Don’t Bow Down to the Office Bully

My friend, Kelly Abel, is one of those people you would hire to do anything. Why? Because she will not take on something she’s not going to succeed at and she’ll do anything (within reason) to win. It’s this quality that got her hired to manage a New York fitness center–even though she’d never done it before.

Her new job was a potential nightmare. She inherited a demanding clientele, a downtrodden staff, a history of sub-par sales, and a facility in sore need of an upgrade. But Kelly was up for it. Always one to relish a challenge, she was even excited.

Wildly competitive and energetic (and that’s putting it mildly), she worked around the clock with no regard for weekends or holidays, pitching in on everything from sales to cleaning the toilets when a housekeeper quit. Within eight weeks, a physical renovation of the club was underway and a cultural revolution had begun. Clients began popping into her office to compliment her on noted improvements. Her staff’s spirits were rebooted–a trainer even sent her flowers and a note saying she’d changed her life. Corporate was thrilled; the company president himself emailed kudos.

But not everybody was a fan.

Kelly’s regional sales manager couldn’t stand her and made no bones about it. She complained every time she made her rounds at Kelly’s gym, blaming Kelly directly for not meeting monthly sales goals. She and Kelly disagreed about strategy and she refused to give Kelly the support needed to try new things. She publically criticized her in management meetings and, in private, she stood over Kelly, yelled at her, fingers in her face, often reprimanding her in ways that felt more personal than professional.

“She spoke to me like nobody has ever spoken to me,” an outraged Kelly told me after a recent run-in. “My mother, my father, my best friends, even people who I know don’t like me have never talked to me like that. Is she crazy?”

Maybe she is. Or maybe she’s just one of the thousands of bullies wreaking havoc in the workplace. Google “bullying at work” and you’ll get a whopping 33,700,000 results. It occurs in every country in the world and has sparked the proposal of Healthy Workplace

On-the-job hazing, hostile criticism, sabotage, and outright threats are on the rise, according to a recent study by the Workplace Bullying Institute. (Just the fact that there is a Workplace Bullying Institute is evidence enough that the problem is significant.) Managers and bosses are the worst culprits, although lateral peers do their fair share, often driven by insecurity or an unhealthy competitive streak.

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Almost any overly aggressive, inappropriate or unprofessional behavior–particularly if it occurs repeatedly and is designed to intimidate, humiliate or undermine–fits the bill. This includes being routinely yelled at, cursed at, insulted, gossiped about or excluded. Left unchecked, bullies cut to the heart of a company’s productivity and damage the bottom line as their victims’ morale and confidence plummet resulting in lost time at work due to stress related illnesses that can lead them to quit or, in the most extreme instances, even commit suicide

Workplace bullying is no joke.

Sadly, the weak economy and high unemployment have combined to make office bullying numbers go up, but the incidence of reporting has gone down. Fearful of losing their jobs, victims are not seeking intervention. Even more sadly, the baseline abominable behavior we’ve become accustomed to in our reality-TV driven culture, has made many of us more accepting of treatment that is outrageously unacceptable. But Kelly didn’t hesitate to sound the alarm.

When the company’s regional sales manager berated her for “poor” sales, Kelly did her own research and discovered that 2011 sales goals were much higher than they had been the year before, despite the economy and the fact that half of her gym was under renovation. She also found that, while they were below goal, her team was exceeding actual 2010 sales, something the regional manager had failed to mention.

When the regional manager told Kelly that the other GM’s resented her for suggesting changes to corporate, Kelly reached out to her peers directly and learned that they was a lie. In fact, the other GMs confided that they also felt mistreated but, unaware that it was a general issue, they’d been afraid to speak up.

Armed with this information, Kelly fired off a letter to the company president and her direct boss, documenting in detail the regional manager’s behavior and accusing her of creating a hostile work environment that was detrimental not only to her success, but to the company’s overall success. The president is looking into it himself.

While the outcome isn’t yet clear, Kelly is. “I won’t work with someone like that, period,” she told me. “The company will decide who they want to keep. If it’s not me, I’ll find another job. What bothers me is that so many of the other people I work with don’t have the confidence to say that. Or they just can’t afford to take the risk.”

A tight economy is no excuse to tolerate poor, unfair treatment. Don’t get bullied, get help from Human Resources. And, if you have no other option, get out. No job is worth your self-respect or your health.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments: Have you ever been bullied at work?