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century to create monsters that leave a path of people that have been psychologically, physically and emotionally scarred. This process sends ripples into the general community and makes a harsher and uncaring world.

Can bullying be cured? It is certainly not cured by bullying the bully. You can’t: Bully it forward.

Offering support to those who are being mistreated is important to improve the individual’s chances of retaining their strength and gaining a level of resilience. Resilience is defined as the capacity to rebound from adversity, stronger and more resourceful (Stewart and O'Donnell, 2007).

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To survive mistreatment at work you need to know your enemy, know yourself and recognise the issue. It is also crucial not to keep your mistreatment a secret. Silence

indicates complicit acceptance and accommodates the bully (Debowski (2009). Keeping the silence is like domestic violence and sexual abuse. Keeping silent allows for mistreatment to flourish.

It is important to build workplaces with heart. Workplaces with heart put the person first over performance. Where difference is encouraged and valued. Where mistreatment in not allowed to flourish. Where there are repercussions for human rights violations that do not entail further human rights violations. The public service should be the place for this.

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Chapter Six - The Scourge of Professionalism

Unpacking the Processional facade that leads to disenfranchisement

This chapter deals with the notion that professionalism as it is practised in the public service allows workers to be mistreated, supervisors to act in inhumane ways and the system to ignore and perpetrate these behaviours. Public service managers need to move away from being ‘professional’ to being humane.

Hayward’s (1917) work, as quoted in Caiden (1991) looks at the criticisms of

professionalism. These include professionalism as self seeking where behaviours are sought to acquire power and privilege. Also where professionalism seeks to abuse power, by being unchivalrous, tyrannical or cruel towards the weak in its care.

The problems for public service ethics begin with the evolution of professionalism in a culture of technical rationality (Adams and Balfour, 2005). In the public service there is a social construction of ‘reality’ that elevates rationality and professionalism as dominant norms that in turn justify injurious actions (Ghere, 2006). Typically the abstract principles such as respect for people, beneficence and justice are downplayed in favour of what is presumed to be rational and autonomous, proceeding rigorously from some point assumed to be true. In an environment based on this notion of professionalism, ethical behaviour becomes mere window dressing. Modern professionalism is characterised by moral vacuity (Adams and Balfour, 2004).

Technical and rational solutions, the cornerstones of professionalism cannot solve the messy and complex issues that go with managing people. Rationality and professionalism should be considered as especially suspect values that frequently cause injury to workers and the public (Ghere, 2006).

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This phenomenon is apparent in the stories of my participants. Most people who have been a public servant have worked with people who would claim they were professional.

Sometimes these professionals are characterised by a lack of feelings, lack of compassion and lack of empathy; like a robot. Only the work matters, not the people. Only the

perception of their supervisor matters. Always looking up. In recent years these

professionals have been to ‘Emotional Intelligence’ workshops. Surely understanding and acknowledging people’s emotions are human qualities that do not need a workshop to determine their worth. There have been many sins committed in the name of

professionalism. Professionalism should not give people the protection to bully, intimidate, to micromanage or to crush. Professionalism should not equate to uncaring, distant and emotional bankrupt people.

Most of the participants in my study had issues with their supervisors, ranging from cruel behaviour to illegal behaviour. There was a mismatch of what would be considered humane and kind treatment with the behaviour of public service managers in a professional setting. All public service employees should receive fair and compassionate treatment. This however is not a realistic expectation if you work in the public service. In fact it is the exception rather than the rule. There is a cumulative effect of workplace mistreatment to the

individual. You drag your baggage from one job to another. Professionals do not necessarily protect and promote the well-being of humans (Adams and Balfour, 2004).

There is a difference between professionalism and ethical behaviour. Many of the managers did not act in a beneficent way to people in their care. Fair treatment of employees should be the cornerstone of employee relations. Fair treatment is not in the rhetoric of

professional literature. Ethical behaviour is not the same as professional behaviour. Public service managers need to move away from being professional to being humane.

Bureaupathologies aim to take the personal out of the work paradigm. When we don’t view our colleagues, those who supervise us and those we supervise, as real people, with

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humanity and kindness, all myriad of sins can be perpetrated. Bureaupathologies and professionalism have been combined in this 21st century to create monsters that leave a path of people that have been psychologically, physically and emotionally scarred. This process sends ripples into the general community and makes a harsher and uncaring world. Or is it the harsh and uncaring world that creates the monsters in the first place? It is the nature verses nurture conundrum.

It is hard to find research that criticises professionalism because it is taken as a given that professional is the way to behave. Also professionalism means that you have a degree of control over your job. In the public service, this control is a myth. Very few public servants have control over their own labour. Even public servants who work in the field do not have this control.

Nicole’s discussion of this follows.

