TGIF – People Behaving Badly

As the week winds down, we wind down with some tidbits for your information, education, health, and enjoyment.

Quote of the Week: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”  Maya Angelou

Humor Break: “Have you heard the one about …” usually is a warning sign of a politically incorrect form of humor about to materialize.  Today we present an exception.  I would like to thank the 7-year old person who gave me this joke that any (inner) child can love:

Have you heard the one about the Corduroy pillow?  

It’s making HEADLINES!  

Stat of the Week: Listening to scuttlebutt that a colleague has made — an ethnic slur, a sexist joke, or some other offensive comment increases the likelihood that employees will make similar comments themselves, potentially creating an expanding circle of misbehavior. However, actually witnessing verbal abuse has no such effect.  Researchers hypothesize that knowledge of coworkers’ bad behavior tends to normalize or even glorify such behavior—but seeing nastiness firsthand elicits enough empathy for the victim to counter that effect.

Action Tip: Be courageous, tell people when you are offended by jokes that single out a person or group.  Don’t tolerate racist, sexist, and other forms of “ist” jokes. 

Volunteering: I expect that most of us rarely give a thought to “ist” humor in the workplace or any place for that matter.  Frankly, we rarely give any conscious thought to the elimination of any kind of prejudice.  It is not that we are intolerant, just busy.  So today let me present you with a reminder notice.  Take 5 or 10 minutes to read, learn and act upon ways you can make your home, workplace, community and world a little less prejudiced.  No Place For HateTM: 101 Ways You Can Beat Prejudice!

[tags]diversity, employee behavior, workplace behavior, verbal abuse, ethnic slurs, sexist jokes, envisia, envisia learning, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley[/tags]

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.