Meet a Chief Drama Slayer

Workplace investigations are supposed to reveal the truth, but most companies accidentally design a process that breeds silence, fear, and repeat drama. We’re joined by Patti Perez, a former employment lawyer turned HR leader and third-party investigator who has conducted thousands of workplace investigations and now trains the next generation to do the work with rigor and humanity. From quid pro quo harassment to messy breakups that spill into the office, Patti explains what these cases really look like when the door closes and the interviews begin.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome to Workplace Confessions Behind Closed Doors. I'm Elsa Barbie. And I'm Don Andrews. We have been friends since sixth grade. Somewhere between a car wash job, a few questionable boy choices, and 40 years of friendship, we became the kind of people who always want to know what was really going on, including at work.

SPEAKER_02 0:21

Don spent 25 years as an employment lawyer, digging into workplace drama from the inside out. I built a long career in the beauty industry as a brand educator with a few TV cameos sprinkled in for fun.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

We came up in very different industries, but we have the same passion. Meeting new people and asking how they got their jobs, what they love, what they can't stand, and what happens behind closed doors.

SPEAKER_02 0:45

Every episode, we talk to a new guest about their lived experience in the world of work. And because our guests stay anonymous, they can spill the truth without the fallout.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

We get into the choices they made, the tiny cruelties, the surprise kindnesses, and some of the moments that never make it into human resources reports.

From Gift Wrapping To Employment Law

SPEAKER_02 1:03

Equal Parts informative and titillating. This show serves up all the tea while honoring the incredible, complicated, often messy work people are doing across the industries and across the map. Welcome to Workplace Confessions Behind Closed Doors. Let's get into it. How did you get your start? More or less, what was your first paying job?

SPEAKER_00 1:25

Thank you so much to both of you for having me on as a guest. I'm thrilled to be here. I'm glad you clarified it because probably at least everyone in my age range, there were non-official jobs before the official paying job, lots of babysitting and those types of things. But my first paying jobs, I worked over called Montgomery Wards as a gift wrapper. I was hired during Christmas season and loved it. And by the way, I am still an amazing gift wrapper because I really learned some skills there.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Awesome. So tell us what you do now and then walk us through how you got from gift wrapping, best job ever, to what you do now.

Mexico City And Big-Firm HR

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Believe me, there were days when I was billing as a lawyer where I thought, if only I could just gift wrap, this would be the ideal life. So I took a very traditional path educationally. I went straight to college after high school, straight to law school after college. Had lots of jobs, but not anything in the real world. And so was pretty unprepared. I started out as a lawyer doing employment law. I loved the topic. I have always referred to it as workplace drama, which, given the name of my book, that that makes sense. And look, I'm Latina. I love cheese. I love all the stuff that goes on in the drama department. I just don't want to be in it. I just want to observe it. So I very accidentally, it was not strategic. I'm not going to pretend it was. Ended up kind of making some career switches that got me to the right place. I lived in Mexico City for a couple of years, and it was my first foray into the non-legal world. I worked at DC for a couple of years, and that was my entry into actual hands-on HR work. And I found out that giving advice as a lawyer is a lot easier than actually implementing things as the HR professionals. Telling someone to fire someone versus actually firing someone are two very different things. And it gave me a really unique perspective. So when I got back to San Diego, which is where I've spent most of my life, I opened up my own company because at the time I had a two-year-old. And invention is the mother of necessity, I think is the saying. I didn't want to work at a law firm anymore. I didn't want to take an executive position in HR because I had this little baby I wanted to spend time with, but I still wanted to work. So I opened up my first consulting company that really constitutes the bulk of my experience and probably will cover the majority of what we'll talk about today. Lots of training. I opened up the company during the time that California passed its mandatory harassment training law. So I did more training than I can remember, lots of consulting. I was appointed by a couple of governors in California to draft regulations on civil rights laws. And one of the projects that I took on was writing regulations on disability accommodation. So, for example, I did lots of consulting in that field. But the bulk of my practice was conducting workplace investigations. And I conducted thousands of them. And so as you can imagine, I have some wild stories, some that I will share with you today, some that you'd probably be banned by the podcast dogs if I actually gave you all the details. So I'll try to keep it as clean as I can. But I really found my groove doing that. I realized that some of the things that displeased me about being a lawyer were my best assets as an investigator. The fact that I wasn't super intimidating, although if you ask my husband, he'll tell you that I certainly can be. But generally speaking, I'm not. That was my absolute best asset as an investigator. People trusted me. I'm incredibly, incurably curious. And so that served me extremely well. I'm very genuine, I'm very authentic, and people just trusted me. And so they told me everything, sometimes more that I wanted to know. And I combined that with my analytical brain, and it ended up being the best of all worlds for me. And I did that for a long time, loved it, but it is exhausting work and very emotional work. And so after doing it for a long time, I decided to do what I thought was going to be my last pivot, which I thought would be going from having gone from litigator to workplace crisis manager to systemic change agent. And that's what I've been doing for the last few years. I did write this book called The Drama Free Workplace. And it's really a compilation of all I've learned throughout my career to help leaders primarily, certainly employees as well, but primarily leaders help them navigate how to keep their workplace culture drama-free, primarily from setting up systems and structures to allow for that. My husband and I moved to Rome, and that's Rome, Italy, not Rome, New York, not Rome, Georgia, Rome, Italy, two years ago. And I continue to work with clients on projects like I went from conducting investigations to training people on how to do them, doing training related to my book and my latest foray. I thought that I had found my last pivot, but apparently I get bored easily. I am in the process of applying for doctoral programs to do some academic research that kind of will bring together everything that I've done throughout my career. So, nerd that I am, that apparently is going to be the next pivot for me.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Would you just tell us a little bit more about what you were doing in Mexico City?

