Have you ever had a confrontation with an aggressive co-worker where you just got so befuddled that you couldn’t find the right words for the moment? Instead, a great comeback occurred to you hours later, probably in the middle of the night, after you replayed the situation over and over in your mind. Don’t you wish there was a script you could memorize to help you out in situations like this?
You can handle the situation better next time if you have plan of what to say and do. You’ll find ideas in Beating the Workplace Bully: A Tactical Guide to Taking Charge (available here). The book will not only help you create a script to defuse bullying remarks, it will also help you devise a strategy to handle that first moment of confrontation, as well as learn how to prevent bullies’ remarks from taking hold in your thoughts.
For example, author Lynne Curry, an HR consultant with a Ph.D. in social psychology and an MA in teaching, suggests that rather than wasting your night revisiting those uncomfortable conversations with bullies, you “Get their toxic thoughts out of your head and externalize them by writing the bully a letter that says everything that needs to be said. You don’t need to mail this letter, just seal it, and give yourself closure. Make each night a vacation from your bully.”
Workplace bullying causes more problems than sleepless nights
“Bullying is an epidemic,” says Curry. “Surveys find that more than 65 million working Americans either experience or witness abusive conduct during their workday.”
And that makes it a big problem for managers.
“Law office managers regularly come into contact with people who bully,” says Curry. “The bully may push them into reacting, either defensively or by going toe-to-toe. Neither reaction works. The law office manager role requires that they handle the situation in a proactive, diplomatic, professional manner. Because just one bully in an office can make employees want to find a new workplace, the manager can’t afford to be a doormat or to ignore the situation. This makes it extremely challenging when the bully is an effective attorney.”
According to Curry, in order to tackle the problem of workplace bullies, “Managers must establish policies and procedures concerning bullying and also provide an effective grievance channel for employees who have concerns. And they need to understand why their partners might not want to handle the problem.”
Why bullies are often tolerated in the workplace
Curry points out that while bullies in a workplace are toxic to an organization’s productivity and morale, many leaders are reluctant to deal with the problem. Why? “Three factors protect and even immunize bullies,” Curry writes. First, bullies tend to treat their employers better than they do co-workers, so the boss does not always see the bullying behavior. Also, bullies “often produce great short-term results. This leads some senior executives to embrace the bully as a hard-changing, bottom line-oriented taskmaster.”
The third factor that prevents leaders from dealing with bullies is the concern that they themselves might be considered a bully. Writes Curry, “Because of the overlap between bullying and problem behaviors others demonstrate, many organizations hesitate to enact anti-bullying policies, claiming it’s too hard to define bullying.”
But there are ways you can create a bully-free environment, and it starts with learning all you can about the subject to successfully derail bullies and prevent them from trampling on your staff.
Learning the skills takes practice
As Curry points out, “Research shows that while you remember only 10 percent of what you read, you retain 70 percent of what you answer if immediately questioned about what you’ve learned. And it’s even better if you put into practice the skills or knowledge you’ve just learned. By doing that, you retain 90 percent of that information eight months after learning it.”
To help readers retain the information covered in her book, Curry has included exercises at the end of each chapter. One exercise is to write a business case to convince a senior manager that bullying in your organization needs to be addressed. Another is to create a conflict-handling goal. And at the end of the chapter on “turning the tables on the bully,” you practice countering “bullyspeak” and consider how best to handle the manipulation.
For example: “Imagine that a bully attacks you by accusing, ‘Where’d you come up with this crap?’ Regardless of how you answer, you may sound defensive, giving your bully open-season to continue. If instead you counter with, ‘What are you getting at?’ you turn the tables.”
“When you ask a question, you sidestep an attack and take control of the conversation,” says Curry. “And if your bully confronted you in front of an audience, they then laugh with and not at you.”
Conclusion
“When you encounter a bully, you want to walk away feeling calm, not trampled,” says Curry. “You want to get to safety with your dignity intact.”
Now that’s a scenario that won’t keep you up at night.
