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Working
for a Boss Who Bullies
By
LISA BELKIN
Published: May
8, 2005
DURING one summer break in college, I worked at a print
shop. My days were spent collating and stapling - and
listening to the manager scream.
She
didn't yell directly at me (at least not terribly often)
because, I guess, I was temporary and not a threat to
her authority. But she chastised and lambasted and verbally
eviscerated everyone unfortunate enough to rely on this
as a permanent job. I cannot print the things they,
in turn, had to say about her when she wasn't in the
room.
I
found myself thinking of that boss a few weeks ago,
when underlings of John R. Bolton started appearing
before Congress to say he should not be made ambassador
to the United Nations because, in the words of one,
he was a "serial abuser" of employees, "a kiss-up, kick-down
sort of guy." What saddened me was that I was not surprised.
I don't know anything about this particular man, but
I do know that bullying bosses are generally allowed
to move up the rungs of power, their temper tantrums
mistaken for a leadership style.
"I
would estimate that one in 10 leaders cross the line
into bullying their employees," says Richard S. Wellins,
a senior vice president at Development Dimensions International,
who has for 34 years provided "antibullying training"
to business executives.
Judith
E. Glaser, author of "Creating We: Change I-Thinking
to WE-Thinking and Build a Healthy, Thriving Organization"
(Platinum Press, 2005), agrees. "They are everywhere,"
she said. Ms. Glaser, who coaches high-level executives
who need to improve their behavior, defines bullying
as "threatening, intimidating or embarrassing people
who work for you."
Bullying
in the office looks a lot like bullying on the playground,
she says, except that the abuse is almost always verbal
rather than physical and there is a paycheck rather
than milk money at stake.
Consider
two stories sent by readers.
"I
had taken a one-day vacation in order to visit my uncle
who was dying of lung cancer and placed in a hospice
program," says an e-mail message from a woman who works
in hospital administration. "I received a call on my
cell from the director screaming and yelling at me as
I stood by my uncle's deathbed. She completely forgot
that she approved my time off." Her supervisor, the
woman said, was too afraid of the director to explain.
A
second woman, on the admissions staff of a private school,
said her boss "would explode unexpectedly at me (I suspect
she liked to see me jump) with false accusations which
I would immediately deny."
"When
I did, she would berate me even more."
How
to handle a working relationship like this? The employee
at the private school consulted a job coach, who told
her to do the equivalent of lying down and playing dead.
When the boss started complaining, the employee threw
her arms out in supplication and proclaimed: "I am soooooo
sorry. What can I do to change this?" The boss, she
said, retreated in confusion.
The
second employee went not to a coach but to a therapist.
She stayed in her job, spent money to complain about
that job once a week, and finally quit after a year.
Many
bullied employees quit. What they do not do is sue,
because bullying is technically not against the law.
Statutes prohibit sexual harassment, racial harassment
and physical assault at work, but specialists in the
field tell me that unless a rampaging boss boils over
into one of those areas, he has, in a legal sense, done
nothing wrong.
But
he has done nothing much that is right, either. One
can hope that when the political smoke clears on Mr.
Bolton's nomination, the hearings will have done for
workplace harassment what the Clarence Thomas hearings
did for sexual harassment - raise the profile, get the
conversation going, maybe even lead to some laws with
teeth.
I
would like to think that some of this has already begun,
in a place possibly more important than the legislature:
executive office suites. Steven M. Paskoff, a business
consultant and author of "Teaching Big Shots to Behave
and Other Human Resource Challenges," says bosses bully
because the internal culture considers it the norm.
"Companies
always ask me what they can do to make these people
'get it,' " he says of the times he has been called
in to help curb a bully's behavior. "But it's not as
if these individuals don't understand that their bullying
behavior is inappropriate. They understand. They just
don't care. For one reason or another, they believe
the rules don't apply to them."
Many
of you wrote after my last column, asking for specifics.
I said I started work at The Times a week before computers
were installed. For the record, I meant the week before
desktop computers were installed in the Washington bureau
(the New York newsroom started using a computerized
word processing system in 1975). The desktops and I
arrived in the summer of 1982.
This
column about the intersection of jobs and personal lives
appears every other week. E-mail: Belkin@nytimes.com.
Creating
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Seeking best practices shifts the focus from I to We,
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View an example
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