The Assistant and workplace complicity

Last night, I was flipping through Hulu and came across The Assistant.  I hadn’t heard of this film, and so watched a dreary, green/blue filtered trailer, and yet… I was mesmerized.

If you haven’t heard of this film, it features Julie Garner of Ozark fame, as a junior assistant to a film mogul.  It is a barely veiled narrative of Miramax Pictures and Harvey Weinstein. It has excellent critical ratings, but poor audience ratings. It’s a day-in-the-life type of film, without a lot of action. It’s quiet and thoughtful.

The film takes place over the course of one day and effectively portrays the monotony of an entry-level employee.  Garner’s character is treated with indifference, even by the male assistants, who throw balled-up paper at her to get her attention. She handles her day as she has for the last two months, which is how long she’s been working there. She conducts her job, including cleaning up an unspecified stain on the couch, with the detached routine of someone who has been doing this for years.  She neatly stacks medicine for erectile dysfunction. She cleans up her boss’s syringes from the trash and puts them in a medical waste bag. She grows increasingly uncomfortable with a stream of young women coming in for meetings she doesn’t have on the schedule.

You watch this movie and ask why doesn't she quit? Why isn’t she more vocal about what is going on?  When she sees an HR representative, she has trouble translating her gut feeling that something is wrong into actual evidence of misconduct. The HR rep gaslights her into believing she is a jealous employee and remarks that there are 400 more applicants that could take her job.  

She needs this job. She likely has no money saved to live on. She is fresh out of college. She will not be able to live without it.  At what point will she have enough and move on?

Everyone, from the assistants to the producers to HR cover for the mogul.  It’s this complicity that you see wear her down. How have the others remained complicit in their leader’s behavior and at what emotional and ethical cost? 

This situation is sadly true in many businesses.  I have been Garner’s character. 

When I was 31, I was running a local 5-day conference for one of my association clients. I was 7 months pregnant, so the client footed the bill for me to stay at the hotel. On-site event management can run 15-16 hrs per day. Providing a room meant I didn’t have to commute an additional 45-minutes each way. I really appreciated it.

On the second day of the event, the president of the organization, who was also local and so was not staying at the hotel, asked for my room key so he could take a nap. I declined, saying I didn’t feel comfortable with that. He replied “We’re paying the bill and I want to take a nap. Give me the keys.”

After a few rounds of discussion,  I ended up conceding, but I dropped the client shortly thereafter. I spent the rest of the conference wondering if he had gone through my personal things.

He was known for his aggressive, boundary-pushing behavior, so his colleagues brushed it off. No one ever called him out on it.  It’s similar to a bully in a playground. If you ignore the behavior, perhaps that behavior will never be directed at you. But it rarely works that way. It's frightening what can come to be considered acceptable. After so many years of allowing poor behavior, people stop seeing it, or worse - laugh about it. 

Why do we allow it? Why do we become complicit?

Leaders with huge egos and toxic behavior have a style they tend to use with their staff to keep them in place. They will shame and yell, often over the most mundane issue, so that you feel terrible about yourself, but then provide tiny bits of praise throughout your interactions with them. As they bring you farther and farther down, you become more susceptible to those smallest bits of praise. Your identity suffers as you begin to lose sight of your value. 

It took me until I was 44 years old to quit a job because I knew something wasn’t right.  I am fortunate I had another job lined up, but many people feel stuck in their positions. You can work toward being polished by speaking up. It’s SO HARD to speak up. You will second guess yourself every step of the way. In fact, you will question why no one else is speaking up. That there must be something wrong with you. But you must find the courage and self-conviction to do it. If nothing changes, work on finding a new job as quickly as possible.

XO-
Michele