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Banning Workplace Bullies

A company that tolerates bullying is a dysfunctional company — and that dysfunction is very likely to impact on the bottom line. Here’s how to prevent bullies from damaging your business
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Steve Rudd, an IT and services professional from Tennessee, USA, returned to work from a long weekend a few years ago to find he was starting to get some highly peculiar reactions from the people answering his phone calls.

A bit of digging revealed a co-worker he held in high esteem because of his creativity — who happened to work in the corporate telecommunications group — had been induced by a foe to change Rudd’s name in the phone system to Forest Gump (from the movie starring Tom Hanks).

Never one to be intimidated, Rudd bought the co-worker lunch and plotted his revenge: a WAV file planted on the instigator’s PC that produced a snoring sound whenever his PC went into screensaver mode, (chosen because the individual was frequently out of the office and kept his door locked).

Another corporate bully set his sights on Rudd some years ago. His biggest demand was that all who worked for him be “team players”, which in his eyes clearly meant accepting the philosophy of “his way or the highway”.

“I refused to play along,” Rudd relates. “One day he was chairing a rather large department meeting where he was giving a ‘teamwork’ speech. His favourite phrase was ‘There is no ‘I’ in TEAM,’” Rudd says.

“He made that statement several times through his dissertation. Finally, he repeated the phrase, adding ‘Isn’t that right Mr Rudd’ pointing me out in the crowd. My reply even caught me off guard: ‘That’s true, and there’s no U either’. The laughter was deafening . . .”

Bullies are fun to mess with, Rudd says. They simply don’t know what to do with people who refuse to be intimidated. And if you get your retaliation right, you can even stop the bully from gaining any benefit from their bad behaviour. Adopt the right mind set, he says, and you can easily turn those tables.

The trouble is, of course, that bullies thrive precisely because there are always some people prone to intimidation even as others eagerly take up the cudgels to defend themselves against those they perceive to be bullying them. And corporate warfare, where the strong stand up for themselves and retaliate at will while the more easily intimidated suffer in miserable — and typically highly unproductive — silence, is no answer to the problem of workplace bullying.

Of course workplace bullying is something that is as old as the workplace itself, its causes buried somewhere deep within the human psyche. But a workplace which permits bullying — and in the still largely-macho world of IT bullying is probably more likely to flourish than elsewhere — is a dysfunctional workplace, and that dysfunction is very likely to reveal itself in the corporate bottom line.

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Comments

1

Jerry Bushell (no relation to the author)

Sun 12/07/2009 - 22:27

Banning Workplace Bullies

The article presumes that the Human Resources department is not itself involved in bullying. This is a very dangerous assumption.
In the Bully on Line website forum, members frequently post comments about how unhelpful & condoning of bullying HR departments tend to be. In fact, HR departments frequently use bullying tactics thus helping the bully as an alternative to dealing properly with the situation. In general, it is easier to deal with a complaint by dismissing it, no matter how unjustly, rather than going to the bother of investigation. As soon as that happens they have set a precedent that a bully will use knowing the HR department will back them & dismiss the complaints of the bullied. The result is a toxic workplace culture in which bullying becomes the norm & little actual work is achieved.
Perhaps the reason why bullying is particularly rife in public services & organisations is the lack of commercial incentive. In others, the dysfunction of bullying will make it uncompetitive & the company will eventually fail. Not so public services where an ever greater amount of tax revenue gets pumped in as the organisation achieves less & less. One characteristic of these becomes a clear divide between the favoured & the unfavoured in terms of travel expenses, time out of the workplace on visits, subsistence & all other "privileges" of the job. One employee may receive many times their official salary whilst his colleague is denied even th means to travel to essential meetings.
Yet HR departments both condone & perpetuate these divisions.
In the past, strong trade unions prevented workplace abuse. Now it seems they are little more than extensions of HR departments. Pity the public sector worker in a toxic environment. The only option is to leave, often with no hope of a good employer reference, only the stigma of apparently having failed in an "easy" (i.e. unpressured by commercial consideration) environment.

2

rahesh pandit

Sun 16/05/2010 - 21:53

I worked in British Telecom Offshore delivery center in Pune known as colocation centers. After few weeks i found that BT program managers were resorting to mobbing to get their work done at a low price and in un imaginably short time scales. Bullying and mobbing were used to enslave employees of the offshore IT services providers like TechM, TCS, infosys etc . People were openly threatened isolated and some them fired to force others into compliance. People were made to work continuously for extended hours(14-16 Hrs daily) and on weekends for months together. Every month a few team member are expelled from teams labelled as not meeting expectation.(and promptly fired). and new ones brought in.

The worst part is BT (and its offshore partners) publicize this method as Agile methodology and a shining example of collaboration.

if a respectable name BT is resorting to this kinds methods we can imagine the situation in the third world and economies like India.

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