SPEAKER_00 6:35

Sure. So I worked for a project with the now defunct USAID program. It was actually, I worked for an independent company called the National Center for State Courts, but it was a contract that was paid for jointly by the State Department and USAID. It was a judicial education and exchange program with judges from primarily Mexico and the U.S., but also other international judges. Really, as a both cultural and legal exchange, the Mexico and U.S. relationship was especially important to us because there were so many. And being from San Diego, that sort of made it very convenient to help judges on both sides of the border resolve cross-border issues. So we put on conferences and basically just dealt with federal judges on the U.S. side and a variety of judges on the Mexico side.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

What kind of company were you working for in DC when you were working in HR?

Bias As A Young Latina Lawyer

SPEAKER_00 7:28

I worked for a huge law firm. It was a bit of a bait and switch. I did not, I had always stayed away from huge law firms. This was a, you would recognize the name if I told you. And when I was talking to a recruiter who was helping me get a job, I'd gotten some job offers to be an in-house counsel, but it required travel. And at the time my son was six months old, and that wasn't something I wanted to do. So she told me it was a company of a thousand people. And I thought, all right. When I showed up at the interview, it was a law firm that is based in New York and actually has tens of thousands of lawyers and employees with about a thousand employees in the DC office. So I was immediately turned off because it was a law firm that I would have never worked at as a lawyer. But the managing partner was fantastic. And he really wanted to hire somebody who was a lawyer by trade, because these were partners, particularly, that wouldn't have respected somebody who didn't have the same level of education as they did, but who also had this HR knowledge and ability to be able to make things more practical. So it was one of the best jobs I've ever had because I simultaneously served as the in-house counsel, having to tell partners things like that scantily clad girlfriend on your screensaver is probably not what we want to have people seeing when they walk into your office. But then also headed up the HR department and dealt with the budget, dealt with staff, and actually built the department from scratch because they had never had anybody in that position before.

SPEAKER_02 8:54

So I wanted to take a step back because a couple of things resonated with me. One, you're Latina. And two, you were very young when you became a lawyer. What kind of challenges can you tell us about that you faced, not only being that young, which is in itself probably some challenges, but then on top of that, the great layering of being Latina as well.

