CHAPTER 1

A SKILLS-BASED APPROACH TO SEXUAL HARASSMENT PREVENTION AND RESPONSE

SKILLS VS. RULES

If our ultimate goal is to create gender-diverse workplaces that are safe and respectful, how might we go about ensuring that all employees both know the rules of the game and have the skills to follow them? Consider soccer for a moment. Let’s say your goal is to get a group of diverse athletes and nonathletes to play a game of soccer together. How might you go about it?

You might start by explaining the rules of the game, allowable conduct on the field, and the penalties for breaking the rules. You might ask your team to read the rules in advance of the first practice and clarify any questions they might have. But it’s pretty clear that talking about the rules of the game isn’t the purpose or point of soccer practice.

To learn and master the game of soccer, you need to practice so you can build the skills of running, handling the ball on the field, and playing as a team. You need drills that people can practice alone and with each other. You need to learn the positions, and which one you are best suited to play. Some people will need to learn how to run while kicking a ball, while others will need to learn how to pass to others. Some people can run fast but can’t shoot the ball, while others have great precision in their kicks, but can’t get to the ball fast enough to take a shot. With regular practice and reminders of the rules of play, you might not win the World Cup, but you’d eventually be able to play a rewarding game of soccer.

When we hear the term “sexual harassment training,” most of us think first and foremost about the rules part of training, also known as compliance. Compliance training typically consists of a review of the legal definitions of sexual harassment, company policy, and the repercussions for being in violation of company policy and the law. Sometimes this training will incorporate scenarios designed to teach participants how to recognize sexual harassment when it takes place. Sometimes the training will be offered as an online course, which saves companies money, but eliminates interactivity. The effectiveness of the training is measured in terms of completion rate and sometimes, in the case of online training, passing a test indicating that you understand the definitions and policies presented.

Compliance training evokes a wide range of reactions, and some training modules are still so poorly designed, it’s hard to take them seriously. Recently, a friend of mine shared a slide from her company’s compliance-focused online training module. Curious, I asked her what skills she was learning from the training. Her reply, in jest: speed-reading and multitasking.

A female human resources executive once shared with me that she left a compliance training early in her career feeling terrified and overwhelmed, telling herself she’d never touch anyone she worked with ever again. This is also a common reaction to a rules-based training. Employees of all genders often leave compliance trainings feeling frustrated that the trainings aren’t useful or feeling scared, anxious, and fearful that their awkwardness or ignorance will result in losing their jobs.

These reactions are unfortunate, because compliance trainings play an important role in sexual harassment prevention. Rules do matter. They provide a common language for talking about behavior and set the expectation that those who commit sexual harassment will be held accountable. Compliance trainings also provide companies with the necessary legal mechanisms to hold perpetrators of sexual harassment accountable without being sued. Preventing lawsuits is important. If a company or organization is out of business, it can’t pursue its mission or sustain its workforce.

Compliance is the perfect place to start. However, when training begins and ends with compliance, it creates challenges that can allow troubling behavior to continue. Oftentimes, compliance training leaves more questions than answers and doesn’t support a tone or climate where those questions can be effectively answered and addressed.

Compliance doesn’t always address power dynamics and boundary issues that are troubling, but not covered by policy. For instance, a man wondered whether the weekly poker night he hosted for his team was appropriate, given that the regular attendees were all men. Another man confided in me that his junior employee had stopped coming on sales calls with him after a compliance training, but he didn’t know why.

“She avoids having even work-related conversations with me,” he said. “I’m on eggshells, wondering if I did something wrong, but I’m afraid to ask her or bring it up with our district manager.”

Even worse, perpetrators often aren’t deterred by rules, even when those rules are clearly spelled out during compliance training. After all, sexual harassment was already against the rules before the #MeToo movement broke. When a perpetrator or potential perpetrator leaves a compliance training and returns to a culture of silence and avoidance, that sends a clear message that they can continue their behavior without repercussions.

