108: Navigating Workplace Challenges with Birgit Pohl

Can compassionate leadership genuinely transform workplace culture, particularly in the high-pressure environment of tech? 

Join us as we explore this question with Birgit Pohl, a seasoned leadership coach and engineering leader. Birgit shares her personal journey through unexpected career transitions, illuminating how embracing change can lead to more fulfilling leadership roles. She shares her experiences with workplace bullying, giving us insight into the emotional and psychological hurdles faced by women in male-dominated industries. 

We talk about the intricate dynamics of workplace bullying, examining how it can become a political game that disrupts direct communication and fair feedback, and the complexities surrounding performance reviews.

To counteract these challenges, Birgit emphasizes the necessity of crafting a workplace culture anchored in kindness, respect, and transparency. Her insights and practical strategies offer a roadmap to cultivating a healthier, more inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive.

Birgit Pohl is a leadership coach and engineering leader, who coaches people and trains organizations in creating high-performing teams through culture. In her role as a coach, she helps leaders and engineers who want to become leaders understand the human-side of leadership and how to utilize it to create teams that thrive and perform.

You can learn more about Birgit on her website and can connect with her on LinkedIn.

Go to https://betterhelp.com/resilience or click Notes on Resilience during sign up for 10% off your first month of therapy with my sponsor BetterHelp.

Chapters

• 1:14 Compassionate Leadership and Workplace Bullying
• 9:49 Establishing Workplace Culture to Prevent Bullying

Transcript

Birgit Pohl: 1:15

I value the face-to-face conversation, especially, especially when there's conflict, when there's some sort of like. I don't like this person because what I like to achieve within a person who has an inside conflict with someone else is to make the person aware that these emotions are there.

Manya Chylinski: 1:39

Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience is to make the person aware that these emotions are there. Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, manya Chilinski, and my guest today is Birgit Pohl. She's a leadership coach and an engineering leader. She coaches people and trains organizations in creating high-performance teams. We talked about compassion and leadership through the lens of bullying in the workplace. You're going to find her perspective really interesting. Thanks for listening. Hi, birgit. I'm so excited that we are going to be talking today. Before we dive into the topic at hand, I would like to know what's one thing that you have done in your life that you never thought you would do.

Birgit Pohl: 2:27

Thank, you for being here first, manja, that's a really interesting question. I started out as a graphic designer and I thought this is something that I really want to do. I really fought going into this direction and then, once I had the certification for this profession, which is a full education, I thought after a couple of while I need to do something else. I didn't think of that, of changing career, but I did. And then I thought of where should I go, and thought about it could be economy. It could be mathematics, because I went into higher education. It could also be computer science. I studied for a couple of years. I didn't finish it because I found myself being a software developer already. I achieved my goal of becoming a software developer without the bachelor's degree, and then the journey didn't end it, so it still changed. The only stuff that I thought was becoming a graphic designer, and then I thought I didn't think of becoming a software engineer, and then I didn't think of becoming an engineering manager, like a boss of someone, a leader.

Manya Chylinski: 3:54

But I did so. You're living the life you never thought you would do, exactly. That is quite interesting. That is interesting and it leads us into our topic today, where the theme this year is compassionate leadership and compassionate workplaces. And you think a lot about training people to be better managers and bullying in the workplace, and I guess let's just get started with what is workplace bullying? What does it look like?

Birgit Pohl: 4:31

I have experienced bullying even at school, so I'm very much sensitive to it. And I have experienced bullying also at the workplace the same things or the same themes. Like you would exclude someone from a group, you would try to punish them. At school it was like calling names, making some fun over someone. But at school it was like calling names, making some fun over someone, even being physical with someone right, hitting someone and stuff. And at work I come to experience almost the same.

Birgit Pohl: 5:10

For me, the physical stuff has been left out, but I know of some cases where physical harm has been done. Nonetheless, the psychological harm is also hard enough. So let's also talk about that. And this starts with just by being there, by being present, and someone doesn't like you being there. So imagine someone has lost their own position and you come in instead of them and this is an unfortunate event that actually also has happened to me. So it could be anyone. This was even a hard race to get into this position, because some other people who applied for the same position were as good as I am, maybe even better.

Birgit Pohl: 6:07

Who knows? Anyone could have been bullied in this position by the person who lost this position, so it could be men, women, whoever but also as a woman in tech, by my sheer presence as a woman, right, I have been bullied just by being a woman. And how does it look like? People constantly tell you that you have no knowledge, that you're completely wrong, and well, the only thing that might work or not is the looks. So they also focus on how you look right.

Birgit Pohl: 6:49

So, making comments about the look, I had that as well, knowing you, know yourself, because you track your work, you do the work and you do it well, that the work you're doing is actually pretty good. And I also had cases where I said like. So I had lots of complaints from men about my work not being done well, my thoughts and strategy not being done well. As a collaborative person as I am, I thought okay, we can work together, so maybe you have an idea how we can make this better. And in the end, these men didn't come up with a better idea or with an idea at all, but followed the strategy that I have suggested.

