How rage coaches are helping Hollywood take on powerful jerks

“Bullies used to be OK in Hollywood,” says Carole Kirschner, who runs the WGA’s showrunner training program and is often charged with teaching writers who have never been managers how to run a writers room. “The sun is setting on them. It’s long overdue, and I don’t think we’re going to go backward.” The ability of workers to call out their bosses, either on company review websites like Glassdoor or on social media, means that managers are more on their toes about their behavior. “People are not willing to come up in the industry in the same way they did 25 years ago,” says McLaughlin, who was the director of consulting and executive education at the Center for Effective Organizations at USC’s Marshall School of Business. “The expectation of employees is completely different now.” Differences in generational values have been shaping corporate environments for the past 15 or so years, since millennials began joining the workforce, but entertainment and media, a typically more insular industry community, has been slower to adapt, McLaughlin says. The fact that even entry-level entertainment jobs are highly coveted and competitive has contributed to a culture where abuse has been tolerated as part of paying one’s dues, though that is now changing. “People leave organizations now because of their bosses, not because of pay and compensation,” she says.