How to Handle a Workplace Bully

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  staffingworker10/28/08 Report as spam
  1

  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  The last company I worked at should write an article on How to Hire a Workplace Bully

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  BNETcomment10/28/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  Great information. BUT most often the bully is the boss or the bosses friend who has a sense that they can 'get away with it'.
  
  My experience is, if you are a white male in your fifties no one will believe you, even your friends.

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  jiking10/28/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  About the last part - what if you are hiring someone who was a victim of bullying so they don't want you calling the bully which led them to look for another job? By the logic of the writer they are a suspect bully. I know of one person I worked for who I definitely don't want future employers contacting and it has nothing to do with my behavior.

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  jameslactao10/28/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  Yes, how about if the bully is a superior of yours? I tried the 'stating the actions' technique, but he seems to flare up quite easily. It dampens morale of the people around.
  
  This is a great article, though! Thanks.

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  gvpdbish10/28/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  What great info. Unfortunately, I was labeled as the workplace bully because I held subordinates accountable for their obligations. Collectively, these millenniums figured out how to band together and exile the boss who held them accountable. Now I am unemployed with a foreclosed house and no health insurance for my family. So what happened to expecting a fair day?s work for a fair day?s pay? Who cares ?lets just all subscribe to mediocrity and pacifism

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  YG88810/28/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  Wow ! Great Stuff for Corporate "Animals" - Bosses and Staff Alike....
  
  Folks at BNet - Thank You Very Much n Keep Up the Good Work pls
  
  Cheers !
  
  A Hayashi

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  scamo10/29/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  @gvpdbish
  
  Blaming others for the situation one is in is also a symptom known to Bullies. It is very egotistical. In your message, you are saying you are not the cause for the problems you have, but the "milleniums" are. Think about it. Could you have done something different at the time? I bet you could have.

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  Caroline Barnes10/29/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  I agree with Job Hopper. All too often it's a case of 'who you know' that protects the worse bullies. Great article though and some interesting guidance points.

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  null10/29/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  As a relatively young manager of a company I try to connect with employees in their early to mid 20s. However, my company manages other people's money. That means my principal responsibility is to our investors and to ensure work gets done in proper and timely way. The vast majority of employess get it. Some do not. There is nothing wrong with making very clear to these employees that "satisified underperformance" is unacceptable.

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  ktjohan5710/29/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  Most bullies I've encountered had a DNA advantage in acquiring and keeping the position they held. I'll never forget one "secretary" (who occupied a coveted office space). This bully managed to get several bosses fired, in addition to the staff of one entire department; leaving HR scrambling to fill the void. People were afraid to be seen talking to whomever happened to be her point of wrath. I left after two years (on my own power, one of the few do do that,thank you very much), but not without an ulcer.
  There was also some scuttlebut that she "had something on each member of the board". I believe what kept me afloat was: A. Staying out of sight, out of the line of fire, quiet and non-confrontational. B. Superior work that saved the company thousands of $. and C. (Most Important) Spending an inordinate amount of on CYA maneuvers! Every moment of company time, every move, every conversation was logged and accounted for (in several locations). This in itself is an abhorrent waste of company time, but on more than one occasion it kept me from getting fired! I was the ONLY person to "survive" this bully's multiple attacks.

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  FactoidFred10/29/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  Most bosses who are perceived as bullies have poor management styles and skills. They still believe in autocratic leadership and compliance-base discipline. This just doesn't work anymore in today's society. These tactics only lead to decreased morale and encourage employees to do one thing-not get caught. A skilled employer will find that if he hires the right people and creates a proper working environment, he won't have to make people do their job, they will want to do it!

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  mewfp10/29/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  I am a firm believer in establishing clear expectations and holding people accountable. If you do decide to make the effort to retain a person of value, know that it will take considerable time and energy to effect the change. Corrective action plans are extremely useful for clearly communicating what changes need to take place but it will require a concerted effort on your part (and co-workers who model the correct behavior) to assist the person in adopting a new way of relating to others. "Bullies" need to learn new response sets and see the value in them. So provide feedback often, maintain vigilance, confront the unwanted behavior when it happens, and hopefully everyone wins. Most people do want to get along; they just need the right strategies to be successful.

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  jodiemer@...10/29/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  How about some clues to handling a 'passive-
  aggressive' type who does most of his sleazy
  undermining and bullying right under the noses
  of the bosses? In the case to which I refer, he
  does just enough to make himself useful to the
  higher ups but his presence is killing morale
  and quality of the whole program.

