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ADVANCING KNOWLEDGE THROUGH COLLABORATION

Joy-stealing games

by Kathleen T. Heinrich

Kathleen Heinrich

The theme of this issue of Reflections on Nursing Leadership is “advancing knowledge through collaboration.” Normally, partnering with others does serve to advance knowledge. As I’ve written elsewhere, “Partnerships are mutually beneficial, professional relationships between and among nurses.” (Heinrich et al., 2005, p. 34). But what about those situations where negative relationships between colleagues impede teaching and scholarly endeavors? It’s a topic rarely discussed by nurse educators (Glass, in press).

At the National League for Nursing (NLN) 2005 Summit—sponsored by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International—I was given the opportunity to address incivility among faculty members. I asked the audience of 1,400 nurse educators to share their stories.

I gave them a minute to “write about a time when a faculty colleague, administrator or subordinate said or did something that left you or a colleague feeling disrespected, devalued or dismissed” (Heinrich, 2006, p. 41). In exchange for their anonymous responses, I promised to publish what I learned. Two hundred sixty-one respondents described academic game-playing that results in what one called “joy-stealing” (Heinrich, in press). The following stories illustrate 10 of those joy-stealing games and compare mentoring behaviors with tormenting behaviors. [Editor’s note: For readability and clarity, some of the responses have been edited.]

#1. Setting up
Mentoring behaviors guide others. Tormenting behaviors “set up” colleagues for embarrassment and/or potential failure. Here’s how one respondent described it:

“It was my first lecture. I got to the room 45 minutes early and found that the LCD projector was missing. I had spent hours and hours preparing my PowerPoint presentation. A novice, I went to the most senior instructor—35 years’ experience—for help. She told me to ‘look around.’ I spent the next 25 minutes looking around. Finally, in tears, I went back to where she was sitting, eating breakfast, and told her of my continued unsuccessful search. She responded, ‘Well, I don’t use PowerPoint, so just use the one in my room.’ She had let me worry and sweat and cry when she could have helped and supported me.”

#2. Distorting
Mentoring behaviors act like mirrors that reflect positively on mentee potentialities and gifts. Tormenting behaviors are “fun-house” mirrors that twist those assets into deficits and liabilities. One respondent wrote:

“My evaluations are good from students over the past 4 1/2 years, and I have heard a particular faculty member say it’s because I am easy or because of the way I look. It’s not so much one instance but a multitude of small, indirect messages that say, ‘We don’t approve. You’re not doing a good job. You’re not tough enough. You identify too closely with students, etc.’ ”

#3. Misrepresenting and lying
Mentoring behaviors are about transparency and truth telling. Tormenting behaviors obscure and deceive. As one participant wrote:

“When I started a new job as a graduate faculty member, my boss made my life miserable. She failed to communicate on a regular basis, despite my request that she do so. When we did meet, she did not make eye contact, kept her back to me, did not look up from her computer and did not call me by name. When I approached her in a group, she walked away. After giving initial approval to two major projects that I had worked on diligently for months, she reneged. She actually lied on a written evaluation of my work, saying that I had said, ‘I’ve been a screw-up all my life.’ I never said that and never would have said that. I quit.”

#4. Shaming
Mentoring behaviors are respectful. Tormenting behaviors shame with words and actions. One faculty member described a colleague with whom she team-taught:

“She constantly treated me, in front of the students, as if I didn’t know anything. She would grab my notes out of my hand when she felt my time was up.”

Another example of shaming was described by a respondent who wrote about “an admissions coordinator who threatens others by putting their names on a list to be given to individuals in positions of authority.”

#5. Betraying
Mentoring behaviors convey expectations and norms directly. Tormenting behaviors betray colleagues, using covert tactics. For example, one respondent describes being betrayed by an administrator in a cyber-bullying situation:

“A faculty colleague verbally attacked me in an open meeting and continued, over the next three years, to send offensive and hateful e-mails. The person refused to discuss our conflict face to face. When I finally informed our associate dean of the problem, she refused to read the e-mails or deal with the situation, as the other person was her close friend.”

When the betrayer is a group rather than an individual, it is called “mobbing” (Westhues, 2005). One administrator recalled:

“I went on sabbatical after six years of successfully chairing my department. When I came back, my assistant chair had ransacked my files and created an environment of mistrust of me and my work. My assistant had support from the administration, and ultimately, I was ousted.”

Mobbing can even become a departmental norm, as one respondent described:

“We are a small faculty, and it seems that everyone gangs up on one person until that person leaves. Now I’m feeling that I’m going to be next.”

#6. Breaking boundaries
Mentoring behaviors honor personal boundaries. Tormenting behaviors intrude. For example, one respondent described a colleague who “entered my office and took books off my shelf without asking.”

Professional boundaries are also broken when intellectual property rights are violated, a situation described by another participant:

“The dean bullied herself into being a co-author on my research. She defended herself by saying, ‘Well, the department funded the research, so I have every right to be published on the research.’ ”

#7. Splitting
Mentoring behaviors honor diversity. Tormenting behaviors split or separate nurses along a fault line of prejudices that may include skin color, academic status, specialty or type of degree. One respondent wrote:

“I attended a conference where an educator from a university asked for volunteers to assist with a research project on physician/nurse relationships. I volunteered. When the educator saw on my business card that I was a faculty member in an associate degree program, she reluctantly took my card, said nothing to me and never called me. I have 29 years of experience working with surgeons and anesthesiologists and have done research on physician/nurse relationships. It was her loss and her unfortunate attitude.”

