[acb-hsp] When Bullies Go to Work

[peter altschul]

When Bullies Go To Work
  Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon March 8, 2012
  My friend Dennisinin remembers the exact moment he knew he'd 
had enough.  Enough of the "nonstop nagging and ostracizing and 
accusing" that had become his weekday routine.  He was standing 
on the platform of the subway station at Union Square, leaning 
out toward the tracks to see if the train was approaching.  "And 
I thought, if I don't pull back, if I stay here like this, so 
many problems will be solved."
  Dennis' tormenter? Not a schoolyard thug shaking him down for 
lunch money, but a high-ranking executive in one of the largest 
financial institutions in the country.  When the mean kids of 
your childhood grow up, they don't all evolve into self-aware, 
contrite adults Sometimes, they just move from the playground to 
the corner office.
  Dennis says that his problems began the day he dared to point 
out a flaw in his supervisor's report during a meeting.  From 
there, he was swiftly taken off a project he'd been immersed in 
and moved to one "I literally didn't know anything about." He was 
also, unlike the other members of his team, billed for taking the 
company's car service after working late one night.  "They told 
me I didn't have to work overtime and accused me of malingering," 
he says.  But what sticks with him now, long after he's left, are 
the sly humiliations and social ostracizations.  Like when he 
broke a toe and couldn't wear business shoes, he was sent up to 
the vice president's office and made to show him his swollen, 
purple foot.
  "They'd call meetings and not tell me," he says.  "I'd see them 
going into the conference room without me.  They'd go out for 
lunch afterward and not include me." His department abruptly 
banished office birthday parties in March, and resumed them in 
May.  "My birthday is in April," he explains.  Unlike the guy in 
his department who a year earlier leaped to his death out a 
window, Dennis, fortunately, got out in time.  By then his hair 
was turning gray.  He was having self-destructive thoughts on the 
subway platform.  And so even though it was the height of a 
recession, "I went in and I quit without having another job," he 
says.
  "There's exclusion, there's cliques -- the same as school 
bullying," says Cheryl Dellasega, a relational aggression expert 
who's written "Mean Girls Grown Up" and "When Nurses Hurt 
Nurses." But unlike school bullying, she says, the issue is still 
not widely addressed.  "There's a definite lack of awareness.  
People are very surprised when they think about these things 
happening in the workplace." Yet it's all around us -- a 2010 
workplace bullying study found that 35 percent of workers say 
they have experienced bullying firsthand and another 15 percent 
report witnessing it.
  It happened to Nicole, who worked for two years in the 
marketing division of a fashion company.  She sensed the 
organization might be a less than great fit when she didn't wear 
makeup to work one day -- and someone said to me, "What's wrong 
with your face?" Before long, she says her boss would "wait till 
I left the office, ask for changes on work, and expect them 
before I'd returned." And when she returned to the office after 
several days off, she says, "Then my boss really started turning 
on me, not giving me work.  I got a written warning about my 
attitude.  My boss would litter her emails with smiley faces, and 
I'd get called into the office and told that my emails were too 
bfrosty." I was in complete shock.  I'm a really tough cookie," 
Nicole says.  "I went to school for business.  And I started to 
have panic attacks at work."
  For Beth, who worked for a cosmetics company, bullying stress 
hit her in the gut.  She got off on the wrong foot when her aunt 
died on her first day at the job.  "I told my boss I had to leave 
and she said, `Well what other days are you taking off?`" After 
that, she says, it got worse.  "If I was leaving at 5:45, she'd 
say, `Just because I leave at 5:45, that's not a green light for 
you to leave." And when she had to take time off for surgery, her 
boss asked, `Can you change it? We have all these conference 
calls coming up; you're going to have to do this from home." Beth 
says, "When HR put me on disability, she went ballistic."
  After that, "She would yell at me in front of other people.  
Having worked on Wall Street, I've been yelled at and screamed 
at, but this was bullying like I've never seen.  I got yelled at 
in the hallway one day and almost threw up at work." And when 
Beth complained to HR, she says she was told, "Isn't it a little 
early to not be getting along with your co-workers?" Beth was 
able to set up a safety net consulting gig and jumped ship, but 
the scars of the experience run deep.  "I felt so rejected," she 
says.  "I have yet to update my LinkedIn profile because I'm so 
terrified of the idea of those people looking at it."
  Dennis, Nicole and Beth worked in different industries in 
different parts of the country.  Yet in many ways they all fit 
the profile of a workplace target.  Dellasega says office bullies 
tend to have an "inner lack of confidence that causes them to 
lash out" -- something a competitive workplace feeds on 
exquisitely.  So who do they look for in the pecking order? "The 
most thoroughly competent person," says Dr.  Gary Namie of the 
Workplace Bullying Institute.  "The person is well-liked, has 
empathy, is ethical, and so has whistle-blower potential, and 
doesn't want to get involved in office politics.  They all say, 
"I loved my job.  I just wanted to be left alone to do it." They 
can't believe this happened to them.  What distinguishes a target 
from a bully-proof person is the target thinks, it must be me."
  Part of what makes workplace bullying so insidious is that it's 
so deeply entrenched in the corporate cultures where it 
flourishes.  It's not just one jerk -- it's a whole department of 
sycophants and terrorized underlings.  As Liza, who works in 
graphic design, says, "One of my bosses likes to throw paperwork 
on the floor so we have to get on our knees.  I commonly see a 
reaction of, `That's just how he is,` or `He's just having a bad 
day,` when an incident occurs." Namie says this is common.  "The 
whole group adopts the practice out of survival and fear, and 
over time it becomes the norm and the bullying becomes 
institutionalized.  It's about loyalty," he says.  "Once you 
start promoting people for that kind of behavior, you've sent the 
message."
  The stigma of being the unpopular kid in the lunchroom, of 
playing what Nicole calls the "emotional Russian roulette" of the 
workweek can wear a person down and wreak havoc on a person's 
health.  Unlike bullied kids, Namie says, "Adults are not nearly 
as resilient.  When they're devastated, recovery is so hard." If 
you love what you do and you take pride in it, it's traumatic to 
spend your days among people who undermine your confidence and 
tell you you're bad at it.  "Throughout every single week -- 
sometimes every day -- they would point out something wrong I'd 
done.  And the constant phrase was, "You should have known,`" 
says Dennis.  "It bothers me to this day."
  In a brutal economy, the options aren't always as easy as 
simply walking out and going somewhere nicer.  And the toxic 
workplace has been around since long before the first scribes got 
their butts chewed out for sloppy papyrus work.  But it's 
heartening that we're beginning to make strides to raise 
awareness and make the workplace less toxic.  "We're focusing on 
prevention; we're doing seminars on civility," Cheryl Dellasega 
says.  "Employers have to be more proactive now," because 
"bullying impacts on productivity." Statistics are hard to come 
by because targets themselves don't always connect the dots 
between their absenteeism-causing migraines and ulcers and their 
aggressive colleagues, but Dellasega says at least 5 percent of 
workers say they've deliberately not gone in to work because of 
stress there.
  Work can be stressful.  Colleagues can be difficult.  It's 
sometimes easy to chalk it up to a high-pressure business or a 
prickly supervisory style, to suffer in silence and chalk it up 
to the nature of the industry.  But just like school or family, 
your job isn't supposed to give you headaches or high blood 
pressure or anxiety attacks or suicidal thoughts.  If it is, 
there's something seriously wrong.  As Namie says, "Did you ever 
wake up on a weekday and say, `Today's the day I deserve to be 
humiliated?`" And if you didn't in grade school, why would you 
believe it now?
  stinin Some names and identifying details have been changedst
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