How to Kill Drama with Kindness (Challenge #70)

So I’m trying something a little new this summer—I’m letting YOU vote on my episode topics! A few weeks ago I ran a poll on my linkedin page, which you can follow at kindleadershipchallenge.com/linkedin. Anyway, today we’re talking about one of the top vote getters, Workplace drama. More specifically, I want to explore toxic workplace drama, healthy workplace conflict, and how a kind leader can guide team members--and themselves--to shift from the former to the latter. 

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Welcome to the Kind Leadership Challenge, the podcast that empowers leaders to heal their organizations in ten minutes! I’m Dr. Sarah Clark, founder of the Kind Leadership Guild, where I use my PhD in Higher ed leadership and nearly 2 decades of experience in academic libraries to coach a community of educational and library leaders who are working to build a better world without burning out. 

Kind Leaders aren’t perfect, which is actually as it should be. In our unique ways, we make tough decisions without becoming jerks. We create impactful and burnout-proof systems for our organizations. And we know that once we stop controlling and start collaborating, even the most ambitious vision can become effortless. Kind Leadership’s pretty simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. So if you’re up for a challenge, stick around as I teach you how to create a resilient, thriving legacy that will strengthen your community long after you’re gone.

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At first glance, Office drama is a bit like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s Law Clerk Alan Novak’s description of pornography—You know it when you see it. However, that squishy definition has never totally sat well with me for either office drama or pornography. I suspect that both phenomena are hard to define because they are ultimately aren’t grounded in logic. So instead of starting with me declaring a definition of workplace drama, let’s reverse engineer a working definition based on the behaviors we see at work that most people would define as drama. From there, we can figure out how we can shift ourselves and our team out of drama and into something a bit more healthy. 

 According to Stephen Karpman’s model of the Drama Triangle, there are basically three flavors of drama—villain, victim, and hero. Let’s consider how those types of drama play out at work. 

The first flavor of drama, villain, can be loosely defined as rudeness or incivility. In the workplace all of us need to be able to give constructive feedback in a way that it can be heard. However, when there is an element of blame or frustration, justified or not, the message can get lost in the tone. In worst case scenarios, it is easy to spend much more time and energy judging people for their role in a situation than in actually facing the problem that needs solving. 

Next up is victim. When someone is in victim mode, their drama often looks like complaining, withdrawal, or neediness. When operating from a victim stance, a person will not look for solutions to a problem because they feel they have no power at all to change the situation. All they can do is say, or think, “poor me.”

Third up is Hero—my personal default when I slip into drama, and a favorite for a lot of leaders in education, libraries, and other helping professions. And this is a sneaky one, because when you swoop in to save someone from the consequences of their actions and bask in the glow of being the great benefactor, you feel accomplished and respected, but all you’ve done is create a vicious cycle that will lead you to burnout, and others to never change the flaws that got them into trouble in the first place.  

So, when we look at these three examples of workplace drama, The common thread is that none of these behaviors actually helps a team face a problem—instead, they allow us to deflect, ignore, or paper over the challenges facing our organizations. And I think that’s a pretty good working definition of workplace drama—expressing our emotions about a challenge in a manner that shifts the focus to feeling better, not solving the problem.

More specifically, when you are in villain mode, you’re often seeking validation that the situation is someone else’s fault. When in victim headspace, you’re seeking reassurance that you are incapable of fixing a problem that is overwhelming your ability to respond. And when you put on your cape and tights and become the hero, you may take enough control to make a quick fix and bask in the glow of accomplishment, but you don’t take the steps that would allow you and your organization to grow out of that exhausting cycle of crisis and rescue. In other words, as I discuss in more detail in episode 30, when we are stuck in drama, our goal is finding comfort, not solutions.

To be clear, drama isn’t evil, because life isn’t that simple. In fact, there are times that admitting your helplessness, assigning blame, and rescuing someone from an urgent situation can be appropriate and even productive. In any case, I’ve never met any person so well balanced that they don’t play the hero, victim, or villain from time to time. But when a person, a team, or an organization get stuck in drama and hide from their problems for too long, things eventually turn sour and toxic.

One effect of practicing the skills of kind leadership is that leaders can more effectively, humanely, and collaboratively take responsibility for their problems so they can start healing them. Leaders can do that by shifting toxic drama into productive conflict.  Instead of using the power of our emotions to dodge the big problems, Conflict happens when we use those emotions as fuel to have the challenging conversations necessary to solving our piece of the problem. By processing and sharing our perspectives we can better understand and explain the full truth of a situation, move through the disagreement at the root of the problem, find a resolution, and come out stronger on the other side.

So how do we shift?

Well, instead of going into villain mode and blaming everyone for screwing up, we can challenge ourselves and each other to take an honest look at the underlying dynamics that caused the problem, and see if there are aspects of it we can shift. And instead of seeing ourselves as completely powerless victims of our circumstances, we can try to identify one small area of our situation, even if it’s just our response to the situation, and create something new that can make the situation a little better. And finally, instead of chasing the high that comes with being the hero, we can delegate, empower, and coach others so they can become heroes to themselves. 

And on that note, here’s this week’s challenge. What drama are you dealing with at work right now, either as a participant or observer? See if you can determine what the deeper problem is that’s causing the drama, and then brainstorm some ways that creative conflict could empower everyone involved to heal the situation once and for all. 

Thanks as always for listening to the kind leadership challenge, especially Angela Beatie, Diane Schrecker, Kimberly Burke Sweetman, Juanita James, Jessa Franco, Kelli Menes, Stacy-Ann Palado, Hunter McConnell, Dan Lawrence, and Ali Ahmed, who voted for this topic in the survey I mentioned at the top of this episode. Before you go, here’s a quick way you can spread the word of kind leadership. I’d like you to take a moment to think of one friend or colleague who could most benefit from this week’s challenge. Got their name in your head? Good. Open your app or head over to kindleadershipchallenge.com/70 and share this episode with them. Add a friendly note as well. Never doubt that day by day, you’re building a better world, even if you can't see it yet. So until next time, stay kind now.