The Recent Travails of the Sierra Club. II. The Problem of Bullying in the Workplace

Here are more thoughts on the Sierra Club story in the New York Times. Forrest Fleischmann raised some interesting points on Bluesky.

Groups of Employees Bullying Others. The guise is almost always “we are the good guys as defined by us” but the undercurrent is a power play.. sort of a “Lord of the Flies” at work. To these kinds of the folks, the ends always justify the means. If you don’t agree with their views of goodness, by definition you are a bad person and should leave the organization. But these dynamics are much broader than just the Sierra Club, in fact, ironically, one of the most widely known stories is from the Times itself.

Remember the “Tom Cotton’s op-ed episode” which led to the resignation of the op-ed page editor (sidenote: Bennett is the brother of Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado)? Bennett wrote about his experience (caution, this piece is depressing) in an article in the Economist.

My fellow editorial and commercial leaders were well aware of how the culture of the institution had changed. As delighted as they were by the Times’s digital transformation they were not blind to the ideological change that came with it. They were unhappy with the bullying and group-think; we often discussed such cultural problems in the weekly meetings of the executive committee, composed of the top editorial and business leaders, including the publisher. Inevitably, these bitch sessions would end with someone saying a version of: “Well, at some point we have to tell them this is what we believe in as a newspaper, and if they don’t like it they should work somewhere else.” It took me a couple of years to realise that this moment was never going to come.

Which is a bit ironic, I think, given that here is the Times calling out what sounds like the same behavior in another organization  (the Sierra Club) including interviews with those bullied. If you remember Bari Weiss’s letter after she left the very same Times..

What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.

It reminds me of Carl Jung’s view of projection, only on an organizational level

“Projection is one of the commonest psychic phenomena…Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour, and we treat him accordingly.” (Carl Jung, Archaic Man)

On the other hand, maybe the piece was intended as an internal warning of what can go wrong in a workplace with a bullying culture.

In fact, if we go to Times publisher Sulzberger’s Columbia Journalism Review’s piece (long, and worth reading but not pay-walled)

As a result, minority groups often carry deep skepticism that the same institutions and institutional values that badly served them in the past can now do better and actually capture the breadth of the world they live in. The conversation about those failures has left lingering uncertainty inside newsrooms as to whether those failures should be blamed on lack of representation or on outmoded values that may no longer fit the moment.

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Many journalists from underrepresented groups have stories about being recruited in part because of the different perspectives they bring but, once on board, being told to put aside those perspectives to avoid being dismissed as biased.

Sulzberger’s basic point is that reporters shouldn’t throw out the baby (objectivity) with the bathwater (white male bias) as many argue they should.  Similarly, perhaps the employees of the Sierra Club should focus on the environment, as the Times so clearly points out in its reporting.

It seems like one way of framing both the Times and the Sierra Club experience is a power struggle between the old guard, who wanted diverse-appearing people to think like them, and the new folks, who want to take the old organization in a new directions.  The new directions may or may not be financially supportable.

But back to the bullying. I don’t remember that kind of bullying at the Forest Service.. was that because I happened to work in healthier places? Or because I left before bullying became popular in workplaces for cultural or other reasons? Or because FS first line supervisors somehow managed to shut it down? Or maybe the FS has its own variants of bullying? I’m interested in others’ experiences.