What The Job Gives And Takes

SPEAKER_00 9:18

My own sister, who probably is the president of the Patty Perez fan club and thinks I'm great, said to me at the time, I wouldn't hire you because you look like a little girl. So I had quite an uphill battle. Lots of stories about a deposition, having older men walk in, take a look at me, and you could tell by their face, think, oh, I've got this and this is going to be easy. And yes, it was oftentimes almost fun to be underestimated because they quickly learned that was their mistake and that they would do so at their own peril. It's also exhausting to have to do it all the time. And probably the story that I can share with you that will explain it in a nutshell is that I happened to initially be in a field employment law, but I also did another type of law that required me to take, in my first year, probably about 200 depositions. So when I would show up at the law office to take a deposition, every single time, and every single time, I was mistaken for the court reporter. Being a court reporter is a wonderful career, but that's not what I was. Nobody looked at me and thought that I was a lawyer. So every single time I had to correct them and I did it politely. There are two times when I was not so polite about it. One was when it was a two-day deposition, and the same receptionist mistook me for the court reporter the second day. That one kind of pissed me off. And another time was when the court reporter was already there. So, girl, I was the backup court reporter, and that just is unacceptable. I should at least be a lead court reporter. I would share this at the time with my friends. There was a universal answer that everyone says, it's because you look so young. So I accepted that. But I decided, in fact, even back then to don't do my own research. So I went to people who were my exact same age and asked men, both white men and men of color, and then also asked my white girlfriends whether they got mistaken for the court reporter. Zero men got mistaken for the court reporter, no matter what their race. My white women friends did get mistaken on occasion, not a hundred percent of the time. And so I would say to people, absolutely, I don't deny that my age is probably the biggest factor. But to your point, layering on then my gender and layering on my ethnicity, there's just no denying that those were also causing this, these biases and these uh presumptions being made about me.

SPEAKER_01 11:42

So we always like to ask the what you like most and what you like least about what you're doing. But I'm wondering if you want to take that question in the role you're in now and then separately for when you were doing workplace investigations. Because it's so different.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

There's really almost nothing that I don't like about my job right now. I explore Rome by day and then lightly work by evening. I will say this: having your own business is harder than people think. And I have had lots of people call me to say the following, which I always find hilarious. You've had two businesses, they've both been successful. I am ready to start my own business because I want to work less. Tell me, you know, how you do that. Now, again, admittedly, I work less now, but I am nearly 35 years out of law school. When people would call me and ask me this question 20 years ago, I would laugh and say, if the reason that you want to have your own business is to work less, then you know, you're in for a big surprise. The admin part of the job, the admin part of having your own business has always been my least favorite. So the accounting, the taxes, the collections, the business development side, even though I like it and I'm good at it, just having that sort of pressure so that I would say the admin side, when I've had my own business, would be the biggest part of it. And that applies to a lesser extent now, but it's certainly still there. My favorite part of the job, and I actually think it's the same answer, both as an investigator and now, as an investigator, there is something very specific. There is nothing better than after an interview, whether I was talking to an emotional complainant, whether I was talking to an accused party who was very worried about this, no matter who it was. If at the end of the interview, which happened very often, that person said to me, Thank you so much because you heard me. Thank you so much because you really saw me, you really understood me. I had complainants who would say to me, honestly, I would withdraw my complaint. I just needed somebody to listen to me. They wouldn't even say believe me, just somebody who would actually listen to what I have to say. To me, that was gold. And similarly, talking to the clients that I would work with who would say to me, you've helped us take a really complex, messy human issue and really given us guidance on how to fix it. Those to me were my favorite moments.

Choosing A North Star In Work

SPEAKER_02 14:03

So if somebody was going to quote unquote apply for a position that you are currently holding, what would be the job title they would be looking for?