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  GWashington10/29/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  What do you do when the boss is the Bully, and complaints have been made, but management 'seem' to adore the effect?

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  mewfp10/29/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  jodiemer, the best way to deal with a passive-aggressive personality is to be assertive yourself. Tell people how you want to be treated. Assert your right to be treated with respect and let the person know when they are exhibiting inappropriate behavior and what effect it has on you. As the article stated, focus on the behavior not the person. Attacking the person plays right into their hands and will only result in an escalation of the behavior. Quite frankly, p/a personalities have engrained behaviors which will take a considerable amount of time to change but they will only change if the culture of the corporation supports that change. Don't expect to be able to do it alone. Won't happen. You will find however that once you've asserted your rights, the p/a will typically find someone else to abuse. In the long run, you and GWashington will probably want to seek employment with a company which values human decency and fosters mutual respect among colleagues. Many companies don?t embrace it because it?s hard work and requires managers to think through situations they were never trained to deal with. They adopt the lazy approach to management, quickly recognizing that the termination of a negative stimulus (yelling, bullying, intimidation, etc.) is reinforcing and people will respond to it. What they don?t recognize is that it damages the most precious resource a company has, the human spirit.

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  nfak@...10/29/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  I worked as a summer student at University where we had this lady who was a complete coward. She was incompetent and lived to bully meek summer students. My boss was a researcher and would do nothing about it. She had the audacity to give me a performance review when she had no authority to do so!! It was a painful summer.
  She went on to find other work and survived in the university environment for her whole career.
  In my experience, bullies are overwhelimingly incompetent, easily threatened and have an "in" with management in some way either thru nepotism, seniority/expertise, immunity thru unions or seniority, or provide a vital service like spying and ratting etc.
  However, there is nothing that companies love more than keeping their employees demoralized an paranoid, so I guess bullying will continue to be supported by corporations.

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  geoffreymh11/03/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  Once again, it is left to the commentators to make the difficult points.
  
  Corinne has observed that:
  what most of the posts are saying is that they are caught up in a corporate culture that thinks being a screaming egomaniac is a legitimate management style
  
  And that is the problem. There is a tradition in professional service firms and the corporations that ape them (GE, Ford Motor, Conoco, Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems and many others including, of course, Enron in its day) routinely to force-rank their people and fire a fixed percent?the ?worst of the best?. This destructive search for weakness is called an up-or-out policy.
  
  In his 2001 memoir Jack: Straight from the Gut, Jack Welch (GE?s former CEO) strongly advocates the practice. By the third year of forced firings, ?it is war? he boasts.
  
  But firing underachievers is not quite the same thing as creating a high-performance organization. Up-or-out policies produce intensity and dedication but drive out flexibility and creativity.
  
  What kind of a manager wants to face having to identify his or her lowest-ranking subordinates every year and chose which to fire? Perhaps someone like Henri Christoph, the self-appointed ?King of Haiti?, who used two hundred thousand slaves to build a replica of Louis XIV?s Palace of Versailles at Milot. When work didn?t proceed at the pace he wanted, he followed the Roman decimation technique, butchering every tenth man in a long line. After which construction would pick up, but now with only ninety percent of the workforce to feed.
  
  The myth of the strutting martinet as a great model of a hard-nosed, take-names, kick-arse, no-nonsense type of manager feeds back from the Private Sector into the Public Sector. Robert S. McNamara was the archetype of such relentlessly left-brained, ignorant, inhumanity with his appalling kill ratio. Donald Rumsfeld, correctly seen by Richard Nixon in the early 1970s as "a ruthless little bastard", is the latest example.
  
  The advice on the bnet.com site is all targeted at bullying as if it were a one-off, isolated event. But this situation demands more than a case by case response if we are to achieve the collective mindfulness to guard against further economic catastrophes.
  
  (see www.yalaworld.net)

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  Areyes211/06/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  WHat about if they are state-employees who are a couple yrs from a pension? They don't get fired.

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  ASchm12/15/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  Re: geoffreymh
  
  How to get a bumper crop of bullies at your very own
  company.
  I would say the current financial crisis is pretty much
  going to cinch down every organization to 'up or out'
  policies. Further more, right now I think most
  companies are lining employees up and firing one out
  of every five. That gets most of the work done with
  50% less salaries to maintain. (This is not a really
  productive way to foster the team approach.)
  