#8. Mandating
Mentoring behaviors seek win-win solutions. Tormenting behaviors mandate either-or scenarios that are win-lose. One respondent wrote: “I feel disrespected when I am told I am to teach another course without any dialogue regarding the course, extra salary or my workload.”

Often, saying no is either not an option, or it carries negative consequences. For example, one respondent described an administrator who mandated that she work in a clinical setting every Friday. “She was very upset when I said no and punished me by ignoring me. She had made this commitment without asking me first.”

#9. Blaming
Mentors assume responsibility for their own messes (Northrup, 2003). Tormentors blame and make others responsible for one’s shortcomings. A commonly reported sequence, depicted in the following response, is accuse first, get facts later and don’t apologize:

“During an exam that I was giving to approximately 75 students, my administrator threw open the door and practically screamed in a loud, harsh and demeaning manner, ‘Can I see you a minute?’ An incident had occurred for which she did not have all the information.”

#10. Silencing
Mentoring behaviors encourage participation and are inclusive. Tormenting behaviors silence by exclusion. One respondent wrote that, in a meeting with students present, an administrator snapped, “When I want your opinion or help, I’ll ask for it. I’m the chairperson.”

Another senior faculty member described a similar situation:

“I chose to teach in a program that had a long-standing faculty. I was the new kid on the block, but I had many years of experience and came as an associate professor. A fellow faculty member informed me that a decision was to be made and that only senior faculty could make it. I asked what the definition of senior faculty was and was told that it meant associate professors and above. When I responded that I was a senior faculty member by that definition, she looked shocked, quickly recovered and said, ‘You’re not invited.’ ”

When partnerships and collaboration work
One educator’s free-write response ran counter to the prevailing theme of joy-stealing:

“I am fortunate to work in a place of support and respect, fostered by administration and faculty members alike. We nominate faculty peers for our own recognition awards and celebrate their achievements at annual faculty meetings. As faculty members, we vote to use budgetary money for these awards.”

Eighty-three of the educators in that audience reported working in zestful academic environments (Wellesley Center for Women, 2005) where “faculty and administrators work and play well together” (Heinrich, 2006, p. 41). The fact that the most prolific educators form emotionally supportive and intellectually challenging partnerships (Tschannen-Moran & Nestor-Baker, 2004, p. 1494) suggests a link between collaborative relationships and knowledge advancement. In consulting with nursing faculty groups, I find that the more collaboration is valued, the fewer the joy-stealing games and the greater the productivity of teachers and scholars (Heinrich, in press).

Conclusion
Like an artist's sketch, I’ve described an informal review of 261 nurse educators’ stories about 10 faculty games that have one object in common—joy stealing. Retaining current faculty members and attracting nurses into nursing education as a career choice demand growing academic communities that further learning and scholarship. If joy-stealing games extinguish zestful partnerships and hinder the pursuit of knowledge and scholarship, it is imperative that we change the way academic nurses relate to each other by recognizing and eliminating such games from our educational environments. RNL

In the next issue of Reflections on Nursing Leadership, learn how to resist joy-stealing faculty games.

Educator, author and speaker Kathleen T. Heinrich, RN, PhD, is principal of K T H Consulting in Guilford, Conn. She is writing a book, Dare to Share: A Nurses’ Guide to Presenting and Publishing (Jones & Bartlett), about her evidence-based approach to transforming nurses into passionate scholars.

References

Glass, N. (in press). Investigating nurse academics’ experiences in universities: The importance of hope, optimism and career resilience for workplace satisfaction. Annual Review of Nursing Education.

Heinrich, K.T. (2006). Do we do that? Nursing faculty and mean girl games. In K.M. Kolanko, C. Clark, K.T. Heinrich, D. Olive, J.F. Serembus, & K.S. Sifford, Academic dishonesty, bullying, incivility, and violence: Difficult challenges facing nurse educators. Nursing Education Perspectives, 27(1), 34-43.

Heinrich, K.T. (in press). Joy stealing: Ten mean games faculty play and how to stop the gaming. Nurse Educator.

Heinrich, K.T., Pardue, K.T., Davison-Price, M., Murphy, J.I., Neese, R., Walker, P. et al. (2005). How can I help you? How can you help me? Transforming nursing education through partnerships. Nursing Education Perspectives, 26(1), 34-41.

Northrup, C. (2003). The wisdom of menopause: Creating physical and emotional health and healing during the change. New York: Bantam Books.

Tschannen-Moran, M., Nestor-Baker, N. (2004). The tacit knowledge of productive scholars in education. Teachers College Record, 106(7), 1484-1511.

Wellesley Centers for Women. (2005). JBMTI: Celebrating ten years of growth through connection. Research & Action Report. Wellesley, MA: Shawmut Printing.

Westhues, K. (2006). The envy of excellence: Administrative mobbing of high-achieving professors. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.