Manya Chylinski: 7:41

Yes, that's so frustrating. Of course, I can hear it in your voice and I can understand. I've experienced a few of these things that you're talking about and, as someone who works in tech, you are in a field that's traditionally male and still largely male and it feels like perhaps being a woman in tech is feels like a threat some not all of the men in those environments can I?

Birgit Pohl: 8:14

can I put this into context?

Birgit Pohl: 8:16

This, this uh comment that you had like the woman as a threat in the male-dominated world, especially in the tech field, is a quite interesting one, because tech has started out as being female dominated in the history, and that's quite interesting.

Birgit Pohl: 8:35

It's thought that it would be a low paying job, but at some point it was also quite interesting for men to come into this place and Somehow they made it in a way that it's only complicated and complex work and women, who back then were supposed to like they, were thought to be not as intelligent enough as men and, by the way, we have studies that tell otherwise, we are equally intelligent. They excluded the women more and more. It became a high-paying job and now that women are invited into the workforce again, we have this insecurity, this change and transition in the workforce, not only in tech but also in other fields. And this is also where we can come in and dive in the entire dynamics of how a man might feel and how a woman might feel when there is this type of dynamics like the change and transition inside an environment.

Manya Chylinski: 9:47

Right, absolutely. Now, as you are talking about bullying and what you have experienced, I'm thinking this is, I'm picturing in my mind. These are team members, people that you work with, be a team lead, or it could be a supervisor. So is that something that happens, that you're bullied by supervisors or managers, and what does that?

Birgit Pohl: 10:18

look like. That's a quite interesting point you say, because I myself, I have experienced bullying by team members as well as from managers, in a position as a team member, but also as a manager myself, but also as, like, the most executive person in the workplace. So when I start like, try to create a startup, being one of the founding members, you also get people who would like to be founding members as well, but they are not in the board basically. So from different angles and perspectives, you have this kind of dynamics, especially when people have some sort of idea about you that you shouldn't be there, so they want you to go away. Yes, exactly right. And how does it look like?

Birgit Pohl: 11:18

Let's, let's imagine, because this is how my life looks like from a middle management perspective yeah, it doesn't need to be me who's being bullied, it can also be someone else who's being bullied, but it can be me. They're really different perspective as a manager, how you tackle bullying and how you experience bullying. So bullying like when someone tries to bully me as their boss, then it's a political game. Their boss, then it's a political game. So it's like a game.

Birgit Pohl: 11:53

So what I have experienced is that when team member go to my boss, so I'm the team member's boss and the team member goes to my boss in order to talk about me, but in a bad way, especially when you try to be a compassionate leader. A bad way, especially when you try to be a compassionate leader as well as like being people focused leader. It's really hard to come to know when someone tells you that you are forcing people into something. This is where you kind of see the conflicts of like someone is making up things and even my bosses have figured out of. Like someone is making up things and even my bosses have figured out. Yes, this person is making up things because they admitted it, but still the game plays out as the gamer wanted to have it, and that's also a really interesting dynamic, wow.

Manya Chylinski: 12:49

As a manager yourself, or if you're thinking about the leaders in the company, folks who are above you on the career ladder. What can be done to build an environment and build a culture that discourages bullying?

Birgit Pohl: 13:06

That's a really important question. I find we talk about culture and the experience that I got, not only being a software engineer, but also before that and being a leader, a manager, people manager, and also experiencing how I am being played out as my boss was played out as well. The culture is very important. When we talk about culture, we also talk about values and the values they describe a certain framework of how we want to behave inside the company. So, for example, we have the word kindness and respect and transparency. These could be three values that one company could establish inside the organization and, of course, you have to have some sort of clarity of what it means and what it means in a certain context. When it comes to the team and collaboration, we need to describe what it means, like the kindness and the respect and transparency.

Birgit Pohl: 14:18

And when we see that someone, for example, is not going directly to like let's say, let's take me as an example To me in order to like, openly give feedback works directly to my boss in order to like talk about me this could mean that maybe the kindness, the respect and the transparency have a conflict with this action, and so the boss, like my boss in this situation could then say hey, we have a framework of how we want to behave. Let's take this, I take you with me and we have a direct face-to-face conversation with each other. And this is something that I establish, especially even if I don't have these values from a company. I value the face-to-face conversation, especially when there's conflict, when there's some sort of like. I don't like this person, because what I like to achieve within a person who has an inside conflict with someone else is to make the person aware that these emotions are there and so that this person can work it out themselves, because the person who is affected by these emotions is not their To work it out. Right, right.