SPEAKER_00 14:11

The number one thing that I think you need to have if you want to somehow emulate the things that I've done is to have your priorities in order and to always have a North Star, whether it is your values. In my case, it was actually people. I had a conversation when I was in law school. So before I got married, before I had kids, before I even started my professional work, with an attorney who had just left a big firm and had started her own firm. I was a partner at a law firm, so quite a bit older than me, and it just had a baby. And she said something to me that I'm sure the two of you had heard a lot, which was I asked her how she was doing, how motherhood was. And she said, When I'm at work, I feel like a mediocre mom. When I'm at home, I feel like a mediocre lawyer or partner. And it, I'm sure she doesn't remember saying this to me. It literally impacted the rest of my life and the way that I looked at my career. Because I thought to myself, if my tombstone says mediocre lawyer, eh, whatever. But if it says mediocre mom, it did not fulfill my role. And I expanded that. If it said mediocre daughter, if it's a mediocre wife, if it said mediocre sister, if it's a mediocre friend, those are so much more important for me. And I actually wrote for my 50th birthday a blog post that I called Leaning In con Sabor, because when I read that book, although there were parts that resonated with me, many didn't, because there was, I think, a Latina flavor that was missing. And one of them was when Cheryl Sandberg writes about telling her secretary to lie and put on her calendar fake appointments so that she could spend time with her kids. I was the complete opposite. Because of this woman, my priorities were so straight and solid. And I was very vocal about it with everyone. So I would yell in my loudest voice when I was a partner at a law firm. I'm going to my son's baseball game, and you may not call me during that time, or you can't, but I won't answer. My mom is ill. I'm taking time off, and that's it. There's nothing that I'm going to do during that time. And what I find most interesting is that not only did it not hinder my professional success, it enhanced it because I was never confused. I always knew what my priorities were. So as much as that may seem like it doesn't link to the work, that's actually what I would say is that the job description would be making sure you know who you are, whose you are, and who is the most important to you.

SPEAKER_02 16:30

How do you think it would be different if you didn't have children?

SPEAKER_00 16:33

Like I said, my my priorities were really centered on family and people I care about. And so I don't know that they would have been that different because my role as a sister, a wife, a friend were just as important to me. My role as a mom is certainly number one. I will tell you this: I have a friend who coined a phrase that I really like, and that is that many of your listeners are probably in the rush-hour traffic of life, taking care of small children or children who are still at home, working all the time, maybe even taking care of aging parents or relatives. And so really in the midst of the busiest time of life. So I'm going to answer your question by giving people some hope as somebody who's on the other side of that mountain, but still quite young and able to have a good time in life. It's amazing how I am an empty nester and have been so for several years. And those priorities are still there. My family is still the most important thing in my life. I just don't have to dedicate the same amount of time and the same amount of worry as I used to. And I just find myself now with the luxury of having time. I'm going to pursue doctoral studies because I've got the time to do it. And so I think what I would say to your listeners is enjoy what you have now, as stressful as it may be, but also enjoy every stage. Because I, one of the things that I see women in particular doing that I thankfully didn't, and I just I feel sorry when they stress out about this, that they have so much anticipatory anxiety. Oh, my babies are babies. I want them to stay babies. I wish they were babies again, instead of enjoy the heck out of them when they're one. And then when they're five, they're so much fun. Then when they're preteens, they're hilarious. Then when they're teenagers, they start to become kind of your friends, even if they're annoying. Then they leave the house and you can actually give them wisdom at every stage. At least as a mom, I've been able to really adapt to what that changing relationship is. Certainly I've got nostalgia about the past, but without making it interfere with my ability to enjoy what I have now. Awesome.

SPEAKER_01 18:39

So Patty, I know on your LinkedIn profile you identify yourself as a chief drama slayer. You want to share with our audience why that is?

Wild Investigation Stories And Limits

SPEAKER_00 18:48

I have t-shirts if you too. I was looking for something that certainly was clever, but more importantly, was a one-liner that would know that would indicate what I do. And that has really been my goal is to help both employees and leader and leaders slay drama. And I'm very lucky that I come from a family. In fact, my book is dedicated to my mom and dad, who I call my original drama-free teachers. They had a drama-free marriage. They raised us in a drama-free household. And I've always had this desire to pass that blessing on to the people that I interact with personally and certainly the people that I work with.

SPEAKER_01 19:28

Yeah, definitely. It makes you a perfect guest for this podcast because that is what the whole podcast is about is workplace drama. We literally ask for it. All right. So you want my wildest story?

