Social Outliers in the Workplace

Identifying the impact of employee’s missing social skills on businesses and discovering new paths to resocialization

By J. Curtis Witt

My Gratitude:

For the irrepressible support of my wife, Pamela

&

To Mary Isitt, for constantly prodding me to write books and her editing help with this one.

Published by J. Curtis Witt

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or

modified in any form,

including photocopying, recording, or by any information

storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the author.

2017 California

www.OiBizAdvisor.com

Introduction

As images from natural disasters in locations around world are transmitted in real time through satellites into our televisions and web-browsers, it has exponentially increased our perception and understanding of physical devastation. While we are familiar with the visual results of floods, hurricanes, tornados and earthquakes, we are just now beginning to comprehend the consequences of a hidden, cultural devastation. Our communities have suffered the progressive loss of family structures that were at one time vital to the transference of cultural wisdom and indispensable for the development of healthy socialization. We have tried to put a positive spin on this loss by redefining what a family is and talking about the new normal in domestic life, but the readout of this loss is being felt and now measured as a restrictive force in the social development of the US population.

This unseen devastation has left our communities increasingly populated with individuals having underdeveloped or altogether missing social capabilities. The results are much greater than the presence of rude behavior or the absence of polite manners; the limitations of broken socialization are impacting their personal relationships, employment opportunities and their fit into civic community structures.

The focus of this book is on the way that this social deficiency is impacting workplace relationships and the social culture of businesses. At the same time that the expectation of meaningful connection among coworkers is rising, the occurrences of personal conflict, infighting and relational mistrust are weakening the culture of organizations and resulting in lower reported job satisfaction in both large and small businesses. My intention is to lead you through some of the research that defines and explains the causes of social dysfunction in the workplace and offer some recommendations on the way that HR managers, business leaders and supervisors could address and improve the socialization competencies of their employees.

I do have two items I would encourage you to keep in mind as we take up this path together. They are not warnings as much as they are reference points to help you stay oriented to the focus and purpose of the content through areas where you might get a bit disoriented.

Reference point #1

You should know that a segment of the research evidence on the subject of low socialization and anti-social behavior identifies issues like divorce and children born to single parents as a part of the environmental markers that define broken or at-risk families. Some will find this blanket categorization offensive and reject the conclusions based on the perception that it is biased by a traditional definition of family and serving a narrow moral agenda. While I’m not in agreement with propping up moral stereotypes, the data doesn’t lie. These factors, along with many others are influencing declining socialization skills, but please know that the intent of this book is not to decry the cause and lead a reform back to family structures of the good old days.

There is abundant evidence of abuse and dysfunction carefully concealed behind the smiles and other veneers of the traditional working father, stay-at-home mom, community active, church-going family. Additionally, many divorced, electively-single parents, and unmarried partners are exceptional parents and raise culturally and socially competent children.

The research evidence simply connects deficiencies in social abilities to the disruption, instability and lack of healthy modeling among those classified as broken families. My sole purpose for collecting and explaining the causal factors of this decline is to point out the need for resocialization strategies. Our traditional reliance on systems of consequences and rewards to elicit behavioral change from employees assumes that these social competencies exist, and are merely needing to be called out through correction or encouragement.

Expecting and pressuring a person to do something they have never learned, trusted in or valued is like sitting in my 8-year-old, 4-cylinder hybrid SUV and being disappointed that it doesn’t have any ability to accelerate from zero to sixty mph in less than 4 seconds. The expectation defies the design of the car. There’s not anything there, because there is not anything there.

People who have been raised in homes where communication, problem-solving, decision-making, self-management, empathy and conflict resolution skills were either absent or negatively modeled, develop into adulthood having found alternate behaviors that obtain the attention, belonging or power they seek. The social behaviors of employees that are causing disruption, drama and deadlocks are not simply the result of poor choices they are making today; they are working from gaps and deficiencies that were never addressed in their family of origin. There’s not anything there, because there is not anything there.

Reference Point #2

Much of the content for this condensed book came from my Master’s thesis so it has a strong academic feel and tone. I’ve tried to soften the language and make the concepts more accessible and enjoyable to read. You will have to determine how successful I was in doing that.

As I wrestled through what to edit and rephrase, I found myself reluctant to go too far in repackaging the message. My target audience is business leaders, HR managers and those who supervise people in organizations. In my understanding of the function of wisdom, it involves insight to see causal factors behind what is open and obvious and knowing what to do with what is seen. I want to communicate the shaping forces behind what we are experiencing as we employ people who have significant social deficiencies. I don’t want to water down the content so much that it cannot adequately convey the scope of the problem and go the distance needed in recommending solutions. I’ve been careful to not just add words and have kept the articulation of these ideas as concise as possible.

Some of the greatest benefits I’ve received from others is being given a way to look at and a vocabulary to describe things that I was experiencing, but could not accurately identify or define. My hope is that you will receive those benefits as you read on.

