[acb-hsp] When Bullies Go to Work

[Donna Rose]

Me too Jessie.  I work at a very good place now, however, I don't get into 
the office gossip.  Some of the people who do are very unhappy.  I think 
this employer is the best for which I have ever worked.  I have done some 
radical things sometimes to change the system and I was even slightly 
disciplined for it once, but even that time my actions created change.  In 
another setting I could have been bullied over this stuff.  I got enough of 
that as a child.  Back then I tried to insulate myself from it by ignoring 
my bullies.  I may have said this before, but I often wonder what was going 
on in the houses of kids who became bullies.  It must have been terrible for 
them.  I don't believe evil is inherent, but maybe I am wrong.




Go Bravely,
Donna Rose, LMSW

"computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they 
make it easier to do don't need to be done."
-Andy Rooney 1919-2011
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "J.Rayl" <thedogmom63 at frontier.com>
To: "Discussion list for ACB human service professionals" <acb-hsp at acb.org>
Sent: Saturday, March 10, 2012 8:13 AM
Subject: Re: [acb-hsp] When Bullies Go to Work


> Hi.  Greatarticle.  I work with people who are referred by their EAP
> (employer Assistance Program) and often, this is exactly what is going on
> with them--being bullied at work.  This is one reason it is essential to
> work with bullies as children, because child bullies grow up to be adult
> bullies.  Its a personality thing.  And, having been there--victim of the
> bully, both as a child and adult employee, its one of the most unpleasant
> places you want to find yourself.
>
> Jessie Rayl
> thedogmom63 at frontier.com
> www.facebook.com/Eaglewings10
> www.pathtogrowth.org
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "peter altschul" <paltschul at centurytel.net>
> To: "Acbhsp" <acb-hsp at acb.org>; <gmail.com at mail2.acb.org>
> Sent: Friday, March 09, 2012 8:59 PM
> Subject: [acb-hsp] When Bullies Go to Work
>
>
> 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
>  ininB plus Alterationet Mobile Edition
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