SPEAKER_00 19:38

Yeah. Very first investigation on what legally we call quid pro quo harassment. And so a boss is asking me for a sexual favor and saying if I don't give it to him, something bad will happen in work. And this woman is telling me about some facts, sharing with me some of the things that her boss did. And it was, by the way, spoiler alert, a very credible allegation. And so the story I'm about to share is actually just a little bit of an anomaly in that otherwise very credible story that this poor woman had to put up with. But at one point she said, another thing he asked me is he told me that he wanted to have a threesome. And I said, okay, tell me more about that. He said he really wanted to have us ask Susie and accounting to have a threesome with us. And I said, and what happened? She said, I said no, because Susie's ugly. That's fair. See what you did there? That's what I wanted to do. But say, I get it. How about yeah. And bring Joan in here. Bring Joan back in. Exactly. She, yeah. If it had been Carla, I'd like to be here talking. Exactly. She caught herself and was like, oh, so I'm married, and also that's against my morals, and I didn't want to do it. And and again, not only did I have to keep a straight face in terms of not laughing, but also reassure her that there was no moral judgment here. My job as an investigator was not to bring my morality into this. There was Patty Perez, the individual, who, for example, did and does look down on being unfaithful during marriage as an investigator. I don't care if you were having an affair, I care if it interfered in the workplace. And it was not just the immediate reaction that I couldn't necessarily completely convey, but also just making sure that I made it clear that it's okay. What you said is not going to in any way impact my analysis of the case. So I tell you that one because I think it gives people an insight into what I think is one of the hardest parts, truly, all joking aside, of being an investigator. The other one is a story about a woman who was claiming really, she was saying that she had a consensual affair with the CFO of the company, but that at some point he made, they broke it off and he made a comment about I'm gonna have to be making some decisions, some really hard decisions about layoffs. It sure would be great if you weren't on that list. And so she was claiming kind of. Something similar that he was saying, Well, either have sex with me or you'll be on that list. What ended up happening is I interviewed her, and man, she came in with a turtleneck and these this very prim and proper haircut and glasses. And it was very believable. I then went back because I always interviewed the person who was making the accusations first. I wanted to have a clear understanding. Then I went back and looked at more documents and talked to more people. And I found emails like the ones after they broke up. He broke it off with her, basically her begging him to get back together. My favorite one was, though, an email saying, Since we're back to having sex, I have taken the liberty of renting some recording equipment so that we could tape ourselves to having sex. I've got it all set up. Don't worry about it. Links to swinging websites where she was saying, just in case you're into this. So the, and this is going to lead to something that I think people would be surprised about. So it turns out that the woman's allegations were not credible. I re-interviewed her after I had all this information, not to, not as a gotcha thing, but just to make sure that I didn't miss anything. And it turns out that she was the way that she had presented herself initially was not necessarily right. And the reason I bring that up is that because something that I think people who don't do what I've done assume is that I encounter a lot of liars. I didn't. I am talking, I can count on one hand in the thousands of investigations that I did, people who outright lied to me. People did tell me their perspective of what happened, which may or may not match up with what the objective facts said, but lying was a whole different thing. And this was one of those very rare cases that was also had some kind of funny components to it. Love it.

SPEAKER_01 23:45

Patty, what's a myth or myths about workplace investigations or investigators that make you crazy?

SPEAKER_00 23:52

So I've shared one already, and that is that people really think that lying is a huge part of it. Kind of a corollary to that, which in my practice, I don't know if I talked to other investigators if this would be the case, is for me the myth of everything being he said, she said. I think people automatically assumed that 99% of my cases involved these credibility determinations and looking at the facts because people's one person said it was black and another person said it was white. My experience was much more nuanced than that. I would say that 75, maybe even 80% of my investigations had no factual disputes whatsoever. The frustration for me is that people reduce the idea of the work that I did into simplistic terms. And one of the things that I always talk about is that I think it's human nature. We think that as humans, we want to portray heroes and villains. And that's just not what I saw in my work. There were sometimes both heroes and villains, oftentimes there were neither. There were just human beings who, again, didn't necessarily disagree on what happened, but disagreed on whether it should have happened or whether it was an appropriate thing to happen in the workplace. No, that is such an important question. And actually, thank you for asking it too, because I want to make sure that I clarify the story that I shared earlier was because it had some funny components. It is not in any way, shape, or form representative of the vast majority of women that I spoke with. And I don't really know where this stereotype comes from, but I can't think of a single other example other than the one that I shared with you earlier, where a woman outright made something up. And even in the case that I shared with you, she didn't make things up. They really did have a consensual affair. By the way, the CFO was fired for engaging not only in a romantic relationship with a subordinate, but for making, he did make that statement. So even that, her case wasn't wholly made up out of whole cloth, nor was it completely unbelievable. She just went a little too far in terms of the types of things she was saying. But no, it was very rare for me.