Chapter One
The Background of the Breakdown

In his study across five different ethnic cultures, Sherwood Lingenfelter emphasizes the importance of the household unit in the transmission of a family’s cultural content. Lingenfelter notes that,

“The household in every society provides a foundational, organizational unit for the survival of the individual members. As such, a society lives or dies on the basis of the success of the organization of its domestic units. The household serves not only for subsistence, but also as the means of transmitting the material and cultural inheritance of the group. Children learn from their parents the basic means of production and the cultural values and standards by which people organize their activities with one another”¹

Where adults in the 1950’s started withdrawing from social community through the way they designed their homes (no front porches with large enclosed backyard spaces instead), adults in the 1990’s withdrew into the sterile environment of electronic communication. Sociologists have seen this breakdown of social community coming for fifty years, but it has only been in the last 20 years that the connections between socialization deficiencies and the new norm of disrupted, broken families has come into view.

Robert Putnam in his book “Bowling Alone” describes the importance of social capital, using that term to describe cities or states “…whose residents trust other people, join organizations, volunteer, vote, and socialize with friends”. This social capital has been deteriorating at alarming rates across the nation. As more families are characterized by brokenness, their isolation from opportunities and environments holding high social capital are lost, leading to an enlarging socially deficient population. Putnam goes on to assert that, “Statistically, the correlation between high social capital and positive child development is as close to perfect as social scientists ever find in data analyses of this sort.” In presenting evidence of the negative effect, Putnam cites the research of Pediatrician Desmond K. Runyan who, after following a group of at-risk preschoolers for several years, found that 87% suffered behavior and emotional problems.²

One group of researchers coined the term “Risky families” and defined it as “…families characterized by conflict and aggression and by relationships that are cold, unsupportive and neglectful”. They concluded that these conditions create the high probability that children raised in these environments will exhibit psychosocial problems including troubles processing emotions and poor social competence. They admitted that no single studies have been completed (as of 2002), to link family environment to social competence, but the data they collected does show an undeniable influence from family environment to the “…kind of interpersonal relationships that offspring have throughout their life.”³

Other researchers built on the lower levels of psychosocial problems and documented the causal influences in young people who experienced “…low sociability, questions of self-worth, poor social skills, and a general disinterest in communicating with others”. These social anxieties are represented as moderate among their sample group and contain direct causal links to the respondent’s family of origin.

They reported that broken family structures and the presence of “…parents with poor social skills and psychosocial problems, such as loneliness and anxiety, might be more likely to raise children with comparable social skills deficits and psychosocial problems as a result of dysfunctional modeling in social interactions”. They also noted that individuals raised in hostile or unsupportive families and not exposed to healthy socialization feel like the odd-person-out in social settings even where casual conversation would be expected.⁴

Much of the research attention is appropriately aimed at severe expressions of anti-social behavior that could be precursors to the horrific incidents of school shootings and random violence. However, this worst-case examination of the problem pulls us away from the center stream of social deficiency that is being experienced by huge segments of American youth. Researchers, Cavanagh and Huston point out that the increase of divorce, cohabitation and children born into single-parent homes is resulting in more than half of the children in the U.S. spending time in some alternate family structure by the time they turn eighteen years old.⁵

As I noted earlier, this can sound like a moral statement, but the focus should be placed on the disruption of family environments that contribute to the suspension of social development in some children. For example, one of the common, nagging dilemmas that divorced parents face is in trying to maintain developmental disciplines that contribute to social competencies after the children discover the art of playing one parent against the other. These children can be successful in using the liberties promised in one home as a means of undermining the structures of the other.

This can and does happen in two-parents homes as well. Parents choose to relieve the anxiety of the moment by giving in to the wants and will of the child. The child figures out how to utilize parental anxiety and the long-term result is poor parenting and low social development in the child.

Whatever the new normal is in relationship to the nuclear family or what can or should be done to improve parenting skills is a subject for other, smarter people to figure out. My concern and focus are on the present-day readout of those children who are entering adulthood and the modern workforce without the social competencies required to relate, problem-solve and work well with others.

Chapter Two
Who are the Outliers?

Through my years of experience with people exhibiting lower socialization competencies, I came to refer to them as “outliers”. By outlier, I mean those who find inclusion in social groups to be generally difficult. Being an outlier is not a label that fits a certain class or social status, but more the result of awkwardness, feeling out of place, and an overwhelming sense of dissimilarity from others and especially in groups. This dissimilarity tends to partition outliers into a passive or aggressive posture.

Passive outliers are more reclusive, distant and disengaging socially in workplace relationships. In business they become the slowest movers, most resistant to change and typically non-collaborative. Every business has a few people who exhibit this kind of resistance. Sometimes their disengagement is interpreted as the result of being stuck up or labeled as just being an unfriendly person. It is more often the case, however, that they are socially uncomfortable and reclusion is the safest way for them to guard against their self-perceived inadequacy being exposed to others.

Aggressive outliers tend to be brash, wearing their outsider position as a badge of individuality, and mowing down people under the swinging, heavy beams of their “I don’t give a damn” attitude. In business they are the disrupters, the makers of drama, and the most likely catalysts for injury to trust among coworkers. I am seeing more people exhibiting this in-your-face behavior as outliers join production teams and take positions in organizational structures. The expression of defiance is just as much of a self-protection mechanism as is reclusion for the passive outlier, but the impact of the aggressive outlier is far more damaging. Their actions send ripples of tension throughout business organizations. They are often liked because of their over-the-top mannerisms, but they are not trusted. Disruptions caused by the aggressive outlier are directly connected to the overall decline of social culture in the workplace.

