[humanser] When Bullies Go To Work

[Mary Ann Robinson]

An interesting article that I got from another list.

Mary Ann
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 changed st
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