Fight the power: One employee strategy in disciplinary meetings

You’ve written your letter, prepped your managers, lined up your facts, but there is one variable you don’t know, and can’t control.  What is the employee going to say?  What approach are they going to take?

I say strategy, which some of the time is overstating the cognitive effort applied by the employee- some with put a lot of rational thought into it, and some will not.

What we are talking about here is what approach will they take.  We are oversimplifying the range of potential responses into three broad mindsets that people tend to take, and in this article we talk about one of the strategies- fighting.

What is the fight approach?

The gist of this approach is the employee denies and disputes the allegations against them.   They do one, all, or some of the following:

-              Deny the actions they allegedly took,

-              Deny the actions they took mean what you allege they mean,

-              The responsibility does not lie with them,

-              What happened isn’t as significant as you allege it is.

Let me give you an example, because at first glance the distinctions between the above could be unclear.  An employee could deny they pushed the other person at all, and/or they could deny the contact they made constituted fighting/assault (whatever words your policy uses), and/or deny that it was their fault this happened (i.e. they were provoked, responding, or defending themselves), and/or it’s not a big deal- any or all of the above.  You may ask how someone could say it never happened and simultaneously deny it’s a big deal, and you’d be right.  But they sometimes do.

How it works

Generally their approach is; ‘no, you cannot fairly conclude what you are considering to concluding.  It is not right nor fair’.   This may be by:

a)        Outright lying about what happened.

b)        Bending the truth.

c)        Denying the intent.

It possible, but rare for an employee is simply lie; stating a fact that they know is not true (a).  More likely they will be reshaping the facts- diminishing what severity of what they did and increasing what other did (b), or simply denying they meant what others perceive their actions to be (c). 

Let’s use an offensive gesture as an example (if you want to get Shakespearean, think about biting one’s thumb).  The employee may deny they bit their thumb. They may agree that they did it, but it was in fact a mild response to severe provocation.  They may deny that it is indeed offensive, deny that they knew it to be offensive when this happened.

They could be right

I feel like this should be taken as a given, but it would also be glaringly absent if I didn’t mention this.  They could be telling the truth.  Why might this be the case?

-              You missed something

-              You got emotionally captured by the complainant

-              The facts don’t fit as well as they appear

If you are interested in this, there is a whole area of study on human behaviour during investigations, and I would suggest doing your own research into this if you do find it interesting.  But an oversimplification is this:

-              An innocent person will argue, and will not admit to something they did not do. But;

-              They might be guilty but not know it (e.g. most people don’t mean to be racist)

-              They might be trying to fake being innocent.

As above, this is obvious, but we need to be careful not to forget this.  Never close you’re mind the idea that you’ve missed something, interpreted something incorrectly, or being persuaded to someone fault solely because of another emotional reaction to it.

Don’t take it personally

This should also be taken as a given, and the need to point it out potentially unnecessary.  Being lied to feels very personal; when someone tries to deceive us, it’s very hard to set aside your reaction ‘do they think I’m an idiot?’.   When someone dupes us, we feel like a dupe.  When someone tries to dupe us, we feel like they think we are dupe. 

Remember they are not fighting with you, they are fighting against the outcome that might happen.  Even if it is personal, even if they genuinely don’t like you and would take pleasure in your failure (and those are some solid ‘ifs’) that’s still not what they are trying to achieve here.  Don’t fail for ‘main character syndrome’, this isn’t about you; they are trying to avoid an unpleasant outcome for them.

When it works

It works better when the evidence is weak or subjective.  If it’s behavioural, eye-of-the-beholder stuff, then fighting their corner is a fair approach.  If a co-worker has cried to the boss (literally or figuratively) that they’re a bully, but they think they are acting reasonably (e.g. rationally, but professionally insistently that they do what they ought to be doing), pushing back on the allegation is fair. 

It also works more where the job isn’t on the line right now- typically minor misconduct or performance.  If it’s early stages, the employee can push back to get better clarity of what is expected of them.

When it doesn’t work

Some transgressions are unforgivable, some are forgivable.  This isn’t well suited to situations where the employer would be able to live the employee staying on if they took accountability, but not if they refuse to.  For example- inappropriate and unprofessional conduct- ‘we can live with your offensive ‘foot-in-mouth’ comment if you understand and won’t do it again’.

This strategy is the higher risk strategy, but it can better suited to unforgivable transgressions, where either the employee is looking to go, or where the allegations are so big that (if proven true) staying isn’t an option on the table, so fighting is the best option.  Every employer is different, but typically (in this order), theft, violence and dishonesty are harder to see how (if found) the employment relationship could continue.

The significance of inexperience

With only extreme examples of concerningly recidivist transgressors, employees don’t know how disciplinary meetings go.  They don’t go very often, and for many people, this is the first one.  Their advocate (representative/support person, wingman etc) likely will have, and this does cover that knowledge gap somewhat, but they might not have one, or their representative didn’t have a lot of time to prep them.   So most of the time the employee will be a fish out of water, and very conscious of this, and very uncomfortable.  This can be due to:

-              The serious of the situation,

-              The cross-examination of their behaviour by the company and their boss,

-              Just sitting down with managers. 

No one likes talking to management types in formal meetings to talk about their potential screw-ups.  It’s hard.

This is a good thing right?  You’ve greater familiarity and comfort, makes it more likely that you can control the meeting better?  Yes.  Mostly. 

But stress can elicit bad decisions, and this strategy (fighting) can be a bad option.  Employees intuitively deciding to take a combative approach because they are under stress could be a bad decision- in the least, it’s not a good decision-making process.

If you’ve given the employee sufficient time to think the situation through, you should see less of this, and if you still see this, I would listen more- they clearly think they are in the right, or at least the course of action you’re putting them is wrong to them.