It happened to me: the experience of shame after I was quite brutally dropped from teaching on a leadership course. Though the whole incident was unfair and badly managed, still I felt ashamed and exposed. Since then, I became increasingly tuned in to the emotional consequences of shame in the working environment.

Feelings of shame & failure inspire strong emotions
The public nature of working in an organization makes us more exposed to humiliation and vulnerable to shame.  Feelings of failure can evoke strong emotions often linked to individual vulnerabilities and disruptive organizational dynamics.

An excessive fear of losing the positive image of oneself is often related to a work setting where difficulties and complex problems are not dealt with in an open way, and where it does not feel possible to acknowledge that mistakes are sometimes inevitable and poor performance is not just the responsibility of one or few individuals. In such a context, relationship among staff tend to be defensive and blaming of each other, hindering the possibility of learning from experience.

Lack of trust
Martin, a head nurse, was escorted out of his hospital. He was denied access to his computer and suspended from his duties with immediate effect. He felt devastated and ashamed: his whole career was on the line. His mistake and lapse of judgement didn’t seem to match the severity of the penalty.

He came to me having had a difficult relationship with his boss.  He felt unsupported and criticized by her and the situation had been deteriorating for some time.  There was little formal supervision and he had been openly criticised in front of senior colleagues. Martin’s response had been to withdraw, focus on his clinical work and become less involved with his managerial duties. He was feeling more and more isolated and was thinking of looking for another job.

There had been instances of deaths and serious medical complications as a result of poor practice in a number of hospitals. Martin’s area of work, acute medicine, had increasingly become the focus of attention both inside and outside the hospital, and had inevitably absorbed some of the anxiety around death on behalf of the whole institution. The resulting paranoid atmosphere caused him to retreat into his own position rather than look for help and understanding from his colleagues and manager.

When an opportunity to present at a conference abroad came up, Martin decided to do it in a private capacity.  He didn’t tell his boss – he was angry with her and also fearful she would block this initiative, even if he was doing it in his own time. However, he forgot to book leave for the days of the conference. Jane eventually found out and, while Martin was away, started a fraud investigation in the belief that he had carried out a private assignment during his hospital hours. By the time that he had returned, Jane had already formed a strong view against him.  She suspended him with immediate effect.

Martin’s hospital was under a lot of scrutiny: what happened to him mirrored the dynamics of mistrust and criticism the hospital was daily experiencing from the wider context outside the institution.

Feeling like an impostor
Joe, a senior executive in a large global company, had enjoyed a good career. He was promised a new role that he felt was well earned after many years of hard work. His new boss encouraged him to apply for the position, but eventually chose someone else. Joe was devastated. He felt betrayed by his ‘work family’ and profoundly humiliated.

It was a ‘public’ humiliation: everyone knew he had applied and he was expecting to get the job. His current role was also going to be made obsolete in the next few months and he now found himself without a clear career future, facing the possibility of redundancy.

Joe thought his career was now crumbling and he started to doubt his own value and competence.

He felt paranoid about his organization, fearing people would find out he wasn’t really what they originally thought.

 His emotional reactions were clearly linked to a difficult upbringing and inner vulnerability. However, the organizational culture- highly competitive and quite ruthless- contributed to his experience of shame.

Fearing the loss of power
Louisa, a senior medical consultant in a large teaching hospital, was accused of bullying behaviour towards a number of the junior staff. The medical director decided not to suspend her and opting for her to undertake an intensive coaching programme instead.

When I met her, Louisa was in shock, struggling to come to terms with the way she had been portrayed and experienced by some of the staff at her hospital. She couldn’t recognize the person they were describing. Years of excellent clinical practice seemed to have evaporated in the context of these complaints.

Her response to this situation was connected to her experience of her position and role, acquired through, and it was coloured by an underlying disbelief that her behaviour could be questioned after such a distinguished career.    She struggled to acknowledge how profoundly affected she was as a result of the accusations of bullying and how anxious she felt about going back to the hospital to re-engage with the people who have complained about her behaviour.

Recovery from Shame
While these clients’ responses to shame were all different, they were equally powerful. Their feelings of vulnerability and sense of failure were strongly linked to their personal history and backgrounds.

Both Martin and Joe had complex family backgrounds. Work had provided a refuge where they had escaped their upbringing and had been able to prove their value. However, they had often felt ambivalent about their worth, as if they were still questioning their entitlement and competence. At a deeper level, the ‘fall from grace’ represented a confirmation of these doubts; it was experienced as a profound trauma, an attack on their primary identity.

In contrast, Louisa struggled to come to terms with the challenge to her well-established position and status – the result of a privileged background and also of dedication and hard work. She felt shaken and humiliated, but her sense of self-worth remained largely intact. Her reaction was also influenced by the organizational response. While Martin was suspended and almost expelled by his organization and Joe spent many months in a marginalized and uncertain position, Louisa was protected from humiliation and given the opportunity to review her behaviour. Louisa’s organization offered a more mature response to the situation, perhaps reflecting her seniority and role.

Shame affects both the organization and the individual
It is the possibility of shame that leads organizations to act too quickly and get rid of ‘the bad apple’ without thinking. It is the shame of being seen to do something wrong or to be experienced as inadequate that contributes to the collapse of confidence and competence in the individuals involved.

How to move beyond
Professor Paul Hogett makes a useful distinction between depressive shame and paranoid shame, with the former “quite a healthy emotion because it might lead us to be disappointed with ourselves

and therefore resolved to address our failures and meet our goals and ideas.  Paranoid shame might be a much more corrosive feeling of humiliation where one feels just not good enough … all or nothing, where failure means uselessness”.

The challenge for organizations and individuals is to move from persecutory shame to depressive shame, accepting shame as, at times, an inevitable ingredient of the complexity of organizational life- being able to feel ashamed without collapsing under the scrutiny of other people.

In these three examples, I was able to restore some capacity for reflection and a sense of perspective.  Martin learned to recognise his own responsibility in the situation without taking the victim position and blaming it all on his manager and the organization. Joe put a lot of energy into rebranding himself within the company and eventually found a suitable role and Louisa’s consultancy journey was about understanding her behaviour and how she came across to junior staff, without using her clinical expertise as a defence for her bullying approach.

The consultancy process helped the individuals to deal with feelings of guilt and despair and to manage the wish to blame others or give it all up.