Personal Context

As a business owner, it was personally frustrating to see these outliers join my organization with great skills, high cognitive abilities and capacities to complete tasks with speed and excellence, but then stumbling over the things they never seemed to have received from family culture in terms of healthy socialization. While, in most cases, they were intelligent and skilled, they lacked self-awareness and the attendant capacities to live in relationship to those in authority, manage their moods and emotions, resolve conflicts with others, be responsible with money, get and give respect, show love, receive correction, or communicate their needs and feelings. Some of these are things taught as behavioral compliance in grade school, but socialization requires a more complex environment than that which can be offered through educational systems.

The family is the ideal environment for the development of social skills, not because families are ideal, but because of the relational dynamics of vital connections, care and loving discipline. These dynamics function within a tension that is not found in any other adolescent environment. The need to successfully resolve a conflict with a sibling is huge when you share the same bedroom. Responding to the rules and decisions of a parent takes on special meaning when they control your play time, determine how late you can stay up, and make decisions about your access to the family car. Educators are working at teaching social behaviors where they are either absent or where other limiting systems of values and behaviors are being taught and modeled in the home. They are investing in socialization training for the future success of the students and for the sanity and security of the classroom, but they constantly face the limitations of time, influence, and the competing priorities of academic objectives. Educators tell me that they are sending more schoolwork home for children to complete there, because so much of the school day is taken up in merely trying to control behaviors in the classroom. The home is the ideal environment for the transmission of cultural and social competencies, but the American home is suffering its own loss of stability, influence and social capital.

With the breakdown of these vital centers of social organization we are now experiencing how the absence of this cultural transmission is impacting the dynamics of workplace relationships and the social culture of organizations. The readout of this loss of family stability and healthy socialization is that many adults face great difficulty fitting in to high-relationship social or group settings. This poses unique problems for businesses today. We have a strategic interest in not just attracting talent to our organizations; we must assimilate them into the cultural fabric and social structures that provide meaning and connection for our employees. These intangible characteristics of meaning and connection are influencing longevity and satisfaction in the workplace, in some ways, far beyond financial rewards.

Through 2017 I helped in the development of a for-profit business model that operates under a non-profit foster care agency for which I have served a 10-year term as president of the board of directors. The need for this kind of business was driven by the challenges we saw foster youth face as they turned 18 and aged out of the system. These teenagers are bright and capable of being trained to do whatever a business owner or manager would require of them. The missing element for most of them is related to soft skills. They lack mature communication skills, the ability to resolve conflicts in a healthy way, a readiness to take direction from people in roles of authority, and the self-discipline and emotional intelligence to manage their feelings long enough to simply work well with others.

Our agency participates in a state program that helps some of these teenagers’ transition into adulthood by providing resources to get them into apartments and offers financial assistance for them while still connected to a social worker until they turn 21. We decided to leverage this program into an employment opportunity that allows us to work on the development of these soft skills while building their work experience.

I was sharing this business plan one afternoon with a man who employs hundreds of people in our community. He stopped me at one point and said, “If your program can produce people who show up for work when they are scheduled, are willing to take direction from supervisors, and can get along with other employees; I’ll hire everyone you send me.” His three-part job-description is at the center of every employer’s greatest need in the current workforce. I became aware through that conversations that we had stopped talking exclusively about foster youth, and identified the primary complaint I have been hearing from HR professionals, business owners and managers from many different industries for the past few years.

Chapter Three
The Impact on Business

Unhealthy social interactions have become one of the leading determinants in the failures of individuals within organizational structures. The traditional path for advancement in organizations has been open for those who overcame socialization deficits by reading self-help books, attended classes and seminars, and even pursued individualized therapy to find the help they need. What we must recognize is that the numbers are working against us as social outliers are making up increasing percentages of the available workforce. That traditional path cannot be relied upon to overcome the sheer numbers, or as a probable course of remedy among the growing number of people affected by severe family brokenness, physical or sexual abuse, and other traumas.

Managers are regularly blindsided by assuming that interpersonal conflicts and underperformance can be corrected by rational conversations involving consequence and incentives. They quickly find they are banging their heads against the walls of deep social awkwardness and insecurity. Hard knocks and trial and error have led some companies to develop approaches that have varying degrees of effectiveness, but the scope of the issues facing outliers is demanding more understanding and better bridges to healthy socialization and inclusion.

There are scores of books that recommend some new way of improving company culture and building tighter teams, but very few are addressing the absence of social skills required to participate in high-relationship environments or make any real and lasting connection with others. There is a sizable gap of knowledge that must be filled with both good data and real solutions concerning this population of outliers. Growing numbers of people are arriving into adulthood without the social skills necessary to navigate an ongoing relationship-based exchange within the circles of family and friendships. Workplace relationships are dramatically affected by this gap through the simple measures of time and proximity.

