- Threat to professional status – including belittling opinions, public professional humiliation, accusations regarding lack of effort, intimidating use of discipline or competence procedures
- Threat to personal standing – including undermining personal integrity, destructive innuendo and sarcasm, making inappropriate jokes about target, persistent teasing, name calling, insults, intimidation
- Isolation – including preventing access to opportunities, physical or social isolation, withholding necessary information, keeping the target out of the loop, ignoring or excluding
- Overwork – including undue pressure, impossible deadlines, unnecessary disruptions
- Destabilisation – including failure to acknowledge good work, allocation of meaningless tasks, removal of responsibility, repeated reminders of blunders, setting target up to fail, shifting goal posts without telling the target
The
behaviors I have been witness to mostly fall under the categories—Threat to personal standing and Isolation. I’m interested in discussing Threat to personal standing in this post today. The bullies use humor, sarcasm, and
inappropriate jokes to belittle employees, mostly during meetings where other
professionals are present. The intent is to diminish the personal and
professional standing of the target in the eyes of those who are present at the
meeting; there is absolutely no doubt about that. They may do this in a way
that gets the people who are present at the meeting to laugh at the expense of
the target, but it leaves a bad taste in their mouths afterward. Why is that?
Because those who were present and who witnessed this bad behavior know that
they have been privy to a power play—bully
denigrating target. The target, usually an employee who works for the
bully, is often clueless and cannot defend himself or herself. And even if the
target is not clueless, he or she is reluctant to fight back in a meeting
setting, mostly because these types of people are often civilized and
professional, in contrast to the bully. But fighting back and causing a scene
would probably be the best thing for all involved. In this way the bully would
be exposed for the creep he or she really is, and the target at least is able
to verbalize that he or she has been abused. The target risks of course being
told that he or she is ‘too sensitive, takes things too personally, to get over
it, suck it up’ and so on. But that is when he or she must stand strong and not
buckle under the pressure applied by the bully to admit that the bully may be right. Because the bully is not
right. The bully must not be allowed to create
confusion in the minds of the target or the others present at a meeting.
What the targets
have to understand is that they are true threats to the bully. The bullies envy
them. They have something that the bully does not have and will never have—a
professional approach to their work and a decency and civilized comportment that
is sorely lacking in the bullies. Most bullies are stupid and crude people; I
mean that quite seriously. Their crudeness may not be overtly manifest, but it’s
there. They don’t like most people either because they are certain that they
are better than most other people. They have ridden on the coattails
of their (often smarter) employees for years, basking in the success that belongs (or should
belong) to these other more competent individuals. They are often unhappy people in
their personal lives; and we all know the old saying—that misery loves company.
But these bullies take it one step further; they want to destroy the mental
well-being of the people they envy. Their behavior should be blocked
in a workplace setting; unfortunately that is often not the case. They are free
to proceed with their belittling behavior because they sit in positions of
power, or simply because they are obnoxious and difficult people who dominate
the environments they find themselves in, where their peers (those of equal status and equal power level) merely smile in
a bemused way at their behavior. In this way, they are free to continue to
behave badly as long as no one stands up to them and says ‘stop’. More people
should overcome their civilized natures and stand up to bullies. It won’t lead
to politically correct meetings, nor should it. That’s the point. We need to
abolish political correctness where it protects the bullies at the expense of
their targets.
