Tales From the Trenches: Harassment Investigations (5/1/26)

A harassment allegation can make even experienced clinic leaders freeze, not because they don’t care, but because every move has consequences. We’ve handled these situations many times, and we break down what actually works when a sexual harassment complaint shows up in real life: how to act quickly without being reckless, how to be delicate without being vague, and how to protect your people while protecting your clinic.

We talk through the leadership basics that decide whether employees trust the process or assume the worst. That starts with relationships and psychological safety long before a complaint, then moves into the nuts and bolts of a workplace investigation: getting a clear verbal timeline, capturing details in your notes, reading back key points, and deciding when written statements help or hurt. We also cover witness interviews, what to do when evidence is limited, how video or documentation can change everything, and why confidentiality is essential to keep rumors and intimidation from contaminating what people say.

Finally, we dig into decision-making when you’re not 100% sure. We share practical rubrics that combine HR best practices, legal risk, organizational values, and the court of public opinion, plus what to say and do to prevent retaliation when the accused stays employed. If you lead a healthcare clinic and want a repeatable, fair approach to harassment allegations and documentation, this conversation will give you a clearer path forward. Subscribe, share with a fellow leader, and leave a review with the hardest people issue you’ve had to navigate.

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This episode is brought to you by Seasoned Advice HR, where I help eye care clinics to hire, retain, and manage better — helping you get Better Results Through People. Learn more at seasoned-advice.com. 

Contact me directly at mike@seasoned-advice.com 

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Transcript

Welcome And Show Focus

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Greetings and welcome to iCare Leadership Live. This is the podcast for iCare leaders who want to level up their leadership, create better cultures, and improve the financial results of their clinics. Now let's join the show.

Why Harassment Allegations Are Hard

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Hey everybody, we are back with another edition of Tales from the Trenches. And today's story is about a uncomfortable situation for everyone, which is when allegations of sexual harassment come up. This is something that I have dealt with countless times in my career. Some of the time it is something you just can't verify. Sometimes it is a valid allegation. And you need to you need to be able to figure out which it is. Because there's so many elements to this. It's about protecting the employee that's making the allegation. It's about protecting the person that is having the allegations directed at them. It's about protecting the clinic, making sure that you know you do your due diligence and that you build trust throughout the process, that everyone involved believes that you are doing things the right way. Even if you're being, even if an employee is being accused of harassment, um, we want them to believe that we're doing things the right way. We want them to have faith that this is being conducted fairly. And even if they disagree with the outcome, we can still take measures to help them see that we are doing what we are supposed to do as an employer. And we certainly want to make sure that the person raising the complaint sees that. We want to make sure that any ancillary people involved, witnesses, character witness, event witness, things like that. And even people that are not associated with the allegation, we want them to realize that we take this seriously because they'll find out. You know, that this will get out, and if you sweep it under the rug, that will get out. If you attack it head on, that will get out. If you are overly aggressive and bull in a china shop, that could that will get out too. That you're just being ham-fisted and and roughshod. And so being delicate but accurate, swift but diligent are is really important. So I'm thinking of a specific situation here, but like I said, there's countless of them. You know, I had an employee that came to someone on my team with this allegation. And what happened in this situation was

Build Trust Before The Crisis

SPEAKER_00 3:05

the employee, the complainant, went to someone that she trusted. And she could have gone to a lot of other people, but she picked someone that she trusted. And this was this is important because it highlights the importance of creating trust. If you have an HR person, a lot of times that person is immediately in imbued with trust because they're HR. You assume that they're going to be impartial or that they have and they have some authority that and that they have the ear of the leader and that they understand um employee labor laws, that they understand employee experience, and that they have empathy and all that stuff. But beyond that, they need to know the employee bringing an issue needs to know that whoever they're bringing it to is going to do something. And that is only built with trust, you know, FaceTime, conversations. Um, that's the best way to build that. And in this particular case, the um the HR representative that they went to, the person complaining went to was someone that had built some of a relationship with this person, maybe more than me, just because of time. And so have trust. Be building trust. Maybe you don't have HR, but you can still build trust with your staff through conversations, through checkpoints, one-on-ones, appreciation, things like