Often people are made so uncomfortable during compliance training that they joke or laugh their way through it, or easily give the “right” answers and then revert to the status quo after training. Perpetrators of sexual harassment and misconduct thrive not only on the silence of their victims but also on the silence of bystanders. Perpetrators are enabled by a culture that doesn’t collectively enforce the rules, and by individuals who don’t share accountability for relationships and behavior at work.

A compliance training is not designed to create a more supportive environment for colleagues who may have experienced sexual abuse or assault. It’s not a place where managers can learn how to better see the workplace through the eyes of survivors, or understand how their lived experience may affect boundaries and relationships with colleagues.

When it comes to compliance, the focus is on the kinds of behaviors to avoid and the consequences if we engage in them. For some, this evokes a type of fearful inaction, a reluctance to come anywhere near the topic again. For others, this evokes frustration, because the rules were already apparent to them. Regardless of these reactions, compliance is an essential first step.

If what we want in the workplace is a place where we have safer and more respectful relationships and interactions, we have to get on the playing field after learning the rules. When we understand that the rules are designed to set up a game that will be more fun for everyone, we’re more likely to pay attention, ask questions, and actually follow the rules when we’re playing the game.

A STEP-BY-STEP APPROACH FOR TEAMS AND ORGANIZATIONS

Whether you are a CEO, a manager, or an entry-level professional, a broader approach to tackling sexual harassment will help you equip your team and colleagues with the necessary skills for today’s workplace. You may be seeking to address interactions among your team members that are eroding trust and safety, or you may have witnessed troubling behavior, jokes, or comments. You may see the limitations of compliance training, and want to do more in your department. You may be frustrated that your manager hasn’t made a stronger commitment to preventing or responding to sexual harassment effectively, or feel deep empathy for those in your workplace who have experienced sexual harassment. You may be leading an organization-wide training initiative after a high-profile incident at the company or in the industry. Regardless of your reason for starting this work, it will help create more safety and respect in your workplace.

A skills-based approach to sexual harassment prevention and response incorporates five key steps.

STEP 1: Start with compliance, policy, and reporting

As outlined previously, there are several reasons to begin your skill development with compliance, company policy, and how reports of harassment will be handled. Whether a training is offered by your organization, as is required in several states, or it’s something you learn on your own, consider this an opportunity to learn the rules of the game, why the rules exist, and what areas are subject to interpretation—and by whom. By asking questions about laws, policies, and reporting up front, you can ground yourself in the rules of the game before diving into a broader set of conversations that play a role in prevention and culture change.

If your company provides a compliance-based training, this first step is an opportunity to explore and discuss its purpose and limitations. If your company doesn’t provide such a training, you can find decent ones online.

When you understand the role and purpose of compliance, it is a natural place to start the conversation about sexual harassment and misconduct with your colleagues or team. A discussion about compliance, policy, and reporting lays the groundwork for more meaningful conversations that explore prevention, culture, and the fuzziness around the edges of the rules. Take, for example, a situation where you saw another manager leaning over an intern to look at something on her computer screen, and he put his hand on her shoulder or back. Let’s say you speak to your manager colleague about it, and he’s offended. You used to think of him as a friend, but now he’s giving you the cold shoulder and refuses to talk to you about it. He also joked with the intern about what you said, and now she seems annoyed with you, too. Did you do the wrong thing? Should you not have said anything about what you saw, even though your goal was to make the workplace safer for everyone? When we can differentiate between conversations about compliance and conversations about culture, it’s easier to engage in both with more skill.

The first step of compliance training is also an important moment to make sure that you and your team understand the reporting process and are clear about the role of human resources in your organization. Demystifying and personalizing human resources helps set the stage for future uncomfortable conversations that may involve someone from that department. Many employees do not fully understand that human resources may impose disciplinary actions that fall short of firing someone and then, for legal reasons, can’t discuss those outcomes. Others find the term “investigation” to be scary, when an investigation is really just a series of conversations involving someone from human resources, the person who made the report, the person who was mentioned in the report, and anyone who might have further information. In other words, an investigation is a series of uncomfortable conversations that are made even more uncomfortable when employees don’t know their purposes or roles.