Adaptation or Strategic Innovation

It is my impression that business managers have done more to adapt to what is as they face the phenomenon of social outliers. Some reshuffle employees to find better or more natural compatibilities and minimize conflicts. Others develop a three-stage warning system where expected improvement is conveyed through a series of “talks” that case-build toward termination. If we do not commit resources and solutions to address the causes of employee dysfunction, we set up a huge revolving door, losing productivity and money as we go through the repeated cycles of hiring, training, correcting and firing. And along the way we leave a large and growing population of people stuck in the morass of an inherited social deficiency. I believe there are better answers to the problems of broken or altogether missing socialization competencies. My hope is that these insights will move us forward to the discovery of those solutions.

Our strategies must change and include creative ways to address the infusion of social competencies rather than merely assuming they already exist. This would seem to move well beyond the scope of standard business policies and priorities, but the realities of a shrinking labor pool and the severe decline in social capabilities are demanding a new assessment of how we recruit, train and engage employees right now.

I am proposing that businesses engage with some ongoing methodology geared to increase the socialization of their workforce if they are to attract and retain task-capable people. This soft competency which directly impacts an individual’s ability to get along with others, is much more difficult to measure and quantify than hard competencies such as mechanical or cognitive skills. While it is difficult to measure, these soft skills are evolving into a critical component the success of businesses; especially among those who are missing the primary building blocks of healthy socialization.

Once I reviewed the research, I set out to identify the primary barriers that are keeping outliers stuck in these social deficiencies. I sought to examine how employment frameworks could address these barriers and work to improve the competencies necessary for employees to find inclusion, rapport, support, belonging and meaning. My objective was to provide a philosophical framework for understanding and responding to the unique socialization barriers experienced by social outliers.

I trust that managers and leaders will be able to use these insights to explore and develop paths to follow so they can become more effective at improving social interactions directly affecting an outlier’s at-work relationships.

Chapter Four
My Research

I chose to conduct my own survey of a mixed group of people who were not involved in the same business. The focus of my inquiry was to determine:

What are the primary sources of an outlier’s disinclination to belong to and participate in a group?

What are the barriers or points of restriction that are keeping outliers from the opportunity to learn and adopt new social skills?

I distributed a large number of surveys at a public event that attracted a good sample in terms of diversity in age, gender and socio-economic status. I asked respondents to leave the completed surveys on their seats at the conclusion of the event. This approach yielded over 70 surveys from which 43 were found to be complete and legible for my use. Distributing the surveys in this manner yielded an unexpected opportunity to gather responses from a segment of the population who were raised in healthier families from which they received useful social skills. Responses from that population provided beneficial comparisons to the outlier group.

Despite using a non-restrictive approach for collecting the survey data, I was successful at securing a good sample group with a balanced representation in gender and age, while still dominantly populated by individuals raised in broken family systems. The survey supplied the cross section of data from which I could corroborate the source of deficiencies I found in existing studies within the fields of education, law enforcement and business.

The survey asked for seven points of background data that helped me construct the profile of respondents. It contained thirty questions that were crafted to reveal four types of inclusion resistance among this focus group. The four categories were discomfort, disinterest, predetermined exclusion, and specific deficiency. Each question was defined to draw out more than just surface excuses or placating compliance to choices they “should be making”.

I chose these four categories based on the other research I had studied. The research was helpful in defining the disinclination of outliers to engagement or connection, but there was a large gap in these studies that limited the ability to arrive at prescriptive actions to overcome them.

Measuring for Discomfort

This category encompasses those who are shy or withdrawn as a matter of personality along with those who experience deep anxiety in any group or social setting. While my data collection did not allow the discovery of psychosocial disorders as defined from those who merely feel awkward and out of place in social groups, the larger category of discomfort helped in sorting out the barrier shyness inherent in an individual’s personality as opposed to the selective preference against socialization.

Measuring for Disinterest

False conclusions can be made by managers concerning the desirability factor as it relates to inclusion. I wanted to draw out whether some part of an organization’s effectiveness at assimilation and inclusion is based on a disconnection from the arrangements or content of what is being offered. Researchers have concluded that “…not everybody wants to be included in all subsystems. For some, exclusion is voluntary. When taken in this context the non-involvement or lack of attachment to particular subsystems is chosen.”¹

Measuring for Predetermined Exclusion

I suspected that some people were making decisions about social connection and involvement in groups through a faulty comparison that automatically determined they would be a misfit in a group or social setting. This predetermined exclusion is another factor that I sought to identify in my research. Some individuals determine that certain groups “…appear impermeable” and anticipate automatic rejection.² This category identifies perception-related issues that affect inclusion.

Measuring for Specific Deficiencies

The final category I looked to uncover in my research was the existence of specific deficiencies that contribute to outlier behavior. The factors of illiteracy, poverty, issues of appearance, speech impediments, looking or sounding stupid, all pose considerations that weigh into the decisions some people make to exclude themselves from social settings.³

Chapter Five
The Experience of Outliers

Henry David Thoreau asked this probing question, “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?” The limiting flaw in most of the remedies we apply to problems is the lack of insight that can only be gained from the experience of the people in the problem. I had a good friend who was a medical missionary in the Baja peninsula of Mexico. Through a grueling five-year timespan, he and his wife were spending large portions of their time and energy organizing, hosting and transporting groups of teenagers and young adults who were being sent out on international serving trips by churches and non-profit groups in the US. He confided to me that, while this may have been helpful to augment the first world perspectives of these young Americans, it was not doing much to satisfy the needs of the Mexican people. The intention of the sending groups was pure, but their assumption of the best way to help meet the medical needs of impoverished people lacked the insider, experiential perspective of the people in the problem.

