Professional Personal Issues

We need a new category to describe the way business is conducted at my worksite: professional personal issues. This term will be used to describe those individuals who make a career of inflicting their personal issues into the workplace, as if they are an appropriate part of the professional community's landscape.

It seems that some people cannot understand the concept of leave your personal issues at home! In the most recent incident, the champion of victimology has taken her case to the classroom, engaging her students in the sensitive details, crying to win sympathy, and then gloating when enraged students go to opponent’s classroom and make accusations about her that are not founded in reality.

The person is in a position of power, emotionally fragile, and a life-long recovering alcoholic who faithfully attends meetings 2 decades after her last drink. Her job is stressful; her position is stressful; her lifestyle is stressful—so she dumps her personal issues onto the shoulders of anyone who crosses her path, the proverbially wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A professional query often generates a hysterical response geared around the concept that a question is a veiled personal attack. A personal comment is met with hostility and suspicion, as if the morning greeter has a hidden agenda. A direct question asked in a meeting is counterattacked with a protective screen of accusation that thwarts the most ardent seeker of information.

The result is a totally dysfunctional situation characterized by hostility, isolation, and total withdrawal, which leaves the person in the power position free to continue the reign of terror.

Because the site administrator is a totally reactive, rather than a proactive leader and brought this individual into his inner circle, he fights all her battles, both real and imaginary. It does not matter how wrong his sycophant is, he supports her and refuses, yes, refuses, to listen to anything negative about her! Several people have gone to him recently, as the inappropriate behaviors escalate by the end of the school year, and he has given them a tongue-lashing and sent them on their merry way with the warning not to come to him with “gossip” about his chosen one.

The most recent clash of the day has so blurred the boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate personal and professional conduct that yesterday, a student came into a teacher’s classroom and openly dissed the teacher for making the power person “cry” in front of her students!

Dr. Phil would ask, "How's that working for you?"

When situations go unchecked and people who are mentally not healthy are left to wreak their havoc with impunity, we all pay the price, and it’s a taking its toll.

There is no resolution to this kind of situation because it’s personal, not professional. As long as anyone is allowed to make their personal issues part of the workplace landscape, there is no way to handle the consequences short of firing/transferring the individuals—and dumping their personal issues on a new worksite.

21 days and counting