Capture A Clear Verbal Complaint

SPEAKER_00 4:37

that. Next, it was really important to get a detailed um complaint from the person. What happened? When did it start? Who was there? Where did the events take place? What exactly did they say and do in explicit terms? Where were they standing? What did they say? What did they mean? What did you think they meant? All that stuff is important to establish from the beginning because what you don't want to have to do is is realize that when you went back to that person that you had some fact wrong, or you had missed something that was kind of important and it had led you down a wrong path because you didn't have the information. So you want to get as much information as possible, and I would write it down. I would write it down. I personally do not like to have complainants write a statement in all cases. Sometimes sometimes I will, if I feel like I'm just not getting clarity from them, then I will say, hey, can you just write down what happened? Because I feel like I need to pin them down. If I need to feel like I need to pin them down, then I will do that. But the problem with having someone write a statement sometimes is people have different skills with writing. Sometimes they skip details when they're writing. Sometimes they forget things, sometimes um they're just not comfortable putting it in writing because they would rather just tell you verbally. And I've been in situations where I was asked to get very detailed statements from people, and it's just it it just is not effective, in my opinion, to make someone hash every detail in a statement. I don't like it. I don't like it, and I don't think that's the right way to go. But you should write down what you're being told, and you should read back the major points about where, when, who, what, and all that stuff, make sure you have it correctly, and that's part of your investigation file. Because at the end of the day, you're the one making the decision, and you're gonna be making it based on what you were told, and you want to get those facts right, but you have to be you have to act based on what you were told, not based on necessarily what was just written. And so if you were told it, you know it. And so get those facts. And if you want to have them write something, that's fine. But it's really the verbal complaint that you need to get. Uh and in this situation, you know, we were able to do that, and and a lot of times when someone has a complaint, they they want to know, well, who's gonna find out, or how are you gonna deal with this? And the easiest, the best is when that person is like, look, I just wanted to stop. I don't care what you have to do. That's when you know this is serious, this is a serious situation. Um sometimes people will say, Well, I don't want anyone to know, don't do anything, I just wanted you to know. That's the worst situation. Because it makes you wonder, well, how serious is if you don't want me to do anything, how serious is this? Um and but at the same time, it can be very intimidating to make this kind of complaint. And so you have to be sympathetic to that. But at the end of the day, you still have to take action based on things that you know. So in this case, the person was very willing to say, Hey, I just I need you to deal with it. I don't I've tried dealing with it, but I just wasn't able to. From there, you've got to get you've got to get statements, you've got to get verbal statements from the witnesses and find out what they know.