  I liken this current 'save the company' approach to
  reducing car maintenance to save money. A car will
  run just fine with low oil, dirty transmission fluids, and
  old breaks...right up to the point everything fails from
  misguided attempts at saving money. This is usually
  at the worst possible moment, and chances are there's
  no cell signals to be found.

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  creative leader12/19/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  The author neglected to mention what to do if the workplace bully is the founder/owner, the COO is her daughter, the Chief Marketing Officer is the other daughter and the husband is also a senior officer. All family members and those who wanted to get ahead became bullys and condoned each other's behavior. I worked remotely for the org for five months and resigned because even from afar, the humiliation of employees on conference calls, pressure to say "yes" to everything leadership desired and the blackballing of those who didn't go along and eventual termination of some, was an unproductive and abusive environment. What bothers me is, those that stayed in their jobs, aren't there because they want to be, they are there because it's a smaller city and jobs are scarce especially in this economy, and they are suffering in a very abusive work environment. What advice can you offer those who need their jobs for survival but don't want to be fired for insubordination?

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  Nawzadi12/27/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  Hello Sir,
  
  At first I thank you so much for offering me a chance to your site and secondly I would like to say that you have posted a great and productive information. It is really a good work and I highly appreciated your work.
  
  Many thank
  
  Nawzadi

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  joyful11212/29/08 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  I was hired by the CEO of a company to act as a go-between between the owner and teh staff. the owner was a bully of the worst variety. I found the best way to handle her was to pander to her ego. When she would organise a dinner and no-one would turn up, I would tell her it was because, in the scheme of the company she was too 'big' and that intimidated the staff. After a couple of failed attempts I advised her that maybe she could 'let' me help her out and take over the organised dinners and outings.
  I also got the staff to ask for her assistance on matters that they already knew the answer to but the simple fact of feeling needed and knowledgible helped curb her bullying.
  Most bullies have inherently low self esteem so if you can do something within the company to 'pander' to this and help boost their own worth, things generally improve.
  I also wrote a report on what lower staff morale was costing the company and how the high staff turnover was costing. I 'pandered' to her own ego by 'suggesting' that she was like the principle of the school, all powerful and all seeing but in the best interests of the company, it was best if she let the department supervisors handle their owwn department problems.
  It was difficult as it was a family company owned by husband and wife that both worked for the company. I suggested enough times that having an office too close to the employees was detrimental to them as they could not focus on what they needed and that they could allocate those offices to lesser staff and take a couple of back offices that were quieter.
  She still blew up at times but I would always intervene and never became loud or angry at her. When all other strategies failed I would explain in a soft but firm voice that her behaviour was unacceptable and that the last thing the company needed was a high employee turnover and that if she could walk away and let someone else handle the situation, that ultimately the company would profit. In the end, money talks, so when all else has failed, find a way to pander to the bully's ego or greed to try and improve the situation.
  I know this may seem dishonest but think of it as positive reinforcement. It is like having a child, you need to try and catch them doing the good things and praise them for it instead of just focusing on the 'bad' behaviour. Trust me, it works and even on the few occasions it doesn't, there is a consolation in the knowledge that you are the one controlling the situation by your positive reinforcement (Okay manipulation) skills.
  Treat bullies as children and use the same techniques found in many parenting books and you will eventually win.

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  bequeathed01/07/09 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  Don't you eventually become a Bully just to survive?
  I mean I have been working with a couple of
  bullies for over three years and I finally have started
  pushing back. I've had a supervisor scream at me in my
  small cubicle and the whole office heard him. I've had
  another person consistently knock down my ideas and
  run me down at every email. I noticed these bullies tend
  to also be fat, heavy, tall. Just like the playgrounds.
  They also steal your work, just like they stole your
  answers in school. Some people never change.

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  Go Big Blue01/09/09 Report as spam
  24

  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  Bullying breaks downs the entire organization over time. Personally, confrontatiuon bothers me, however, when it is necessary, I have no problem with addressing an issue. Most people will not confront issues and address these issues through reporting... as a director, manager, or supervisor we must take action! The worst thing we can do is "nothing". The message sent to the bully is, "I approve of your actions"; while the message sent to the reportee is, "You are not valued." In short... TAKE ACTION!!! Peace

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  bequeathed01/10/09 Report as spam
  25

  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  I took action. I have gone to HR and reported, for the
  record, inappropriate behavior that has occurred and will
  continue to submit my grievances. It is HR's job to
  handle these situations and they know the laws more
  than anyone else.
  
