The Bully-free Workplace

There is a modified method of introducing the topic of bullying within the organization: measure the extent of bullying, then brief executives.

Most people think that intervention requires you to jump between the two parties just before the bully is about to take a swing. Not necessarily true.

Negative emotions and conduct emerge when no attention is paid.

Positive behaviors require clear expectations, constant attention, monitoring, and reinforcement.

Cutthroat culture is more likely developed without the awareness of leaders. It happens if they don’t specifically declare to workers how they expect them to behave.

Culture is set by CEOs. The workplace tone, whether positive and empowering or cutthroat and destructive, is in leadership’s hands.

One of the most important ways you can show trust to employees is to believe reports of bullying when they bubble up to your level.

Empathic and social-emotional leaders function and make decisions if they remember what it was like to be in the lower ranks. They know how much workers want to be believed and how much they want to contribute.

Think of the power of peer pressure and conformity and how often we emulate successful people. It’s clear that at work, instructions, task demands, and other people in the workplace can determine what a person does.

The bully is a psychopath. A psychopath needs constant stimulation without which there is a proneness to boredom.

Coworkers can sometimes be easily persuaded to betray their colleagues at the bully’s request.

Excluding colleagues from the group’s social life is painful.

Divorces are common in marriages in which one partner is bullied at work.

Stress that bullied targets bring home affects their children and spouses in the form of displaced anger. Parents transmit subtle cues about their own distress, and bullying prevents them from being emotionally present during their children’s development.

Nearly every bullied worker experiences anxiety, and clinical depression afflicts 40% of targets.

Bullying at work has been linked to many diseases. Although symptoms aren’t obvious, hypertension is a warning sign.

We refer to the recipient of mistreatment as a targeted–not victimized–worker. To be a target implies temporary mistreatment while victimhood implies a permanent disruption of normal functioning.

The power of the term bully in the workplace is illustrated by people’s reactions when it’s used to label them as they take it as an insult and respond with instant outrage and denial.