Investigate Fast Without Rushing

SPEAKER_00 8:48

Sometimes your next step is is to meet with the person that's accused before you talk to witnesses. That can be a good next step. If it's a serious, serious allegation, then that is what I would do. I would talk to the person accused, and I probably would strongly consider suspending that person with pay because you don't want that person around and whispering in people's ears and stuff like that. Now, you know, in the modern era, they can be texting, calling, hey, what's going on? They can try to insert themselves into you know their co-workers' heads and try to let people know, hey, so-and-so is making an allegation against me. Or I don't know what's going on, but I just got suspended and start trying to intimidate people and all that. And that's why you need to, all throughout this whole process, you need to be letting people know that you know confidentiality is important, and don't talk about this, and don't try to figure out who said what, like, and don't do it. Because the the integrity of the process is really important. You're gonna talk to witnesses, you're gonna find out everything that you can find out, and leave no stone unturned because you never know when a conversation will take you in a certain direction that will help you realize you know what really happened. And you never really know 100%, but it's nice to get from 60% sure to 80% sure what happened. That's pretty nice, and sometimes just one conversation can can do that for you. Um, in this particular situation, we were fortunate that there were cameras in the in the business that we could refer to, and we were able to see some behavior that was really concerning, that really lined up with what was being alleged, and in and of itself, it it seemed to implicate very clearly you know that inappropriate behavior took place. You may not have video evidence. Um, if you can, it's good, but usually you won't, so you're gonna have to rely on the things that you're being told. Um, but I can't emphasize enough getting more information, you know, to get clarity. And at the end of the day, you're not gonna be a hundred percent sure. Uh, but you're gonna have to make a decision based on the things that you know. Um, and you can include things maybe that you've been told in the past, things that you've been told by witnesses, things the complainant said, um, documentation that has come up with this person before. And at the end of the day, you're just gonna have to make a decision. And sometimes what I imagine is if everyone in your local community knew the things that you knew, would they be mad at your business if you let this person stay? How would they feel? What would the the court of public opinion say? Another decision um tool that I use is what are what are our values here at this organization? Are we looking to just follow the law? Are we gonna define harassment and look it up in the in the law and say, well, you did harassment or you didn't harassment, didn't do harassment, or are we going to follow maybe more of a values decision rubric and say, you know what, I don't know exactly what happened, but there was some there was enough inappropriate things that I just don't want this person here, and I don't want to have that risk. That's a perfectly fair approach to take. The the reality is most people don't put themselves into situations where they could even come close to being alleged to have harassed someone, and so the fact that you have like some smoke involved is um is problematic. It's problematic. Um, but at the same time, you never want to rush to judgment. So,

Decisions, Values, Retaliation Warnings

SPEAKER_00 13:06

you know, in in this situation that we've been talking about here, fortunately that there was so much clarity around the evidence that that we that we made a confident decision to terminate the employee. And and you know, that's good. That's that we were lucky there that we had clarity. You don't always have that. And sometimes what you have to do is is go back to the complainant and say, look, I I can't definitively say what happened. I'm concerned about what you shared, and you have to kind of smooth that over with that person and let them know that you're still there, that you want to know if anything further happens, and you want to know if this person tries to retaliate against them, which is uh which is really bad, which we could terminate them for that as well. But we want to make sure that complainant knows that we're here for them, and even though maybe that person is still gonna be around, that we want to know if anything additional happens. So this is where you really have to build trust because they may not be getting the outcome that they're looking for and that they think is right. And you may and and maybe they the person did what was alleged, but you just could not establish that. And those are unfortunate, but building that trust back is a key step. It's also important to make sure if someone was alleged to have done harassment and is going to be staying in the organization, they have to know that retaliation is not acceptable, that you know, talking to people to find out what happened or what was said is completely inappropriate, also. And in fact, I I look at that almost just as bad or worse than the the original harassment because that person is trying to uh have a chilling effect on your ability to investigate her all harassment in the future, and that person is trying to inhibit your administrative duty to find out what has gone on and and what is going on, and that's a serious problem. So retaliation and all that stuff is

Documentation Help And Closing CTA

SPEAKER_00 15:21

not okay. So hopefully that that's helpful. And this, you know, in this case, we let the person go, but you know, there's always a path forward. You're not you you're not always going to be totally confident. It helps to have someone who has been through it before. I am available to help, you know, if you have these issues. That's one of the things that I do. Um, so get someone that's had some experience if you can. Uh create documentation. I and I think after the fact, document what took place and what you were told and how you handled it is important for your own. I would never give that type of file to an employee, but for your own files, I would do that. So this has been Tales from the Trenches here. We've been talking about harassment. Hopefully, this was useful to you. Uh, we certainly didn't cover every single detail and every nuance, but if you find yourself in this situation, hopefully you feel a little bit more empowered to handle that. Well, that brings this episode of iCare Leadership Live to a conclusion. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show on your podcast app and share it with someone who would value the content. I promise to bring you more guests and content to help make you a better iCare clinical leader. I also invite you to subscribe to my HR newsletter for iCare leaders. You can find information about that at seasoned advice.com. Now go out there and lead with confidence.