I often wonder about young people. You get told you are going to be doing all this important stuff and that you are going to be a professional person effectively. And you are going to be making decisions, independently. That’s how I would define professional.

Autonomous?

Yes, a degree of autonomy and the ability to make a decision about areas of your own expertise. So that’s what you get told, and the training I did was different than the training today. However, it was; you go in and they say ‘you are the best trained people in the world’.

The reality of that is, after a while, once you’re gone past that period of learning skills, and coping with the job in terms of physically doing it, once you start to broaden your focus, you see the reality of things around you. And then you can see how things work in terms of the organisation. Then you realise you are doing a lot of repetitive stuff and you are working hours that are really s..t.

And you essentially have no control over your own time. So everyone else makes decisions for you and you have very little control.

133 So you go from having this perception that you are a professional, you have

control over your own time and then you reach a point when you think no, I have no control over my time and really no control over the decisions I make. I’m just really doing a robot’s job.

In my research there were many examples of mistreatment by managers. Talk around supervisors’ behaviour was a major theme. Lily sees her industrial experiences as being similar to those of family violence victims.

This boss was so difficult. It was like being in a domestic abusive relationship. We could tell by the sounds of her steps what mood she was in. Like some beaten wife waiting to see what mood her abuser was in. I am so against people bringing their moods to work. I don’t think people should have to put up with their bosses’ moods. It’s the work place, you can’t behave badly and then have make up sex or love like in an intimate relationship.

I think in the workplace you need a higher code. I’m not saying that you have to be a robot. I think empathy and kindness are very important qualities for a manager but moody is so self-indulgent and destructive in the work environment.

When public servants describe their relationship with their supervisor as similar to domestic violence then there are certainly issues. Domestic violence is illegal and there are refuges for people who are victims of domestic violence. There is no such support network for public servants who have been victims of industrial and psychological violence at the workplace. There is little recognition of their pain and suffering. Like in bygone eras when domestic violence was a secret and what happened in families was meant to stay private. The abuse dished out under the guise of professionalism is silenced with the victims being labelled as lazy or incompetent or stupid or difficult. When high ranking public servants act in such a way there needs to be an examination of the culture that allows it to happen.

The following is an excerpt from Lily’s interview which describes the inhumane treatment at the hands of a consummate ‘professional’.

134 My new boss was a young guy. He rang and tried to have meetings with me

but the thought of going back to work would send me into a panic attack. This guy had no empathy. No ‘emotional intelligence’. So the last conversation he rang me up and started yelling at me and telling me I would report to work tomorrow. And I said ‘I will kill myself’. This was not an idle threat. I was suicidal. Death for me was a better option than turning up to work on Monday morning. And this is etched on my mind forever. He said ‘That’s neither here nor there. You will turn up to work on Monday’.

What sort of management school did he go to? What sort of human being would say that? He was awarded the Young Professional of the Year, a year after that incident.

I would expect any humane person confronted with a suicidal person would not respond with ‘That’s neither here nor there’. What contempt this manager had for my participant. Only the policy mattered, only the b.m on the seat. This was a manager. The organisation had put this person in charge of personnel. For him there would be no personal in personnel.

The public service puts pressure on individuals, who want to receive promotion, to act in ways that corrupt their interaction with fellow humans. They put their professional hat on and take off their humane hats. In the public service people’s performance encapsulates their worth and value. The person who determines this value has extraordinary power. Even though it is couched in terms of objectivity and hyper-rationality, determining one’s worth through performance is a highly value-laden activity, which advantages particular groups and individuals and devalues others.

The following discussion with Lyn shows how destructive it is to the individual when their skills are not valued and their commitment to the organisation is discounted.

135 I don’t understand. When I went into the Department, I totally believed in the

Department as a way for people to move forward. Be mobile. Seeing it’s such a huge organisation there must be heaps of things to achieve and do. But they don’t want me to do anything. They don’t want me to do anything good. Or produce anything good. I mean, the more I keep my head down, the more they think it’s better.

I just feel that they don’t want. I’ve always felt that they didn’t value my skills and but now I know they just don’t want them.

I think it’s very clear that they don’t want anything that I have to give them. Because we are sitting there ready to give it to them. But they don’t want it. My main grievance at the moment is that I can’t get engaged.

I trusted the system. It’s just so sad. It’s such a waste of resources. Personally, my psychology may be a bit weaker, I mean I cry and cry.

But such a waste of goodwill and investment. We are so short on resources. But they are wasted and there is so much we could do for them. They don’t let you in.

You cannot judge the worth of a person based on their public service performance. In the institutional setting there must be a conscious effort by public servants not to be seduced by technical rationality but rather operate in the full knowledge that people’s personalities are not fixed but ever changing and reinvented. There needs to be a quest in the public service to recognise and understand that the public service is ideologically complex and able to accommodate a range of people and ways of knowing and doing (Quicke, 2000).