What I hope won’t get lost in the hard data of studies like the one you’re reading is the window that is created for us to see a glimpse of the world, society and the workplace through the eyes of the people experiencing overwhelming socialization barriers. Like the people who live in destitution in the central mountain range of Baja Mexico, these outliers are not living as they do because of a lack of intelligence or poor choices. They do the best they can with what they have been given. What I’m saying is that it’s easy to criticize the behavior of someone who consistently fails at resolving conflicts in a productive manner or exhibits some other deficit in personal interactions, and then act dismissively toward them. Some people are stubbornly stuck in antisocial behaviors with no intention or interest in learning a different way. Many, however, are simply stuck and have never been afforded the opportunity to learn different and better means of getting along well with others.

Survey Findings

As I’ve already demonstrated, previous studies in educational settings provided evidence linking broken family structures to the difficulty that individuals face with even the most basic socialization scenarios. I found this same correlation among my research group. Of the 43 respondents in the survey, 69.77% identified their childhood family structures as broken and among that group 87% rated their parent’s social skills as poor or below average with 73% indicating that they received little or no preparation in the skills of personal communication, resolving conflicts and building trust from their parent(s). Interestingly, the older respondents in the survey group, especially those who identified themselves as 61-70 years old, tended to identify their experience as characterized by healthier family structures and receiving a stronger transmission of social skills from socially competent parents.

I discovered that 51.16% of the respondents’ function with an ongoing awareness of how their personal history, education and socioeconomic status contribute to the way they fit with various social groups. 60.47% indicated that personal history was the greatest factor in determining their perception of fitting in. The deep brokenness in families is producing growing numbers of individuals who enter their 30’s and 40’s with divorce(s), bankruptcy or criminal records as a part of their past. This presents inclusion barriers to those seeking integration into social structures that appear to be populated by people who have their lives together and do not share any social or experiential commonality with them.

Just over half of the survey respondents admitted a feeling of being an outsider in most group or social settings. An individual’s personal history appears to frame and reinforce that feeling. This explains the relative ease with which many outliers engage with subcultural groups like AA or other life-issue support groups. Inclusion in these groups is based on personal deficiency rather than a perceived normalcy and career success. The shared history of addiction and its related losses, family dysfunction, moral compromise and criminality become the doorways of inclusion into these subcultural groups despite the presence of social discomfort.

I asked respondents through the survey to identify their least to greatest personal limitations across five categories that would exclude them from participating in social activities or joining new groups. The categories were:

Literacy - Poor reading and writing skills

Physical - Speech impediment, embarrassing tattoos, body size

History - Shame of past family or personal history, incarceration, addictions, violence or abuse

Mistrust - Fear of rejection, high mistrust of people, self-protective

Shyness - Overwhelming sense of awkwardness around others, fear of being put on the spot or singled out

I was a bit surprised that literacy was not a higher limitation than it appeared in the research results. My expectation of this category being a greater limitation was based on the low reading and comprehension grade level for the county in which the survey was conducted. However, literacy did show up numerically high with 69.3% of respondents identifying it as a personal limitation to joining a new group even though it was ranked as a lower factor than other categories. Shyness and mistrust dominated in the two highest levels of personal limitations.

While the limitations of shyness and mistrust are not surprising, they do indicate the size and scale of the emotional barriers these outliers must traverse in order to participate in the high-relationship environment of employment teams and workgroups.

Chapter Six
One on One with Successful Outliers

In addition to the surveys, I interviewed six individuals who were selected based on my previous knowledge of their background, family upbringing and the progress they made through their outlier past into jobs that required higher social competencies. Of the six, three were male and three were female. Three were between 31-40 years old, one between 20-30, one between 41-50 and one between 51-60 years old. All of them were raised in broken, low-income families. They were invited into the study on the basis of their perception of not fitting into established social groups and the experience of significant discomfort in social settings.

Each of the interviews confirmed the correlation between the low social competencies of their families and their individual struggles to trust, communicate, resolve conflicts and build lasting relationships with others. The questions explored that correlation and sought to discover ways in which employers could adapt to address the socialization deficiencies. As I outline the findings from these interviews I will delve into some prescriptive solutions that I hope will equip managers to take positive steps forward on the path of resourcing and engaging outliers.

Dissimilarity

Those I interviewed had differing stories concerning the distance they perceived between themselves and others. The greatest cause of that distance is not based in the appearances and perception of success in others as much as it is the outlier’s own history that preconditions rejection, marginalization and mistrust. Whether it is the 14-year-old girl who bears the rejection of her mother who prostituted her to men for drug money or the young boy who attended six different high schools as a result of bouncing back and forth between family members; without ever actually graduating, the conditions of instability, shame, and degrading social status carry forward even after their fortunes have changed and they begin to take steps to build their life away from poverty and chaos.

Business managers and leaders have a large role to play in utilizing the social capital of the organization to help in the socialization of outliers. This role begins with a better understanding of the origins of brokenness that contribute to the way outliers think, relate and respond.