SPEAKER_01 26:06

One follow, one other follow-up on the topic of myths, which is did you come across people who thought that because the companies that were involved in the investigations were paying you, meant that you were biased and you were always going to find in favor of the company or the company's representatives.

SPEAKER_00 26:24

On the occasions when I would have people say exactly that to me, why should I trust you? You're just being paid for by the company or your fee is being paid for by the company. I had a couple of sort of pithy answers. And the first thing I would say is, of course the company's paying me. It's the company who has the responsibility for ensuring that this gets resolved. Don't you think it would be unfair if this cost was split? I wouldn't expect you to have to pay for any of it. And so it's their responsibility to pay for it. So that was one that just reframed it into saying just because they're paying for it, actually, what it means is that they are being responsible and doing the right thing. The other thing I would say is this is what I do for a living. For me to actually develop a reputation as being biased, either way, either being more favorable to the person making the allegations or the accused would not only not be the right thing to do, it would destroy my entire work, which would then lead me into look, as we continue to talk, I think it'll become pretty obvious that I'm incredibly curious. And that as if I put on my lawyer hat for one second, it is so much better. And I am doing my job so much better when I uncover something now rather than trying to steer an investigation in a direction where the truth maybe will come out later, let's say in litigation. I'm not doing you any favors and I'm not doing the company any favors. So any one of those is the ones, you know, that I would employ. And I have to say I had 100% success. I never had anyone once I explained it to them. The last one that I would use sometimes is I would say, I'm here because I want to find out the truth. And the train has left the station. This investigation is going to go forward with or without your participation. Imagine how inadequate it will be if I don't actually have everything that I need from you. So I give you different ones because it really depended on who I was talking to and what I assessed was what they were really feeling in terms of the distrust. And in every instance, they would eventually say, okay, I'll talk to you.

Internal Versus External Investigators

SPEAKER_02 28:24

Okay. What would be the benefits, if there are any cons as well, of having a third-party investigative group coming into a company?

Training Investigators With A Human Lens

SPEAKER_00 28:32

Let me answer it this way: I truly see advantages and disadvantages to internal and external. What I always said about an internal investigator, the biggest advantage that the internal investigator had that I could never have was they understood the culture. They understood the politics and the ins and outs of working at the company. I certainly did my best to try to learn. I would actually ask those questions in interviews, tell me what the culture is like, tell me what the environment is like. I had a standard question, for example, that I asked if your work environment were a movie, what would it be rated? Would it be a G rating? Would it be an R rating? Would it be an NC17 rating? And it, so I did things to try to get a feel for that, but it's never going to replace somebody who is internal and really has an understanding of that. So that is a huge advantage. A disadvantage is, and I think this is part of the reason that these investigation units started, a huge disadvantage to an internal person is that they're often asked to wear two competing hats, one day to be the neutral investigator, and then the next day to be an executive coach for the head of that department, maybe the person who was accused. And I can give you other examples, but I think you get what I'm saying, that that having to go back and forth makes it really difficult to establish credibility in either role and trust in either role. From an external investigator's perspective, the biggest advantage, but I will say this caveat if the external investigator is good, because in answering Don's question, I gave you my standard answers for why I was able to really convince people that I was there because I wanted to get to the truth. Not every external investigator is that way. There are absolutely external investigators who, and I will say, not to throw my colleagues under the bus, but the people who still litigate and also serve as investigators, which by the way, is almost in every occasion, if there is a big investigation, if it's NBC, if it's the NFL, if it's they hire a lawyer, and it's almost always a person who also defends the company on other occasions. I don't care how good that investigator is. That is, that's a hard, a hard way to show that you're truly unbiased and that you don't have a conflict of interest in the work that you do. But assuming that you're a person who is able to do it externally, I think the advantage you bring, I already said the disadvantage is you don't necessarily have all the ins and outs, but the advantage is you really have no dog in the fight. It doesn't matter to me how this turns out. I just want to make sure that I don't care if the CEO gets mad at me because I found that he or she behaved inappropriately. It doesn't matter to me that this person is a high performer or considered a valuable employee. I'm just looking at the facts. I'm not tainted by this is the 20th time that this person has complained, complained. To me, this is the first time. And so I'm going to take everything they say at face value. So both of them have advantages and disadvantages. I think realistically, given the number of complaints that come across the desk of most companies, it's probably not feasible to have an external person do every single investigation. Having internal ones makes sense, but probably having a mix of the two would be the right call.

