Bullying is
commonplace, almost expected sometime in childhood. Numerous
anti-bullying awareness initiatives exist in schools and communities.
But what about bullying in adulthood? Do we ever expect to experience
a bully in the workplace, in our professional lives?
The most common
stereotype is the bullying boss. Unfortunately, this was my first
experience with a workplace bully. It began with good intentions. She
saw me as an apprentice. I was grateful for her interest in me and
the opportunities she gave me. We had a good first couple of years.
The trouble began
when my professional interests began to diverge from hers. She began
to get more controlling about what I did with my time. I remember her
getting upset with me when I attended a guest lecture because it
wasn't about our specific subfield of physics. She wanted me to quit
all of my extracurriculars and hobbies. She wanted to see me at work
in the evenings and on weekends. Who was she to tell me what I could
do with my spare time? Grad students are only paid for 20 hours per
week, so technically speaking, I was already working tons of unpaid
overtime.
She had my future
planned out for me. She wanted me to start working on a new project
that wasn't part of my doctoral research plan and wasn't directly
applicable to my dissertation. I had my own funding at that point, a
NASA GSRP fellowship, with a set research plan. Had I been interested
in the new project, I would have jumped on the opportunity, but I
simply wasn't interested. Only later did I realize that she was
trying to get me to work on her new pet project at no cost to her.
She decided that
after I graduated, she was going to send me to her colleague's
university in Europe to work as a post-doc. Some graduate students
would be thrilled to know that they already had a post-doc
opportunity lined up for them. I was not. I had no interest in doing
a post-doc in that field of study and moving to Europe. I felt that
she was trying to dictate my life even after I was no longer her
employee.
Once she realized
that I had a mind of my own, she gave me the “it's my way or the
highway” ultimatum. I was an emotional mess. I felt that she had
her thumb pressed down on me and was pressing harder and harder. I
felt trapped. When I finally decided to take “the highway,” I
felt free! I later learned that she slandered me to my fellowship program, but that did little damage.
The next workplace
bully I encountered was a colleague, a peer. She and I were at the
same level and worked together in the same lab, but we had different
roles and different students who we were supervising. She was hired
to take some responsibilities off my plate so I could focus on other
things.
She hated that she
wasn't my supervisor. She wanted to be in charge of the whole lab. It
drove her nuts that we were equal. It bothered her even more that I
wasn't intimidated by her. She tried many methods of intimidation to
try to “win” what she saw was a battle against me. What bothered
her the most was that she never won. I always held firm and refused
to compromise my integrity.
She yelled at me and
insulted me to the point where, instead of responding, I had to drop
whatever I was doing and leave the room (mostly so she didn't see me
cry). She spread lies about me to the other students and told me lies
about what the other students allegedly said about me. She turned one
of my students against me, but he got egg on his face when he
realized that he made a mistake with our experiment, not me. She made
the workplace a toxic environment.
My supervisor at the
time is a wonderful, supportive man, but he's not a fan of
confrontation. He sat us down for a meeting together and tried to get
us to reconcile, but by that point, extensive damage had already been
done. I was at the point of creating documentation to report my work
bully to the university's human resources department when I learned
the happy news that she was leaving. Something switched in her mind
at that point, because she was actually a decent human being to me at
the very end. Go figure.
My third workplace
bully was an administrative assistant, an older lady. She was the
admin assistant to the big boss of the company. Because she held this
role, she thought herself superior to all, as if she was the actual
assistant big boss.
We rarely worked
together. Once I needed her assistance to get some signatures from
the big boss for a project. Another admin assistant and I approached
her on a Friday early afternoon for her help. All she had to do was
give the papers to her boss to have him sign them, then hand them
back to us, a five minute job. She decided that she didn't like how
we had printed the papers, so she reprinted them to her liking, which
took her approximately half an hour.
Little did I know
until months later that this bully held a grudge against me because I
asked her to (gasp!) do her job on a Friday. She waited until I was
on travel attending a conference to ask me a question via email on an
afternoon, a non-urgent question that I did not know the answer to
because it wasn't my job to know. When I didn't answer her first
thing the next morning, she wrote back to me CCing my boss and the
big boss demanding to know why I hadn't answered her.
Unfortunately, my
boss at the time operated out of fear and thought that any negative
confrontation with his employees reflected poorly on him. Before I
had even gotten a chance to form a response to the email, my boss
contacted me demanding that I apologize to the bully and do whatever
she wanted, immediately. He took it a step further by concluding that
because I hadn't answered her email immediately, I wasn't responsible
with my time during conferences. I hadn't taken any action at this
point, all of this mess was being done to me, and I felt like a
hit-and-run car victim. Just as the bully had planned.
The bully continued
to escalate the issue when I returned from travel. Things were said
about me behind closed doors. I learned that she claimed that I
dropped a project on her on a Friday afternoon and made her work late
doing it, and I never apologized for it. My boss didn't care about
the actual issue, he only cared about the conflict, so he insisted
that I apologize to her. But I don't appease bullies. I knew that she
wanted to, “put me in my place,” and demonstrate that she had
power. I was not going to give her that satisfaction.
Finally, to appease
my boss, I approached her and asked, “Do we have anything to talk
about?” “No,” she responded. When my boss asked if I had talked
to her, I could honestly answer yes. Thankfully, I never had to work
with her again.
What do all of these
bullies have in common? One: they're alpha females. I've noticed a
tendency for strong females to become adversarial with other strong
females who they see as competition. Two: they aren't used to people
standing up to them. Three: they all rose to positions of authority
in professional environments.
Bullies don't just
exist on schoolyards or blue collar jobs. My biggest misconception
was that all professionals act professionally in professional
environments. This is not always the case. I've had to learn that,
with this and everything else, I can only control my own actions.
Others can act as they please, but my goal is to remain professional
even in the face of the harshest workplace bully.
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