One of the first patterns I saw in these interviews was how critical personal interaction and invitation was to their steps toward greater inclusion and connection with others. Managers who take a personal interest in outliers and invite them into places of significance based on what they see in them will achieve great success at opening the doors to their personal growth and development. These personal invitations are vital to those who have been neglected by those most responsible for their care and overlooked by the systems and structures supposedly in place to help and protect them.

It is stunning to observe what is dispensed in terms of belief and belonging into socially broken people through a simple, “I want you to be a part of [this] with me”. Effective leaders have had to lessen reliance on public communication and increase the number of personal invitations that are being extended to people who would otherwise never participate in any form of engagement at all. One important perspective that should be considered with these invitations, however, is that the movement toward involvement in groups and teams needs to be done by increments. The high value that businesses are currently placing on teams and work groups, to some degree, disallows for incompatibility with the demands of those roles which is rooted in personality or social brokenness.

In her book “Quiet,” Susan Cain powerfully explains the challenges that introverts experience as they are expected to conform and perform in environments better suited for extroverts.¹ This challenge is even greater for those who are required to find their fit on a team when fitting in has been a life-long battle. It would be beneficial to perhaps have outliers work independently at first; allowing them the opportunity to develop a sense of worth and accomplishment before bringing them into a team setting that will require accelerated growth in personal interactions.  

Expected Conformity

The second understanding I gleaned through the interviews was discovered through seeing how much personal disappointment outliers endured to finally gain access to opportunities people with higher social competency have opened to them without even trying. Every person had a story to tell about the way that they were overlooked as a result of their dress, language, marital status or family history.

As much as we would expect that those with higher social skills and awareness would not ostracize those who don’t naturally fit into the same groups, there is a clear insider versus outsider message communicated in the social culture of many American businesses. Wise managers will keep aware of the distance that separates outliers and work to close these gaps. This process is necessary for navigating the complexities of building trusting relationships and bringing together culturally divergent groups.

One way is to appeal to the higher social awareness of team members and remind them of the difficulty of the process of learning the culture of a new organization. Those without success in social relationships have a much greater difficulty adjusting, adapting and fitting in.

Like finally solving a riddle and then wondering how you could have possibly missed that word clue when it is so glaringly obvious to you now; coworkers and supervisors who have adapted to the language, customs and social behaviors of the business forget the slow process of trying to figure it all out, and unwittingly cast an expectation of how others should think, relate and behave. Leaders and managers would be wise to regularly train and remind both adapted and adapting employees about the reality of growth taking time, which is evidenced in every individual’s personal story. The message that you can and will find your fit here over time, contributes to a specific kind of hope that is vital to the psyche of an outlier.

What would have helped?

One of the questions from which I was most interested to gather responses was, “What could we [business leaders], have done better to help you past the barriers to inclusion and community? The responses broke down into three actions: notice, accept and include. We will need to work deliberately against the narcissistic leanings of American culture that allows people to go completely unnoticed. All of us need the validation that others know us and recognize our place and role in the larger circle of other people’s lives. This notice is particularly important to outliers.

They have experienced more than their share of rejection. One man I interviewed talked about the open favoritism that he experienced in his broken family. “Mom’s favorite was my oldest brother” a fact about which his father often reminded him. He told me, “I went away to work somewhere for a few weeks and my mom gave my brother my car”. Outliers move through life with a heightened awareness of neglect that must be counteracted by the sincere notice and attention of managers, leaders and coworkers.

We know that acceptance is a high value in our current culture. It is especially so among the outliers. When noticeable people are honored, and their contribution is recognized in a way that undermines the inherent value of others, they will push farther outward and grow more deeply mistrustful. The majority of those we interviewed had some experience with this acceptance inequality. It can appear to outliers that the systems of conditional acceptance they had to negotiate as children are being replicated in the business world. It seems obvious that this would be expected in the work-reward arrangements of business, but for those who had to fight for their place in the family only to be treated inequitably, their sense of conditional acceptance is alert and distorted. One of the ladies in interviewed referred to herself as having to be a chameleon around people which evolved in her personality as “…more of a survival tactic from [her] brokenness growing up”.

Ask Me to do Something

One of the themes that developed through the interview process revealed the importance of early inclusion to the outliers. A few of their stories showed how invitations to a social activity were galvanized into a positive choice by being asked to do something related to that event. One of the ladies I interviewed was asked to be on a hospitality team for a company retreat. This kind of invitation held two powerful motivations: being needed and the obligation of commitment.

Too often managers shape the function of events and groups after the behavior and expectations of insiders; those already connected, busy and reluctant. Many leaders have experienced the bothered look from people who are fine with being asked to be a part of a group, but have no interest in doing something to help the group happen.

Outliers are not typically looking for events to attend. Intrinsically, they are looking for places of meaning and belonging. Being asked to participate, so long as it does not expose social, financial or educational deficiencies, is a clear path to experiencing these things.

