Managing the Kanye West and Joe Wilson in Your Workplace

September seemed like the month where we should have been sending some adults back to school—obedience school. We had Kanye West, the self-appointed arbiter of good music, snatching microphones out of MTV music award winners’ hands. We had Joe Wilson, today’s most popular Congressman from South Carolina, who broke the rules of decorum in the House of Representatives to call President Obama a liar. These outrageous acts of incivility are not confined to rappers and politicians.

From the cashier who talks on her cellular telephone while ringing up your store purchases to the jerk who cut you off in traffic, there all sorts of tell-tale signs that rudeness is becoming the norm in our society. But what happens when we’re trapped in a workplace, for eight or more hours a day, with people who constantly ignore (or don’t care about) the boundaries of impropriety?

From annoying gadflies to bully bosses, today’s workplace is a breeding ground for the rude and the thoughtless. Earlier in my career, I had the displeasure of working with a bully manager. I remember the pit in my stomach I felt everyday I went to work. I don’t know what sadistic school of management he attended, but his philosophies included having an “us” versus “them” approach, yelling, and taking advantage of every opportunity to belittle and embarrass his staff.

While we may laugh at Kanye and Joe’s antics, bad behavior in the workplace can be toxic and expensive. According to the Corporate Leavers: The Cost of Employee Turnover Due Solely to Unfairness in the Workplace study conducted by the Level Playing Field Institute, unfairness costs U.S. employers $64 billion on an annual basis –a price tag nearly equivalent to the 2006 combined revenues of Google, Goldman Sachs, Starbucks and Amazon or the gross domestic product of the 55th wealthiest country in the world. Much of that $64 million price tag represents the costs of losing valued employees, training new employees and sometimes even lawsuits. Remember that bully boss I mentioned? Well, he lost 85% of his staff within three years.

And then we have tragic situations where workplace incivility leads to workplace violence. Earlier this month, the country was gripped by the story of a promising Yale Medical School student who was allegedly strangled by a controlling lab technician.

There needs to be a return to direct rather than passive management. During the 1980’s we moved away from micro-managing, but now the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that managers forgot how to manage. They don’t share their workplace expectations; they don’t get involved in workplace disputes. Managers need to not only correct incivility in the workplace, but they need to also make every effort to detect it. If Kanye or Joe were my employees, I would have reprimanded them, counseled them, documented the incidents, and given a strong warning. I guarantee that by taking a no nonsense approach, they would think twice about engaging in misconduct and having another run in with me.