Bully In Your Office

As you explore your career, be on the lookout for the following four signs that reveal leaders who are bullies looking to strip you of your identity and not allowing you to influence:

1.  Create Negative Disruption To Support Their Own Hidden Agendas - These bullies inflict fear and throw people off guard to ensure environments where they have complete control. They enjoy chaos and throwing a bone now and then because it puts the spotlight of attention on them to satisfy their own overt and hidden agendas. They make it impossible for their people to influence by seeming to but not actually caring about those people’s jobs or the people themselves – just that they are doing whatever it takes to make the leaders look good. Thus no one tries to do more than they are told and see only the opportunities in front of them, never anticipating the unexpected.

2. Create Discomfort And Uncertainty - Bully bosses are masters at ensuring that their departments, divisions, and/or organizations feel uncomfortable or uncertain about next decisions, promotions, or strategic partnerships. Early in my career, I intimidated a boss of mine because I earned more respect than her in the organization. She didn’t realize that leadership wasn’t about having all the answers but about knowing how to lead and maximize the potential of people like me who did. She thought that being a leader was about always being right, rather than supporting her employees with the resources, tools, and leadership to embolden individual capabilities to advance the organization’s goals and objectives.  So instead of embracing me to elevate both our positions, she created discomfort and uncertainty around me. She stayed away from me during important meetings – or even excluded me because she believed that I exposed her lack of expertise in sales and brand management and threatened her position in the organization. She refused to be seen with me in person and communicated with me exclusively via email and interoffice memorandums. Her goal was not to have my back and work with a generous purpose but to create an uneasy environment that would limit my ability to perform at my highest level.

3.  Associate With Leeches And Loafers - There are four types of people in business and in life: Leaders, Lifters, Loafers, and Leeches. Bullies gravitate to the latter two, because they are typically jealous people who lack self-confidence and self-trust and attempt to bring other people down to bring themselves up. They are leeches because they want to use other people’s ideas and claim as their own to advance their careers. They are the loafers because they lack originality and distinction and thus play off the efforts of those that do. Workplaces today require environments that leverage the strengths, uniqueness, and capabilities of people who “get it” to advance those that don’t. A great leader can detect who gets it immediately and finds ways to elevate the individual capacities of those that don’t – they lift and lead and unleash people’s passionate pursuits. Bully leaders take advantage of those who don’t get it and marginalize those who do to create more leeches and loafers for the betterment of themselves. It’s a zero-sum game that weakens the workplace and makes it impossible to win in the marketplace.

4.  Leverage Authority To Create Silos And Polarize People - Leaders who are bullies are smart enough to know their boundaries. They want to know how much they can get away with to ensure their own insecurities aren’t revealed. To help define these boundaries, they create them! Bullies love silo-ed work environments. Division, marginalization, and disconnection only benefit their agendas. Sharing of ideas and ideals? Allowing people to live with an entrepreneurial spirit? That threatens their stature and exposes their inability to create relationships that generates momentum, growth, and not just change but evolution.

These four signs might not be signs of the apocalypse but they are becoming more prevalent at work and will lead to destruction if left unchecked. Leaders are having a hard time hiding them so watch out for them and be aware of how they are affecting what you do and your organization’s ability to see and seize opportunities. Bullies don’t create safe environments free from judgment or like transparency. 

Remember: the first step to solving a problem is realizing you have one.