I have been reading the Dolphin horror story of Incognito and Martin along with the rest of Miami. It got me thinking about the fact that we have all had to deal with workplace issues. When you have people in a closed environment for long hours, you have to be naïve to assume that it will always be sunshine and unicorns. In my 26 years of commercial real estate, I have seen and heard of some crazy incidents. The Wolves of Wall Street antics were not a stretch of my imagination in the least.
I have a pretty high threshold of tolerance. When I was with CBRE, a Fortune 500 company, they had us taking online diversity and harassment training about every 2-3 years. Although I passed, I was surprised at some things that I would tolerate but the company policies would not.
I have been fortunate that I never had any direct incidents – apparently I have a deep line drawn in the sand – however, I have been involved in several interventions. As a result, I strongly believe that we all need to speak up when we see bad behavior. Whether we are directly involved or not, we cannot reward bad behavior with silence. Trust me, I am no prude. I swear like a sailor at times, enjoy a great smutty joke or sexual innuendo, but I also realize you need to know your audience.
One of my managers once told me that his threshold was how would he feel if it was his daughter. That’s a good start, but we can do better. So I call upon all of us to speak up in that moment. It takes courage, but trust me, once you do it, you will not be alone and you will sleep better.
