the Horrible and the Miserable

Reflections on the Road to Respect

For many of us December means holiday preparations and celebrations. For me, it has also come to mean the rather demoralizing task of having to read story after story of disrespect and abuse Now you might be wondering, Erica: why on earth would you want to subject yourself to such a depressing task during the season of light and joy? The short answer is that I am a panel member charged with the task of ranking America’s worst leaders for the eBossWatch America’s Worst Bosses LIST.Our task as panel members is to read through the hundred or so cases of leaders who harass and bully those they are hired to lead, and rank them from 1 – 10: 1 being worst, 10 being the best.Let me be clear here. When I say best, I don’t actually mean best as in good; I mean best as in the least awful.I have to tell you this is a challenging task. I can’t help being reminded of something Woody Allen said in the movie Annie Hall.“I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else."I am always tempted to rank every boss with a 1, but I don’t. I look at the overall fact set and choose between the horrible and the miserable.Whatever the ranking one commonality in these cases is abuse of power by those in positions of power. Another commonality is that the targets are overwhelmingly women, members of visible minorities or LGBT individuals. The most aggravating commonality is that when targets chose to speak up, they are either ignored or retaliated against.It is maddeningly obvious that far too many leaders either fail to appreciate or choose to ignore the respectful, common sense advice shared in our October interview with Sue Paish, CEO of LifeLabs -“Model the behaviour. If you see inappropriate behaviour you better make sure you act on it because people will be watching.”As depressing a task as it is, I choose to remain a part of this panel because I support the work of individuals like Asher Adelman, founder of eBossWatch. His goal is to empower job seekers with information about potential workplaces and what it's really like to work there. As I learned when I interviewed Asher a number of years ago, it was his first-hand, nightmare experience of working in a hostile work environment that inspired him to find a way for people to evaluate prospective employers and avoid bad bosses.Being a panel member affirms for me why I am in the Respect Business. Like Asher, I want individuals to be empowered to choose respect rather than disrespect. I want us to use our collective power to create change by saying no to abusive bosses and disrespectful workplace cultures.It struck me as an interesting coincidence that on the same day I was ranking abusive leaders, the world had gathered to say farewell to Nelson Mandela, a leader who personified what it means to "Model the Behaviour" and to walk the talk of respect.Mandela once said that he felt “morally obliged” to do what he did in his life. While it can be argued that there are vast differences in how individuals interpret morality, our values are the foundation for acts and behaviours which can be described as moral obligations.I believe that we can get some clear insights as to the values that inspired Mandela’s moral obligation from this quote:“No one person is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”The values of love, joy, peace, respect and compassion are the values of enlightenment. When we align our behaviour with these values, we manifest our divine destiny; our soul’s purpose. It is no coi

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