It’s a lot easier to talk about the reporting process before there is an incident than it is to discuss it afterward. Once an incident has been reported, the process and outcome are typically kept confidential to protect all parties involved. This situation is uncomfortable for everyone. After an incident takes place, any discussion about the investigation or reporting process is more likely to sound insincere. If you aren’t prepared to tolerate the ambiguity of an investigation and the lack of details about the outcome, it’s easy to lose trust and make future conversations more difficult.

As a part of compliance discussions, it’s helpful to provide insight into the questions your human resources team may grapple with on a daily basis. When do we give someone a chance to demonstrate accountability and growth? How do we properly document what we believe to be abusive behavior so we can legally terminate them—when no one wants to officially make a report? How can we conduct a fair and thorough investigation without making employees feel interrogated?

STEP 2: Assess experience in uncomfortable conversations

When it comes to sexual harassment, you are going to be engaging in conversations with people with a diverse range of experience and skill. Some employees will have experience addressing troubling behavior, responding to disclosures, or giving or receiving feedback. Many will not.

By reflecting on some very basic questions about your own history of conversations and the history of others, you can gain insights that will inform where your conversations may need more support or skill. For example, a group of employees who are surprised to hear sexual harassment takes place requires different practice conversations than a group that isn’t at all surprised, but hasn’t responded to reports in an official, professional capacity.

The mix of skill levels, however, is not the only challenge. The very fact that we are entering into these discussions with varied backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and skills may surprise us. When a group conversation doesn’t speak to our individual experiences or needs, we may end up feeling frustrated, annoyed, and distrustful of the process altogether.

By establishing a way of talking about and reflecting on experience at the outset of conversation practice, it’s possible to manage expectations about the process, the cadence, and the reality that people will respond to the same situation in many different ways.

Whether initiating an informal discussion, integrating an exercise into training, or participating in the survey included in Chapter 2, ground the skills you seek to build in an actual assessment of experience.

STEP 3: Introduce The Uncomfortable Conversation Framework

Once these building blocks are in place, you can dive into The Uncomfortable Conversation Framework. The uncomfortable conversation is the foundational skill that makes the rest of this journey possible, which is why a significant portion of this book is dedicated to mapping out the Framework.

Through uncomfortable conversations, employees, managers, and leaders can develop the individual and organizational skills required to create safe and respectful work environments. For many people, an uncomfortable conversation might be any conversation about sexual harassment or violence, period. If you can’t talk about sexual harassment or violence, you can’t prevent or respond to it. The Framework will help you understand what to expect in a conversation about sexual harassment or violence and how to engage in one productively, regardless of someone’s background or experience.

The Framework reflects five key insights gleaned from conversations with individuals from a range of backgrounds and experiences, as well as from experts in the field of sexual violence prevention and response. It offers a way for you to engage in many types of conversations about sexual harassment prevention and response, and helps you steer clear of the common traps that make these conversations polarizing or something to avoid.

Once you internalize the five parts of the Framework, you can start to use it more proactively to initiate uncomfortable conversations and use them to develop specific skills that support work-places that prevent and respond to sexual harassment effectively. The Framework comes to life through practice, and the practice offers a chance to reinforce the Framework’s core concepts.

Chapters 3 through 7 of this book provide an overview of the framework. If you are using this book to train a group or team, these chapters can be assigned as reading prior to a practice session, or you can find additional resources on my website, www.sarahbeaulieu.me, to help teach the Framework.

STEP 4: Practice uncomfortable conversations

After introducing the Framework, it’s time to practice. The practice is the core of changing our habits, as it builds your skill, strengthens your ability to navigate behavior and relationships more effectively, and helps uncover potential policy or management issues within an organization or team.