Desperation and Service

When I asked those interviewed about the fuel that motivated them past the barriers they faced, both internally and externally, two noteworthy values emerged. The first and obvious one is desperation. Financial resources and deep layers of family and social support are wonderful to have, but they can serve as insulators that protect people from the pain or discomfort that are revealing the need to change. Outliers do not have these insulators. They can use drugs, alcohol and other distractions, but they are more quickly brought to the end of those resources and forced to seek better solutions than are the socially connected and materially cushioned. This desperation is a gift for those who will use it as a propellant through the barriers of awkwardness, pride and discomfort.

Business managers would be wise to develop and provide ready resources for outliers when they are reaching these points. This would involve connecting them to support groups for addiction, crisis counseling for marriage, anger-management and other relationship-related issues.

The other fuel I discovered that outliers use to propel themselves through social barriers was service. Most people in my study took steps that led to greater inclusion and socialization for themselves as a result of seeking to help someone else. Outliners are, for the most part, keenly aware of the difficulties they have experienced in life, relationships and employment. This awareness creates compassion for others and that compassion will lead them to personal steps of risk, engagement, and change. This personal risk step is often purely driven by the desire to help others.

Businesses that carry a service emphasis will be successful at mobilizing their employees as a general rule, and they will have much greater success at helping outliers move past their social phobias and deficiencies to places of personal growth. Over the years ahead it will be increasingly necessary for leaders to connect social mission to the work that people do and then create ways to influence growth in social skills among the outliers who have been engaged by the call to serve.

The New Normal

Hopefully by now you are seeing the deeper levels of need among the outliers who are increasingly populating employment roles in businesses. In order to help them become productive rather than a problem, a deliberate effort must be undertaken to understand the social, educational and economic changes that have rapidly produced new cultural norms.

The new normal is a person who was raised in a broken family, experienced very little nurturing as a child, and did not receive the vital transmission of social competencies necessary for economic, emotional and relational stability. The new normal person has limited skills that would allow them to function well in teams, take correction or understand the emotional content happening in themselves, much less that which is happening in the lives of those around them.

Chapter Seven
Actionable Recommendations

Most of my prescriptive recommendations have been outlined with the interview findings; however, two additional overarching ideas emerges from my analysis of the previously published data and that which I collected and interpreted in this study.

Re-parenting

A couple of the researchers used the term “re-parenting” as the social component they saw outliers needing in overcoming low socialization competencies. The idea of re-parenting indicates the presence of caring, personal guides who serve in a surrogate capacity for the individuals whose natural parents would or could not.

This kind of re-parenting would require a significant adjustment from managers and supervisors, and yet it holds the potential to provide real solutions for the growing numbers of outliers who are missing that vital social transmission from their childhood. The difficulty of re-parenting a thirty-something-year-old is obvious. Our culture has trained people to fiercely defend their individualism; leading them down the hopeless trail of expecting powerful solutions without considering the need for systemic personal change.

The fact that something is difficult, however, should not determine its merits. In Murray Bowen’s Family Systems Theory, the 8th concept relates to non-family groups such as work or social organizations. He created parallels between familial and societal emotional functioning, but limited that connection to governments or employers becoming like parents in the way that deal with laws and discipline.¹ I’d suggest that this idea actually goes much farther where people who missed the caring, guiding, developmental voices of natural parents are still looking for functional parent-types, specifically in social, religious and employment settings. This can and does get weird and messy, but I believe there are ways to leverage this surrogate family system as it operates in the workplace and create effective ways of increasing social competencies in outliers.

A good friend of mine who directs a large foster care agency has taken two of the younger employees aside for weekly lunches where they talk about family, relationships, money, personal growth, career drive and goals. In this capacity, he functions like a caring uncle who is transmitting values, ideas and narratives containing life skills they can receive or reject. The employees are eager for these meetings and are benefitting from an employer who is willing to shift roles and provide missing attention and cultural information that will lead to their future success.

Using Assessment Tools and Coaching

A wealth of information has been developed and is available now in the field of Emotional Intelligence, interpersonal workplace relationships and building social culture. With that development has come the evolution of assessment instruments that are extremely useful in creating starting points for socialization training and employee personal growth plans.

The receptivity to utilizing this content has been mixed, mainly due to the disconnection from bottom line objectives that executives and CFO’s find in the social/emotional arena. That is an assumption that worked in the business world for a long time, but it is now an old assumption. As motivating as pay, benefits and incentives have traditionally been to employees, two other motivations are rising to rival it. These motivations are social mission and meaningful workplace relationships.

At some point in the past 20 years American workers decided that if a large portion of their life would be spent working, they wanted something more than money to justify it. I talk to younger workers all the time who have passed up jobs with higher pay and located in closer proximity to where they live, solely to work at a job that is engaged with something worthwhile and be teamed up with people whom they personally enjoy. This runs counter to the high loyalties and low expectations of the American workforce of just two or three decades ago, but it is a motivational movement that shows no signs of abating.

Assessments

I favor assessments that measure employee’s social and emotional intelligence. This kind of tool helps to locate where they are both domains; how aware they are of the emotional content in their own soul, and how aware they are of the emotional content in others. Emotional intelligence is not the be-all-end all, but it moves people’s self-knowledge exponentially forward beyond what standard performance reviews or corrective discussions could ever yield.

Another type of useful assessment tool is one that measures working relationship styles or personalities among a team of people. These assessments help employees define the kinds of interactions that are fulfilling and rewarding versus those that are draining and prone to conflicts. Self-knowledge of this kind helps people adjust interpersonal expectations and negotiate ways of interaction that serve their working style as well as others on their team.