SPEAKER_02 31:50

What's one lesson that you've learned the hard way?

SPEAKER_00 31:53

What I do now is I train the next generation of workplace investigators. So rather than doing the investigations myself, I take all my wisdom and I've put together both live and an asynchronous online training that I call mastering workplace investigations, but I've also created a certificated certificate for it. And if you take my course and pass my test, you become a certified human-centered workplace investigator. And that truly is to me what sets me apart. Many investigators, and there's no problem with this, obviously I fit into this category as does Don, our former lawyers. Too many of them approach it with a legal mindset, approach it not just from a compliance perspective, but see investigations as a mini-lawsuit. I reject that. That just to me does not make any sense in terms of how to approach it. And so that was my differentiating factor when I was an investigator, but it is now my differentiating factor when I train people on how to investigate. And I call it equal parts art and science. There is definitely science to it. I have developed methodologies that are very science-based in terms of how to determine how to fix a problem, what disciplinary measures should be taken. It shouldn't just be gut instinct. I have a process that you can follow. But the art part is to have that curiosity, that open-mindedness, and rely not just on the human-centered, but process-informed. And so equal parts both.

SPEAKER_01 33:21

And so are you training the next generation on your concept of the salvage ability scale?

The Three Rs And Resolution Science

SPEAKER_00 33:28

So I'll actually explain to you very briefly the entire methodology. So what I have found, my entire process, my model is called the three Rs model. So you receive complaints, and that involves teaching people how to set up systems where there is psychological safety and comfort so that people actually feel comfortable lodging their concerns. Hopefully the earlier the better before it becomes full-blown drama. So it's not just the intake process, but actually the systems related to having a system that receives complaints. The second R is review, and that's the actual investigation. And I go into the art and science of interviewing, collecting additional evidence, doing the analysis, credibility determinations, how to actually determine findings, et cetera. The last step is resolution. And so you receive, you review, you resolve. And what I found, because one of the things that I didn't mention that I also did quite a bit of during my career was serve as an expert witness. And so I would get hired by parties, either the plaintiff or the defense, to come and testify during litigation, to testify on a number of employment-related issues, but primarily on the adequacy of an investigation. And so a big part of my job then was reviewing the investigation. Was it actually done correctly by an internal person? And one of the things that I found is there were sometimes problems on the receive. There were oftentimes problems with the way the investigation was conducted. But a lot of times the investigation was actually fine, but the way they resolved it was horrible. And it actually broke the entire system, the ecosystem that is circular. And if you mess up one part, then people are not going to trust the system. You lose legitimacy. And therefore the chances of people actually reporting concerns goes way down because they talk. If somebody feels like it wasn't resolved correctly, let's say you let somebody off with a slap on the wrist because they were an executive, that gets around and people now no longer trust the system. So the resolve part, I have again the art and the science, but the science is this methodology that's a four-part methodology. And the first one, which is meant to eliminate bias, is rate the behavior. What was done, what was said, irrespective of who this person is, just the behavior on a scale of one to 10 is what happened. This is obviously assuming that your investigation uncovered that some of the allegations were actually true. Was this horrible physical behavior that would rank, or was this really mild verbal behavior that honestly by itself was not that, was not that big of a deal, but still inappropriate and unprofessional or that immature a big category. What that does is it level sets because now the person knows that if it starts as a one, the person's not going to be fired. That's completely off the table. On the other hand, if you start the objective measurement nine, this better not end with a slap on the roof because you're starting already with the knowledge that this behavior is horrible and that level sets it. That's a nine, that's an eight, whether that person is a CEO or an intern. So step one is a subjective behavior rating. Step two is looking at other factors. So is this a person who's been with a company for 25 years and never been accused of one thing? Or is it a person who's been there for three months and has been accused of five things? Was a person told that this was offensive and asked to stop? That's not necessary in order for you to find that it was inappropriate, but it's a helpful metric for actually determining whether this person actually listened or continued to do harm, despite the fact that they knew that it was causing harm. Other factor that I look at. The third step is a salvageability rating. And the salvageability rating is something that I developed asking questions of the person accused of the behavior during investigation. And my question are things like now that you know what would you do differently? What you do did you learn from this experience? What are the things that this has taught you? And how will you take those lessons moving forward? And the answer is A from look, I've learned that even though what I said was never intended to do harm, that my words are powerful and I'm so sorry. And I want to figure out how to make amends. Now you also have to take into account whether this person is being genuine when they say that, assuming that they say something like that, versus the person who actually made me develop the salvageability rating, the person who said, Yeah, I learned a lot from this investigation. I learned that woman is hypersensitive and I should stay away from her. And so the third factor is, is there any contrition? And the reason that's important is what I found is that leaders, because oftentimes HR is not the one making the decision, it's usually the leader who's making the decision on consequences. It seemed like there were only three options. Either we give someone a written warning, we send them to training, we give them a final warning, or we fire them. There was not a lot of creativity. And the reason that salvageability rating becomes so important is if the person says, I accept no responsibility, this only happened because the other person is overly sensitive, don't send that person to training. It's not going to do any good. There has to be something else that is going to send the message across. So that's my methodology. Step four is you take all of that and now you rewrite the behavior. If the behavior started as a two, does that number go up or down depending on the other factors and the salvageability rating? And then from there, you can select a much more appropriate remedial measure.

