, there was a lot of turmoil going on. If your leadership team is constantly changing, then there is no way that other employees have had the time or opportunity to build trusting relationships that could then be used as foundations for understanding and more constructive problem-solving.
What I keep thinking about, however, is why the employees who felt like they were suffering or being harmed by this environment felt like they couldn’t speak up. Wait, I actually know the answer to that question: power dynamics within organizations are very real, and lots of times people don’t speak up because they’re afraid: they have too much at stake (they depend on this job for financial sustenance, or as a stepping-stone to other jobs). They aren’t being given safe opportunities to speak, which is why dozens of them will speak to a media outlet off the record only. And, lots of people don’t feel safe in general–because of persistent and structural oppression about their identities, their appearance–which is another reason why people don’t speak up.
But—but—I would like to talk about other aspects of why people don’t speak up. Because this past week, I found myself in a position of not speaking up. I was working on a project for which I had not been given adequate guidance, under very hard deadlines that had previously either gone missing or were vaguely stated. And by the end of the week, over a fish dinner that I couldn’t eat, I suddenly started crying and my husband, who is accustomed to my calm competence on many professional and personal matters, was somewhat unnerved. (Although he rallied and came through with support and love, poor darling. I know he was feeling bad for me because he not only vacuumed the house this morning but also did the floors and dusted everything. Acts of service are his love language and he knows how much I value cleanliness.)
Some of the vagaries associated with this project were on me. I could have made earlier inquiries about background materials, could have been more insistent on thematic queries (“do you want it to be about this? Or that?”), could’ve, should’ve, would’ve. But for myriad reasons, I did not do these things and instead, I just went at it. I wrote and wrote and did not succeed in producing adequate first drafts. I’ve produced GREAT first drafts under worse conditions and I got in my own head about how I could do it again, despite the fact that I was flat-out exhausted from other projects, and also tapped out because of complicated family dynamics that happened this past week.
THAT’S the point: I got up in my own head. And in that state, I was unable to ask for help (this is another failing of mine) and I was unable to take any agency in the matter. I think this may have been one of the things going on with the Late Night situation, and it happens in other difficult workplace situations. People get waaaayyy up in their own heads and they don’t, or can’t, see a way forward.
Unlike the Late Night employees, however, I did not have the factor of unequal power dynamics in my situation. I was working with two colleagues who I love, respect, and admire. And in fact, the high esteem in which I hold my colleagues may have been a contributing factor to me stiff-upper-lipping it for several miserable days. I wanted so badly to do my part well, because I knew how busy they were, and how completely without malice or intent their actions were.
After my crying jag, I wrote a (I hope) calm message in which I said that the process wasn’t working for me. That I couldn’t produce decent writing without better guidance and some more input. I tried not to assign blame to anyone, although I admit, I was in a bit of a self-flagellation headspace—saying things to myself like, why the fuck did I sign up for this? Who on earth can write this many words in this amount of time? (I’ve produced a truly astonishing quantity of words over the past few months.) The response, from my highly valued colleagues, was immediate and thorough, and a better way forward was proposed.
But: I am still thinking about how I got up in my own head. I am still thinking about how I repeatedly and futilely threw myself against an unyielding surface and it took days of not breaking through, and mounting stress, and tears over a fish dinner, to get me to say something. And I guess that I am thinking about all of the employees and workers out there who are also, for lack of a better phrase, up in their own heads at the moment. Where they are, for many reasons, unable to take any agency to make it better.
Here are some very, very minor bits of advice if this is you:
- One, it is possible, during periods when you are NOT feeling incredibly stressed, to do some self-work to learn what triggers you, or what drains your fuel tank. It took me a good long while to learn that when the news got really, really depressing—like a terribly unjust Supreme Court decision, or even more outrageously hypocritical words from a MAGA Republican—this would then make challenging things in my life feel ten times worse. I don’t think this type of learning about oneself happens overnight—that’s why I called it “self-work”—but I do think it is possible to become more mindful, over time, about the things that make you feel terrible, and to learn to practice a little avoidance until you can fill your fuel tank again. Nowadays, when I take in a news item that is terribly depressing, I remember that the amplification of that news item on social media is apt to send me into a downward spiral, especially if I’ve just spent two hours on the phone with my mother dealing with a financial matter. So I step away from social media. I avert my eyes. When I am asked for advice and support, which I frequently am, I prioritize the people who are closest to me: my kids and my husband.
- Two, it is also possible, during periods when you are not feeling incredibly stressed, to keep an inventory of the rituals and routines that bring you the most comfort and joy and draw upon that inventory when you ARE feeling stressed. For example: I just started recording a podcast in which I talk about movies with my son. (See what I did there? You should check it out.) We are following a schedule in which we watch and talk about a movie every 2 weeks or so, and we’re due for a recording session very soon, and I’m very busy at the moment. But you know what? Even though doing the podcast is work (I write the discussion outlines and schedule the recording sessions; my son does the post-production work; and we both have to watch the movies), this endeavor brings me nothing but pure joy. Co-creating with my son is an absolute pleasure—and I know he feels the same, even though he’s in his senior year at film school and responsible for editing a million projects while also interning. So continuing to do it is something that’s become part of my inventory of things that bring me joy and comfort.
- Three, I always advocate against making drastic decisions when one is very caught up in their feelings. There are times when people are not given that choice, unfortunately. But if you do have the option of waiting, it is always better to make big decisions when you are in a state of mind to calmly assess pros and cons. When people are going through terrible amounts of work stress, most of them have a chyron going through their brain that says, “I need to leave need to leave need to get the hell outtta here….” But it is always, always better to make decisions about one’s future when one has some distance about the best and the worst of what happened.
I’m not pretending that these are anything but minor band-aids for stressful situations at work that I’m offering here. The real solution looks something like what I did after I got out of my own head, and what the Late Night staffers were finally able to do through Rolling Stone—make people aware of the problem so that solutions can be found. And then there’s another long-term solution: getting up in your head about a terrible work situation is always, always, a temporary state of affairs. In other words, this, too, shall pass.
Minna Jung Consulting 