Following the introduction of the Framework, I’ll help you practice using realistic scenarios that you can use with trusted colleagues or in a facilitated group discussion with your team. These scenarios can be adapted to your industry and are designed to tackle some of the common roadblocks you and your organization may hit when trying to prevent or respond to sexual harassment.

These scenarios offer a chance to practice the skill of generating and engaging in productive, uncomfortable conversations. Practice also provides a chance to build new skills, such as helpful intervention, responding to a disclosure, supporting survivors at work, understanding power dynamics, and setting or respecting boundaries. Chapters 9, 10, and 11 will provide an overview of these key skills, why they matter, and how practice conversations can contribute to culture change in powerful ways.

STEP 5: Build habits individually and through teams

Avoiding conversations about sexual harassment and violence is an embedded habit for organizations and individuals. It will take intentional, active efforts to undo that habit and replace it with one of conversation. It’s easy to attend a workshop, read a book, or respond to a conversation that someone else started. It’s a lot harder to start one yourself. This requires more than a single practice conversation or even a single group practice session. However, it’s the only way you and your team can move from responding to incidents after they happen to preventing them before they occur. The more you can commit to formalized uncomfortable conversations, the better chance you will have to change your own habits and the habits of your organization or team.

While some of the topics or methods presented here may feel forced, they are designed to help you break the ice in your role before an incident arises. Chapter 12 provides you with a series of habit-forming resources, no matter what your role is within your organization.

THE RATIONALE BEHIND A SKILLS-BASED APPROACH

There are three main reasons to adopt a skills-based approach. First, it builds on widely respected research into how organizations change. Second, it includes successful methods of changing behavior through replacing bad or ineffective habits. Third, it embraces common-sense philosophies about teaching and learning.

The basic tenets of change management reflect two core conditions required for organizations to change: a dissatisfaction with the status quo and a clear vision for the future.¹ When we don’t shy away from speaking to the dissatisfaction of the current workplace across gender, we can unite around a process for change. A vision for the future is a gender-diverse workplace where we can engage in the kinds of conversations at work that support safe, respectful, and productive workplaces.

Recognizing that silence is often a habit enables us to leverage Charles Duhigg’s research on habits to inform our approach to change. A habit of silence can therefore be replaced with a habit of speaking up. Changing core habits like this one requires building belief and trust in the vision that the world will be better as a result of this habit change.² By establishing a clear vision of a positive workplace culture—rather than a world defined by the fear of harassment or termination—we can more effectively change some of the core habits that lead to sexual harassment in the first place.

Viewing sexual harassment prevention through a skills lens also requires us to consider the conditions that make learning possible. When building a skill around uncomfortable conversation, we are primarily moving people from conscious incompetence to conscious competence. In other words, we are asking people to see something that they know makes them uncomfortable and consciously choose to speak up rather than stay silent. According to research around the four stages of competence,³ this process requires practice in a supportive environment and the freedom to make mistakes.

One final note: A skills-based approach does not tackle systemic oppression and difference in identities directly, though it provides many opportunities to explore the role of power and privilege through its practical application. Oftentimes, focusing on inherent biases can actually perpetuate them.⁴ Additionally, without skills around uncomfortable conversations, discussions of identity can quickly become polarizing and unproductive. By focusing on uncomfortable conversations, we are also building the muscles required to support conversations across all kinds of difference—and the systems that oppress others because of that difference.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

▶ Compliance trainings cover the definitions, relevant—and evolving—laws, organizational policies, and reporting guidelines related to sexual harassment and misconduct.

▶ Compliance is a critical place to start training on sexual harassment prevention and response, because it spells out the rules for the organization and the consequences of breaking them. By placing compliance in a larger framework, organizations can lay the groundwork for effective skills-based approaches to preventing and responding to sexual harassment.

▶ A skills-based approach to preventing and responding to sexual harassment consists of establishing rules and expectations, assessing conversation experience, teaching The Uncomfortable Conversation Framework, engaging in practice conversations, and forming new habits.

▶ A skills-based approach leverages what we already know about organizational change, habit formation, and teaching and applies it to workplace behavior and relationships.