It feels a bit uncomfortable to say this, but being bullied at work is something I’ve experienced a number of times.
My earliest memory of being bullied at work was when a new manager instantly took a dislike to me, didn’t explain to me why and merrily proceeded behind my back, to tell the rest of the team that I worked with that I was pretty useless and that they couldn’t trust me to do a good job.
My second memory of being bullied at work was when I was part of a team of professionals and one of my peers decided that I should be excluded from regular meetings with the team because I had challenged them, rather than agreeing with them as everybody else in the team did.
My third memory is of when a manager that I had liked and worked with very well, left and was replaced by a manager who decided that although I seemed to be doing a very good job, I needed to be reigned in, transferred and kept under close observation to ensure that I toed the line.
On reflection, I think I was probably bullied because I’ve always been very lateral in the way I think about things and I focus on practical ways of getting things done. However, to others, this can come across as being completely oddball and weird. Now regardless of whether I am an oddball and weird (some may no doubt say that I am), I don’t think bullying has any place in the workplace or any other place either.
The thing about bullying is that it isn’t just the bully who is challenging to the person on the receiving end of the bullying. It’s also the people around the bully who either don’t see what the bully is doing, choose not to see what the bully is doing, or are just glad that the bully is bullying somebody else and isn’t picking on them.
Over the years I’ve listened to friends who have described two examples of bullying that bring home to me the importance of tackling a bully early on and have demonstrated to me that even non oddballs get bullied if they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The examples I am talking about are the smiling assassin bully and corporate bullying.
A smiling assassin bully is someone who could be highly respected and well liked by the majority of people they work with but for some reason they always need somebody in their team to pick on and blame when things don’t go according to plan.
This kind of bullying is very hard to tackle because if you try to explain to people that the smiling assassin is making one of their team members lives hell, you may be met with a look of disbelief and an expectation that you’ll just go away – because you can’t possibly be telling the truth.
The smiling assassin has a way with their words and actions that makes it very difficult to take them on and they can also be masters of gaslighting. Often the person who is being bullied is made to be seen by everybody else as the problem. When you are seen as the problem, and the bully has done such an effective job of turning you into the problem, the only way you can push back is to continue to do your job to the best of your ability and make sure those around you know that your successes are because you did a good job and not because the bully was directing you to do those things. This is not easy and it can be extremely stressful because the bully will do everything they can to continue to make you look small, insignificant and incompetent.
Corporate bullying can be equally challenging to cope with. Corporate bullies often find it hard to imagine that their behaviour is anything other than normal. There is often a subtext to corporate bullying; under pinned by a toxic workplace culture. It may be that there are particular people in the organisation that the corporate bullies want to get rid of. Because it’s cheaper if someone resigns than if they have to pay redundancy, the bully sets about making life so difficult for the person, that they would rather just leave. Corporate bullying is usually a sign that there is a senior leadership team in place that is completely unable to manage their organisation in a positive way, has a very limited vision of how to achieve their goals and would rather bully their workforce than do something positive.
Tackling corporate bullying requires very careful documentation of everything that’s going on, and a careful approach to challenging it. In my experience as well as keeping good records, I’ve always advised people to get external advice from somebody who understands people’s rights at work ( I’d always advise anybody being individually bullied to get this as well). This could be advice from the Citizens advice bureau in England (or something equivalent in another country), it might be a union or it might be an arbitration service. in England the arbitration service is called ACAS (scarily, the health and social care workforce are the biggest users of the dispute resolution at work service). For Health settings, there’s also Speak Up Guardians. In each case, these organisations will understand the legal employment framework and be able to advise you on what you can and can’t do.
For me, however the biggest challenge you can face when taking on the bully is the stress and pressure it puts on you and your family and others who are close to you. It’s affects can be long-term and devastating. It can lead to long-term mental health issues, it can lead to a complete loss of confidence in your own ability to do a good job and sometimes tragically it can lead to suicide.
Probably the most important thing to remember is that whether it’s a smiling assassin bully or a corporate bully you are facing, it’s usually the individual or the corporation who are the incompetent cowards and not you.
In the challenging times we live where bullying seems to have become an international sport, taking the bullies on directly or indirectly by calling out their bullying behaviour and supporting each other against the bullies is more important than ever.
As Obi-Wan Kenobi said “May the Force be with you”, especially if you are in the middle of taking on a bully in your life or in the lives of others that you care about.
Jim Thomas
February 2025
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