Safety Wars
Psychopaths in the Workplace
May 18, 2021
A short discussion on psychopathy.
[00:00:00] :  This show is brought to you by safety. The following program is rated for mature audiences and may contain adult language, adult situations and frank safety discussions, the names in certain details have been changed to protect the safe and the unsafe. But believe me, every item in here is true. Here we are out in colorado. We're recording this podcast. I wanted to introduce you to a member of our team, Kadima Grogan. She comes to us from the firefighting industry if that is an industry and also as an E M. T. We were fortunate enough to hire her about a year and a half ago. And why don't you say hello Katie? Hi everyone. So Katie has had a couple of questions over the last month or so. And this has been an ongoing topic of knowing the safety industry and we wanted to talk about what's your main issue that you're dealing with that on the jobs, it seems well, I guess it would have to do with the people, sometimes the leadership on sites there, they're a little bit deceptive and devious and they have this great charismatic personality and their people pleasers. But there's something underneath that just isn't truthful. What would you call that type of person? A psychopath. So by special request today on safety wars psychopaths in the workplace. Let me start out with a little disclaimer here. I'm not a psychologist. I don't play one on tv or the radio. I'm just a guy on the internet that has been a magnet for psychopaths and has to deal with him for his entire life. Diagnosing and treating psychopathy takes time and treatment by professionals and if you think you are one get help. If you think you've been victimized by them, then you definitely probably need help. First of all, let's define psychopathy or sociopathy. It is defined by the NIH as a neuropsychiatric disorder marked by deficient emotional responses, lack of empathy and poor behavioral controls, commonly resulting in persistent antisocial deviant and criminal behavior. In some cases, many years ago I got out of a work situation where the people in charge probably met all of these definitions at least that work. About two weeks after I got out of that situation, I was listening to john Bachelor, a radio talk show host out of new york city one night he was interviewing dr hare and noted psychiatrist and developer of the hairs list of psychopathic indicators. He listed some of the major attributes of psychopaths. And sure enough, those are often the types of people that I had to get involved with in my career, old school project managers and construction and environmental management. We're always rampantly psychopathic in my opinion. Going back and looking back 20 years later it was accepted, it was incentivized. Unlike today we have a better understanding today of these individuals and companies are better able to usually manage them, especially the larger ones. The question is, what's a good indicator of a psychopath? Here's a good one for you when there is a catastrophic injury loss or a fatality and the person says ship happens or it was just their time. They give what we used to call crocodile tears and then a week or two later we're back to business as usual. I recently heard a good one. I don't give a ship. If the person takes a header off the bridge, I need to get the job done on time and within budget. First of all, why do companies hire psychopaths? There's a lot of answers, personal affiliation, family members, any of those, but an easy answer is they get the job done often. The big producers and a company or organization are psychopaths, especially if a company is looking at short term profits. Often they leave the company or the project they're working on well before it ends or before negative consequences come to complete fruition. So your companies with high turnover rates may be a good environment for the psychopaths to flourish. And when I see a company with high turnaround, I know that there's usually an issue there some of the attributes that make them desirable during job interviews. They appear to be easygoing, friendly and easy to get along with. They have a superficial charm, basically all the positive traits that you're looking for. They seem to have because they're the master manipulators, why are they promoted in an organization? They're normally cool under pressure because they have very little empathy, They polished, They dress well, They have charm, they are able to make snap decisions, period. They don't worry about emotional consequences, are able to get done, get those decisions made. So the lack of empathy seems to coincide with some of these positive and I had to use their clothes attributes often. They know how to manipulate the system and bully people Sometimes without the person actually know that they're being bullied. See Our Previous Episode On Gaslighting in Episode eight. They create confusion to advance themselves. What do we call them? The problem, The reaction and the solution. They identify the problem, control the response and of course they have all the solutions. They are able to impress people, especially those in positions of power. So they're the ones who always make the meetings who always are visible that are there. They and they get to know everybody. They get to know the management while you're in the field, doing what you're doing in the field there in the office, doing what they do in the office, creating networks, partnerships and everything else. They're the ones that might might be a psycho. That's that's my experience where they where they exist, right? How do we identify them? Right. Here's some more attributes. Again, some of these are from dr hair, some of them or not, right? They have a high estimation of themselves, right? So one of the things is often and this is my experience, they're smarter than you and they let you know and they will always remind you. The implication is that you are not now you're able to be manipulated. You're put into a situation being manipulated, pathological lying where they're gonna lie over everything. We're not even talking to white lies. We're talking lying when they don't even need to lie. They're just lying. The lack of remorse or guilt for anything manipulative, this lack of empathy, rather emotionally, not mature. My favorite, the parasitic lifestyle. This is back from my political activism days. These individuals typically own nothing, have no credit, like you run a credit score on them. It's like 300, right? But you have multiple bankruptcies through and people go bankrupt all the time. