Dealing with workplace bullies

Marina Salandy-Brown writes a weekly column for the Newsday. 

In quoting the title of a new book I skimmed in a bookshop while abroad, I seek to offend no one. The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal With People Who Treat You Like Dirt is by Stanford University Professor Robert Sutton.

It is apparently yet another elaboration of an essay the savvy don penned for the Harvard Business Review in 2007 that turned into a bestseller, The No Asshole Rule.

The newest book deals with what to do about bad behaviour from colleagues in the workplace, which is something most working people have encountered before the end of their working life, regardless of gender, level, profession or country.

The workplace bully is a truly universal phenomenon. Sutton has received over 8,000 e-mails from people whose daily lives are made miserable by the anticipation of the next slight or put-down, the next insult or harmful action.

The Survival Guide outlines the various types of bullies. We all know the aggressive type but equally widespread is the passive-aggressive. These don’t attack but undermine other individuals and corrode the atmosphere of the workplace, influencing company culture as a result.

The author recognises that most people imagine the mean behaviour to be targeted at them alone but often the meanness is pervasive. That is not to say that that person is not out to get you. Shakespeare’s line from Julius Caesar about smiling and being a villain comes to mind.

I know stories of “friends” who throw you to the wolves at the board meeting, making your ideas their own or berating your course of action, only to accept the same plan when suggested by others.

In the USA it may still be common practice to exclude African-Americans from certain meetings to disadvantage them. But minorities are not the only victims, women have always suffered from that sort of exclusion.

Sutton recommends you try to observe how co-workers are treated and how they respond to subtle and not-so-subtle slights and that you adapt similar strategies to combat the knocks delivered to our own self-esteem, being prepared to band with co-workers if necessary to counter the bad behaviour.

His sage advice, which I can corroborate, is that bullies don’t just change their behaviour one day, since their ways stem from a profound neurosis. He suggests you have an exit plan and if that is impossible then don’t get mad, get even.

Sutton points to lab tests that show how a torturer derives pleasure from a victim’s show of frustration or fear. Much better, therefore, to understand the strategy and counter it with one of your own.

In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein Hollywood revelations, focus has fallen on the typical hierarchy in which men sit at the top as executives and most of the support staff are female. The evidence, not surprisingly, is that sexual harassment, a form of bullying, is more evident in that power structure and the call for more female executives has intensified.

I would like to suggest that there is another reason to have more female executives, other than the threat of women having to sleep their way to the top with some unprepossessing, over-sexed, power-mad male.

Women who are prejudiced or excluded in male dominated workplaces can be led by their own ambitions to practise negative but effective male-style bullying tactics when dealing with female colleagues whom they perceive as threats to their path to the high table: a high-flyer; a good-looking colleague; a better-qualified, equally capable or personable newcomer.

In an environment where there is room at the top for more than one or two women, that dynamic changes and a healthier company culture results.

In a long working life I was never sexually harassed, although I have had to stop it among my staff, but I had my copious share of terrible female bullies.