Most of these assessments are self-reported, online surveys which produce a multi-page report showing an employee’s baseline attitudes and activities along with some recommended development steps. The self-report system is great for everyone, but specifically for outliers who tend to be highly sensitive to objective judgment from others. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said “These numbers reflect how you see yourself… no one else has input on how your results turned out. Now let’s start from how you see yourself and move toward where you’d like to be”.

Train, Train, Train…

Businesses that are engaging employees with these assessments and providing targeted training on socialization skills are seeing a marked decline in coworker conflicts and workplace drama. The overall culture improves by focus and attention on values, ways of relating to each other and expectations of growth in person to person workplace interactions. If you only address the blowups and disruptions in a corrective way, behind closed doors; the cultural expectation is not cast throughout whole teams and workgroups. Improvement in social and emotional intelligence needs to be on the radar of all employees if you are intending to raise the health in the social culture of your organization.

I recently attended a Human Resources conference where the second presenter was advertised as a labor-law attorney who would be talking about compliance issues, hiring and firing and effective performance evaluations. I was shocked to hear how many times he mentioned workplace relationships, conflict resolution and addressing the social culture of the organization. In fact, there was not one presenter out of the four who spoke that day who didn’t reference the health of employee’s social relationships.

Training is vital to developing a strong social culture and it provides a way for outliers to hear what they need to hear without being singled out as THE problem. If your CEO or management team does not prioritize time and money to facilitate this kind of training, I would encourage you to ask for it and keep on asking. There is a ton of data available on the benefits of improving employee relationships and increasing the health of social culture. Use it to sell the need to the people who make decisions regarding staff development in your organization. You can do a lot with web-based resources to introduce the content and lead some roleplay exercises if you need to do the training in house.

Hiring an Outsider for Outliers

There is also a great value in bringing in an outside professional to administer the assessments and provide the training content. Company people are expected to advance the goals of the organization so the material offered in-house can be held in suspicion by those given to conspiracy theories. Outside trainers bring a level of expertise in explaining the content of workplace socialization and introducing some of the most effective practices to help people connect with it and apply it.

One of the interesting benefits that I’ve found as one who is hired in to assess, coach, consult and advise, is the confidentiality that I offer to employees. There is a latent fear, no matter how much an HR director or supervisor promises against it, that an employee’s complaint against coworkers, managers or executives will not morph into some kind of retaliation down the road. An outsider can promise and keep those cathartic conversations confidential while coaching and advising that person out of the rut of blame, criticism and anger. That role is particularly difficult for company staff to pull off. Not because of their competency; but because of their organizational alignment.

Chapter Eight
Final Words

My hope is that the prescriptive suggestions and recommendations offered in this book will result in a philosophical framework of thinking for managers and leaders that will inform decisions on why and how they might design socialization opportunities in the organizations they lead. Too often we are blind to the “why” that lies behind poor performance and the inciting of drama by problem employees. While it is wise for managers to focus on systems and incentives to get the most out of their workgroups and teams, we cannot neglect addressing the barriers that are keeping smart and potentially effective employees from sharing in the success of our organizations.

This research identified concrete points of restriction to growth and inclusion in the social culture of organizations. It revealed some of the vital connections between social deficiencies and the problems experienced by business leaders as they seek to notice, invite, and include outliers into the social structures that are essential to business success today.

I trust that these findings will provide strategic insight toward more effective methods of communication, better assessments and more focused training, along with other practical solutions toward the resocialization of an otherwise marginalized people. I believe this study also provides a broader view of the problem and contributes actionable solutions that will enable businesses to become more aware of the true factors keeping those who have grown up in socially broken families from finding paths to inclusion and socialization.

Notes

Chapter 1

1.

S. G. Lingenfelter, Transforming culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1998), 115.

2.

R. D. Putnam, Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 296-297.

3.

Repetti, Taylor & Seeman, Risky families: family social environments and the mental and physical health of offspring (Psychological bulletin, 2002), 351.

4.

Burke, Woszidlo & Segrin, The intergenerational transmission of social skills and psychosocial problems among parents and their young adult children (Journal of Family Communication, 2013), 88.

5.

Cavanagh & Huston, Family instability and children's early problem Behavior (Social Forces, 2006), 551.

Chapter 4

1.

Williams & White, R. Conceptualising social inclusion: Some lessons for action (Proceedings of the ICE-Municipal Engineer, 2003), 92.

2.

Bernstein, Sacco, Young, Hugenberg & Cook, Being “in” with the in-crowd: The effects of social exclusion and inclusion are enhanced by the perceived essentialism of ingroups and outgroups. (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2010), 1001.

3.

Repetti, Taylor & Seeman, Risky families: family social environments and the mental and physical health of offspring (Psychological bulletin, 2002), 355.

Chapter 6

1.

Susan Cain, Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking (New York, NY: Random House, Inc. 2013).

Chapter 7

1.

Kerr, Michael E. “One Family’s Story: A Primer on Bowen Theory.” The Bowen Center for the Study of the Family. 2000. http://www.thebowencenter.org.