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about multiple bankruptcies for not really valid reasons, right? They don't pay their income taxes or any other taxes, work off the books and for cash. All of those things are parasitic lifestyles and a lot of cases when it's taken to the extreme failure to accept responsibility for their own actions, right? That's number seven, they often manipulate situations that you should take the blame for their mistakes, so we're gonna blame somebody else. You're gonna blame the guy who's off that day, right? Again, go back to the whole thing with pushback that safety professionals get so Good one is you're on vacation. A problem arises. They can wait until you get back from vacation, but they call you on vacation to fix it and blame you because you're out of the office. And then when you come back in all of a sudden you have a mess on your hands and someone does that there. That's a pretty good indicator that what you're dealing with. This is the other thing. If you admit that you're at fault, nothing. So you won't look, he admitted default. Now it's deflecting blame away from them and they use that to manipulate you. So now you're in a situation where, Hey, you okay? Yeah, I could have done that a little bit better now. They use that as an anthem. They amplify it and that's used to manipulate you and make you look bad, make themselves look good. They're unable to set realistic long term goals. How do you identify this? If let's say you're a worker and this is your manager as a psychopath during your annual review or maybe some other appropriate times. Hey, where's this organization going? And if they don't have good long term goals that are even realistic, they have no way of getting there right. That might be an indicator that you have a problem here. Because managers often indicate to you that you should have long term goals in your short term goals. Well, guess what? The managers should also have that They should be able to communicate a vision for their organization. If they don't have that, that's a red flag and general irresponsibility are they're irresponsible and everything they do, they don't care. No work ethic, you name it, they just general irresponsibility. Now, we're into what we wanted to talk about. What are we gonna do about it, documenting things might help but realize that in documenting things that's a distraction from everything else you have to do. So if the C suite accepts, then there's very little that you can do about it. Alright. Very little. Some of the solutions are from Amy morin from an ink that I M C dot com article from april 2018. She has a couple of things on here, right? Number one, keep your emotions in check. If you're dealing with a person who lacks empathy, they're going to use that your empathy against you. So you might have to be a little bit, give up some of your empathy and be as cool as they are right? What Don't be intimidated. # two one of the ways that a psychopath controls people and situations is to intimidate you, You know? So they give you a uh a problem or what have you, right? And they intimidate you with it, you're going to do X, y and Z. They give you what we used to call a ship sandwich and force you to eat it. Just be careful. You don't do anything illegal because I tell you what if you trade pain for pain with these people when they have no empathy, it ain't gonna impact them. However you lose a bit of yourself. So trading pain for pain ain't gonna get you to where you need to be here and it's going to make you look bad, right? Don't buy into their stories, especially if they always paint themselves out to be the victim of things. What kind of stories are they showing? Hey, this is a story and this is how I overcame it and I'm gonna overcome it this way, right? That's if they're saying, well I was the victim and this guy did this and this guy did this to me, what was me? They're looking for you to give them sympathy. So then they could use it to manipulate you into this situation. Here's another one, turn the conversation back on them. Use their flaws against them. So ask questions they wanna, well how are we going to do this? How would you handle it? Well those are two questions, but you tried to turn it back on them in a polite professional way. The last thing and this is becoming more and more popular because of covid opt for online communication before an in person communication This way there's some type of a quote unquote paper trail with that. So what else can we do here? Right? You don't want to lose part of yourself and drive yourself crazy with these folks, right? So for if you're in human resources doesn't look at, hey look at this stuff, you can look up some professional resources that are illegal or maybe you can read out some of these personalities and see if they're gonna fit into your organization. If you don't hire them, you don't have to deal with them. However, you can't do anything illegal. I'm not advocating doing anything illegal or immoral or unethical for psychopathy to be a clinical diagnosis and needs to be addressed by a psychologist or psychiatrist. No. And my non professional experience as a psychologist, right? I think we all have a little bit of psychopathy in us. But when it becomes a problem, right, It has to be addressed. So 1 1 other parting point confronting these folks, you try to confront them up front professionally, ethically morally, legally upfront versus letting things fester and then you have an explosion because then at that point when you explode and unload on them, then they're the victim. They will play the victim card and now you're the aggressor and things again are going to be turned around on you. So, if you recognize these trends and you maybe you need to get counseling. But the other thing is if you're a victim of a psychopath, you need to really get some kind of help out there. So if you're a victim, right? Or suffering from any other emotional views there is help out there. Two sources out there in the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 802 738255 or mental health dot gov. For Safety Wars. This is jim proposal. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the host and its guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company. Examples of analysis discussed within this podcast are only examples. It should not be utilized in the real world as the only solution available as they are based only on very limited and dated. Open source information, assumptions made within this analysis are not reflective of the position of the company. No part of this podcast may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means mechanical, electronic recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the creator of the podcast. J. Allen.