All Toxic Workplaces Are Alike....
Last week, The Athletic published a report on yet another “troubling…workplace culture” in professional sports; this time it was the Arizona Cardinals. The dysfunction in Arizona has been an open secret for a while now — so much so that I factored it into my NFL season preview — but the piece, by Kalyn Kahler, provides important detail on the situation.
In truth, though, it’s a familiar story, similar to what fans learned about the Phoenix Suns and Washington Commanders and New York Mets and Dallas Mavericks. The “toxic workplace” story is a familiar one at this point…
And because it is so familiar, I fear these stories will continue to get diminishing returns. It is only natural, after years of reading the same stuff, for readers and fans to eventually stop feeling outraged. Indeed, for this particular story, the outrage is hard to muster. I wrote two years ago how all these investigations play out like a desperate search for a “smoking gun,” for some example of behavior that cannot be defended as falling into a “gray area.”
But this one lacks any such clarity; there is no smoking gun. The behavior of Michael Bidwill, the team owner and president, is certainly boorish, unprofessional, and unpleasant, but it doesn’t really seem abusive or offensive. There are no allegations of sexual harassment or racial slurs or violent outbursts.
To be clear, this is not a defense of Bidwill, who certainly comes off as a jerk in the story. But he is a jerk in the way that many bosses are jerks. Take a look at some examples from the piece:
“Those who spoke to The Athletic detailed how Bidwill would sometimes react strongly to what they considered minor transgressions – like a squeaky wheel on an office cart or a woman laughing too loudly in the office – contributing to a culture where many employees felt constantly on edge.”
“Just after being hired, one employee said a supervisor told her she would be an ‘official Cardinal’ once she got yelled at by Bidwill or another senior manager. ‘Like 20 minutes after that, Michael Bidwill yelled at me,’ she said. Her offense? She was walking too slowly.”
“Another time, after a department opted to turn off the fluorescent lights above their cubicles in favor of softer lighting, one employee said Bidwill flipped the fluorescent lights back and announced: ‘Here we work with the lights on!’”
There is also an example of Bidwill scolding and cursing at an employee who was arrested for “extreme DUI” (I didn’t even know that was something you could do to the extreme), which… well, I don’t know that being Too Harsh on someone who was driving drunk is something I’m going to get mad about. In fact, you could see another version of this story where Bidwill is criticized for being too lenient on someone with a DUI.
In other words, none of this behavior is outrageous — it’s all just kind of annoying and unpleasant. Bidwill does not come off as history’s greatest monster; he’s just your average asshole boss. This distinction is important because the only real solution we have for this problem is to fire the offenders, so we need to know if the behavior rises to the level of a fireable offense.
For someone like Bidwill, who owns the team, that level is almost impossible to reach. We do have some recent examples of owners who were pressured to sell because of scandals like this one — Robert Sarver in the NBA and WNBA, Dan Snyder in the NFL — but those typically require years of misconduct and a soured relationship with the entire league. Unfortunately, none of the details in this story seem likely to lead to such an outcome for Bidwill.
And, really, they shouldn’t. If a non-owner were fired for behavior like this, I’d think it was an overreaction. The obvious way to deal with someone who yells at coworkers for no reason, and who barges into an office where he doesn’t work to change the lighting, is to take him aside and say, “Hey, cut that shit out. If you keep treating people that way, you’re going to get in trouble.”
But because Bidwill is in charge, and because owners are above any kind of standard accountability, there is nobody who is able to do that to him. Indeed, Kahler opens her story with an anecdote about how the Cardinals did issue an employee survey to diagnose working conditions in the franchise… but when the complaints were overwhelmingly about Bidwill himself, he just shut the whole thing down.
There is no mechanism for getting the owner in trouble, so the only hope is to go to the press and hope public outcry either shames into better behavior, or forces him to sell. If the problem were limited to a few bad apples, then maybe that could work. But by now, when we’ve seen a new version of this story every few months for several years, I think we can conclude that the problem is not limited to a few bad actors in positions of power. No, the problem is the power that concentrates at the top of hierarchies when workers are not empowered to speak up for themselves, and where official rules are superseded by “unwritten rules” that flow from the whims of the owner. In other words, the problem is not the people — it’s the system.