SPEAKER_02 38:49

If you added magic wand and change one thing about your industry, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 38:53

Stop with the pithy, easy answers. Really address issues in a way like the way that I just addressed them. From what is the big picture that we're trying to accomplish? What we're trying to accomplish when we're fixing something that we have found wrong is the punishment commensurate with the crime? Does the punishment fit the crime? And are we implementing something that will keep this behavior from happening again? Those are the big picture goals. Then implement a methodology that actually gets you to that point.

Book Details And Closing Goodbye

SPEAKER_02 39:23

How when did your book come out and what is it called?

SPEAKER_00 39:26

And where can people find it? It came out in 2019. It's called the Drama Free Workplace. I have a copy. Hold on. Spring. I love it. Awesome. It can be found wherever books are sold, certainly through through Amazon. I think it's on Barnes and Noble. It's also on audiobook. And my book was selected to be an audiobook, but I had to audition in order to actually be the narrator. So I do narrate it and I do give people this pro tip. Although it was very fun to narrate the book, it's actually a lot of work. And one of the things you have to do is read more slowly than it than your natural cadence because you have to enunciate everything. And so the pro tip for anybody who goes out and reads the book on audible is put me on like 1.2 or 1.3 so that I sound like me.

SPEAKER_02 40:15

Skills from Montgomery Ward. What skills did you learn there that you've carried through?

SPEAKER_00 40:20

Actually, I'm not a traditionally artistic person. I can't even draw a stick figure. I always say that my creativity, the gift of creativity I was given is in problem solving. I'm a very creative problem solver. That said, there are little areas in which my creativity, my traditional creativity comes out. And I really appreciate the beauty of a well-wrapped gift.

SPEAKER_02 40:43

Case close. There's the goal. Thank you so much for today, Patty. And coming all the way from Rome, it's as if you're just down the street from us. I felt like we all got really close together and shared some great stories. I really appreciate you taking the time from your European life. And with that being said, you have officially joined the ranks of the brave and the bold. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 41:10

That's it for this week's confession. We've laughed, cringed, and maybe questioned our own career choices.

SPEAKER_02 41:17

Big thanks to our anonymous guests for keeping it real and reminding us that behind every job title is a story worth telling.

SPEAKER_01 41:24

If you've got a workplace confession of your own, we're all ears. Hit us up at our email address. And don't forget to subscribe, rate, and share. Your support helps us keep the secrets flowing. Until next time, keep your badge clipped, your coffee strong, and your stories wild. This is Workplace Confessions Behind Closed Doors.