[FROM DAG FORSSELL (971223.2050)]
Here is an item that caught my eye a few days ago. The American workplace
can certainly be full of threats and coercion. It is easy for a manager to
say: "If you cant do the job, I'll find someone who can." This article
illustrates this in an extreme. When both employees and employers
understand PCT, this will fade away, I think.
Best, Dag
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LOS ANGELES TIMES, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1997
PERSPECTIVE ON THE SPREWELL INCIDENT
The Screamer and His Fire Within
Bosses like Carlesimo who rage at subordinates should know that verbal
violence is still violence.
By JONATHAN KIRSCH
0ne of the dirty little secrets of the American workplace--and a mostly
overlooked wrinkle in the firing of basketball player Latrell Sprewell--is
the so-called "screamer," a boss who feels at liberty to berate and
belittle his employees even if he feels constrained by law or political
correctness from making sexual advances or using racial epithets. The ugly
encounter between Sprewell, who is black, and his white coach, which has
been attributed to age, race and class, can also be seen as a clash between
a "'screamer" and someone who simply refuses to endure a verbal scourging.
Sprewell was fired by the Golden State Warriors for throttling his coach
P.J. Carlesimo under the good moral character clause of his $32-million
contract and banned from pro basketball for one year by the National
Basketball Assn. So far, the punishment visited upon Sprewell has been spun
in the media as either a long-overdue exercise of "authority" in the face
of rampant violence in professional sports, as Sprewell's accusers would
have it, or an unduly harsh exercise of discipline based on race and class
conflicts, as his defenders see it.
But the Sprewell incident can also be regarded as a worst-case scenario of
what happens when a "screamer" pushes one of his subordinates just a bit
too far. Carlesimo is a coach with what Newsweek characterized as "a
profane, in-your-face style," and he was apparently in Sprewell's face when
the aggrieved young man "went straight playground" on him, as one fellow
player put it. Carlesimo may have misjudged how much abuse a man like
Sprewell was capable of enduring before his temper would spin wildly out of
control.
"Maybe," cracked San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, "his boss needed choking."
The culture of professional sports tolerates and even celebrates coaches
who resemble Marine Corps drill sergeants, and roughing up a player to
encourage a peak performance is seen as a perfectly appropriate management
style by some win-at-all-costs managers and owners. But the same attitude
can be found throughout the work world. I have encountered some truly
accomplished "screamers" in law journalism and the entertainment industry.
At my first job after graduating from college, I witnessed the president of
the company administer a public humiliation to his advertising director
after the screening of a 30-second television spot that the boss found
unsatisfactory. So harsh were the words that he dumped on the ad director
in the presence of his coworkers, so insulting were his manner and tone of
voice and so embarrassed was I at witnessing the spectacle that I could
think of nothing else to do but slip out of my chair and slink out of the
room.
"Where are you going?" barked the boss, shifting his line of fire in my
direction and stopping me short. "Sit down and watch; you might learn
something."
What I learned was that some bosses feel empowered to treat their
subordinates with a degree of coarseness, contempt and cruelty that would
be unthinkable in any other social setting. I observed that screamers are
often coddled and even encouraged within the corporate culture if they are
successful at making money for the company. And I saw that most of their
victims chose to shut up and take it because they are
afraid to put their paychecks at risk by fighting back. That was 20 years
ago and not much has changed. Screamers are still tolerated in workplaces
where sexual advances and racial epithets are now forbidden.
But the excesses of the screamer cannot be shrugged off as motivational
tools or the unfortunate eccentricities of a gifted manager. Verbal and
emotional violence is still violence. Indeed, Sprewell is not the only
player who experienced Carlesimo's "in-your-face style" as an assault, nor
is he the only one who wanted to put his hands around Carlesimo's throat.
"I felt like choking him many times," another pro basketball player was
quoted as saying of Carlesimo. "He has a way of dealing with you that's
very con descending and degrading. Sooner or later someone was going to
step [up] to him about it."
Of course, the fact that Carlesimo may have provoked Sprewell may help to
explain the attack but does not excuse it. But one of the lessons of the
incident is that a verbal assault may well bring on a physical assault, and
any boss who allows his own anger and aggression to erupt in the form of
bitter words may find that something even harsher may splash back on him.
"[A] subterranean fire was eating its way deeper and deeper in him , wrote
Herman Melville in "Billy Budd," an archetypal tale of an abused young man
who turns on his abuser. "Something decisive must come of it."
Significantly, Melville's words describe Claggart, the abusive
master-at-arms, and not Budd, the young man who struck him down and paid
for the impulse with his life. The "screamer" is the one in whom a fire
rages, and sometimes he is the one who is burned.
Jonathan Kirsch is an attorney and author of "The Harlot by the Side of the
Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible" (Ballantine) and an upcoming biography
of Moses.
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What you sow, you reap.