  I won't tolerate anyone bullying my staff and I always
  stick up for them at the expense of my own reputation
  coming across as contentious.

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  valenrobas@...01/14/09 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  The HR are an appendage of bullying Managers and likes to wear the hat of management. HR helps bullying managers to escape... their bullying crimes. Until the issue of the role played by the HR in an establishment is resolved, the managers will continue to be protected under the management hude instead of allowing them to face the music as an individual offending officer.

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  bequeathed01/14/09 Report as spam
  27

  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  Oh great. I had no idea that HR was helping the bullying
  managers. Hmm. Maybe joining the union is not a bad
  idea after all.

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  riddlywalker01/24/09 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  At least karma takes care of them in the end- the intimidating senior manager who made our lives a misery, and created a culture of vile management behaviour was promoted to head office and lasted all of six weeks before he was fired for exactly the same behaviour- too stupid to change his ways in a new situation....

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  Andre Smith01/29/09 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  Temperament is comparable to Diamonds. You might succeed in shaping it but it is still remains a diamond and will always be. People with bad temperaments can cost your company great losses. The solution lies in one of two options. ?Get rid of? or ?invest money? by sending that person on an ?interpersonal leadership training course?. Principled leadership simply means ?the right people are doing the right things, for the right people, in the right way, at the right time, in the right place, at the right cost, and for the right reasons.? Any compromise simply means a failure in leadership, at the cost of other people?s happiness. It should never be tolerated.

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  sjbenoit01/30/09 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  Bullies rarely see their behaviour as bulling, but rather as performance management. They often see themselves as "being on top of things". I would agree with others who have stated that bullies lack self-confidence, but would suggest that they also have a drive to make things better (even if only for themselves). Harness that energy for good, and you can actually change things. On the other hand, I also hear about bullying when the real problem is the employee complaining. No, I don't think that screaming or disciplining someone in public is ever appropriate, but what about the manager who is closely supervising an employee because he/she is not getting their work done?
  
  In the end, I'd agree with the previous comments that workplace bullying is more complicated than suggested in the article, but, after all, it isn't a thesis, it is a short article.
  

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  catmattice01/31/09 Report as spam
  31

  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  This is great advice and I'm glad to see more out there on bullies. Unfortunately at this point, however, many HR professionals don't even understand what a bully is. If I told people I'm a sexual harassment consultant, they'd know what that meant immediately. When I tell HR I'm a workplace bully consultant, I often have to explain myself, provide a definition, and describe why they might be interested (i.e., why bullies are detrimental to orgs and victims). Hopefully with more blogs like this we can increase awareness.
  
  Check out www.noworkplacebullies.com for more tips on dealing with a workplace bully.

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  Jonny Buckets02/19/09 Report as spam
  32

  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  You guys are making it out to be harder than it really is! Ridding the workplace of the bully can be accomplished in the time that it takes to say a simple sentence - which is, of course, "that I was uncomfortable with Jim putting his hand on my leg yesterday."
  
  Problem solved.

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  Sunitha.G.V.03/14/09 Report as spam
  33

  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  How about if the bully is a superior of yours? I tried the 'stating the actions' technique,It dampens morale of the people around. If he is thick skin what you say .
  
  

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  BNETcomment03/24/09 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  The real problem with office bullying:
  
  Bosses that don't see it, don't want to see and that don't want to deal with it. Or the bully is a friend. Then blame the employee who complains about it!
  
  Read The Bully at Work by Niemi -- a good read on why bullying happens and who the bully targets. Most frequently to the conscientious workers.

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  jenhall07/19/09 Report as spam
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  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  I think the bullying as outlined in this article is not as subtle as Ive seen, and when it consists of smoke and mirrors it is so difficult to pin down. The strategy that helped identify the issue was a concerted effort to gather data over time as there were numerous very small occurances, but once viewed from above, you could see the destruction that was at play.
  
  Also so often there is a rise in bullying in response to change implementation....Im a supporter of the direct approach in this instance...here is the change...if you can go with it great! if not ....well theres seek.com!

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  caifu_yang08/06/09 Report as spam
  36

  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  May be you are right!

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  ArticlesFind08/08/09 Report as spam
  37

  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  What if your boss is the bulley? What then?http://articlesfind.com/Career/

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  estetik10/21/09 Report as spam
  38

  RE: How to Handle a Workplace Bully

  Collectively, these millenniums figured out how to band together and exile the boss who held them accountable. vajina estetigi