Manya Chylinski: 15:53

Now you mentioned feedback, so you're talking about somebody jumping over you and complaining to your boss without talking with you directly, and that makes me think about the performance review mechanism and the 360 degree reviews. I had a circumstance in my corporate past where somebody did not say something to me and then, specifically at performance review time, said something that was months after the fact and there was no opportunity for me to respond to it, and they specifically said it as a way to derail my performance review, and it worked. It did exactly what they wanted it to do, and so I'm curious about that. Those performance reviews and the 360 degree getting feedback from one's colleagues. That seems like it could be very fraught.

Birgit Pohl: 16:57

The thing is, with the performance review, you might get some sort of transparency and knowledge, but I'm very much on your position, on your side, when it comes to these kind of situations. It is a game. It is being played as a game. It is being played as a game to kick after people and is being played as a game in order to like put yourself in a good position and, by the way, this is also something that I teach my team members, with a side note to like please play it with goodwill, because I still look into how you collaborate with each other.

Manya Chylinski: 17:39

Yes.

Birgit Pohl: 17:42

But generally entire mechanism and the frameworks behind it. I don't see how this can create really good results that you can trust. So for me it's a total gameplay and this is the short version and I so around that I create a framework for execution of like. We have a role description of what is the next promotional level where people could be promoted to and what is the current, and we measure the people on the current and see where the people meets expectation on the next level in order to be promoted, and I also tell them what are some examples that could give us some results to this and this. I like this measurement because it gives some facts, but then comes all the context of like the other people. There's 360 degree feedback. This is the most critical part where I see, okay, this is where the gameplay comes in and as a manager, I need to put this feedback also into the feedback cycle for the person and I know that this is just a view of someone else on this person. It might not be true, it might be super false Because especially and actually it doesn't matter if people are on-site or off-site they have some sort of collaboration, they have some sort of worldview and they have their own worldview and they measure the person against their own worldview, and so it is super difficult for me as a manager to create some sort of clarity as soon as the 360 degree opinions come in. It's not even data to me. I know it's nice ideographic data, but I'd rather focus on the will and the will of self-reflection of the person itself, especially with the framework that I'm creating and the clarity which means we have some data points measuring against the person, person success and the person success is.

Birgit Pohl: 20:06

Here are some examples. This is what I did. Example example, example yeah, if there's some sort of conflict, we measure behavior, which I find also quite I don't know if management should measure behavior, because it's some psychology thing. I think this is something that should be temporary. It should not be put in an evaluation, it should be put into the team should resolve this together. It's not the responsibility of one person, it's the responsibility of the team to get the understanding of each other and understanding of each other's worldviews and therefore resolving also the conflict, which means the minimum criteria I think a person should have is the openness in order to resolve this conflict. I think this is the one behavior that I would measure.

Manya Chylinski: 21:08

And that is one that can be difficult for folks, especially when it can be difficult to be open when somebody is giving you some constructive criticism. Birgit, as we get to the end of the podcast, what advice would you give managers or leaders to building a workplace that, as much as possible, prevents or minimizes bullying?

Birgit Pohl: 21:39

So the first thing is to establish these mentioned values. So first of all, I would say get the team together. So let's assume that the organization doesn't have values yet and they're hopefully still small enough to invite everyone to create these values together. And so when the team comes together and they all have the ability to talk about how we want to work together, they can define that into a meta layer and say okay, these are our four or three words that describe our values, and at this level, I don't think that they need to measure it. They just need to uphold themselves to these values as they grow into a scale up. Then it might make sense to also measure against these values as they grow and to a scale up. Then it might make sense to also measure against these values, because what also happens is that people forget about these values. They're hidden somewhere on a website that no one reads and they are not communicated well. So this is the second thing that I would recommend to keep recommending them, to keep upholding them to the values.

Manya Chylinski: 22:56

Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing your perspective and a little bit about your own experience, and then tell us a little bit more about what you do and how our listeners can reach you if they want to learn more.

Birgit Pohl: 23:10

I do leadership training and consulting, so consulting is especially for the companies and leadership training for the individual leader. And you can reach me on LinkedIn and also on my website, birgitpohl. com or leadersandmakers. com.

Manya Chylinski: 23:26

Wonderful and I will include links to that in the show notes to make it easy for anybody to find you. And Birgit, thank, make it easy for anybody to find you. And Birgit, thank you so much for being a guest today. This was such a great conversation.

Birgit Pohl: 23:37

Thank you very much for being here.

Manya Chylinski: 23:43

Thank you for listening. I'm Manya Chylinski. I help organizations analyze their culture, focusing on building environments where well-being and resilience can thrive.

Manya Chylinski: 23:54

Through this process, we identify areas for growth, develop strategies and create the necessary changes to build healthier, more supportive organizations. If you're ready to make a change, I'd love to connect. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe, rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or your listening platform of choice. It really helps others find us and if you want to continue the conversation, connect with me on LinkedIn or visit my website, www. manyachylinski. com. Thank you for being part of this journey with me.