With all of the recent news of suicides due to long-term bullying I ran across this interesting article How to Confront an Office Bully. I guess I have been rather lucky so far, as I have not run across this in my career.
It makes me wonder, who has come across bullying in the workplace and can you describe it or how it was resolved?
On 15/04/10 16:46, dragonbite wrote:
>
> With all of the recent news of suicides due to long-term bullying I ran
> across this interesting article ‘How to Confront an Office Bully’
> (http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/04/are_bullies_in_your_workplace.html). I
> guess I have been rather lucky so far, as I have not run across this in
> my career.
>
> It makes me wonder, who has come across bullying in the workplace and
> can you describe it or how it was resolved?
>
>
About 45 years ago,when I was twenty years old, I had a boss who
repeatedly told me off in front of the whole office. The others in the
office said to me, “don’t worry about it, he picks on one person to be
his whipping boy for about a month and then switches to someone else -
next month you may be his blue-eyed boy”. This turned out to be true.
Mind you, I think what may have helped was that, after several months
work on a pointless project of his, I didn’t come up with the numbers he
wanted - as I’d predicted. He told me that I had made a mistake and had
to do it again so I just blew my top and told him in no uncertain terms
what I thought. I never had any more trouble with him.
Another aspect of this was that he was the lone computer programmer of
the branch. This was in the days when your program was punched onto
8-hole paper tape for you, then run overnight. Any programming errors
were corrected during the day, usually by hand-punching changes to the
tape or splicing in amendments. Then another overnight run and yet
another failure - due to a missing semi-colon, say. This got to him and
he began triple-checking he’d locked his safe, his office, etc.
Eventually he was diagnosed as having a nervous breakdown and spent
several months on sick leave. When he came back, he was a different man
and one couldn’t have wished for a better boss.
–
Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks., UK. E-mail: newsman not newsboy
“I wear the cheese. It does not wear me.”
On Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:46:02 +0000, dragonbite wrote:
> It makes me wonder, who has come across bullying in the workplace and
> can you describe it or how it was resolved?
I’ve seen it in the past - in one situation, I was the target, and I
ended up resigning from the company to get away from it.
In another case, it was a manager/subordinate situation, and the manager
was moved to another area in the company.
I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading on management stuff lately, and
this blog entry actually gets at something else that I’ve been reading,
which is to make it about the behaviour, not about the person or about
personality. The example in the entry doesn’t specifically talk about
that, but underneath what was in that scenario, George was more focused
on the problem behaviour than he was on Dan.
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Yes I have but by the time I knew that standing firm makes bullies back down.
The main problem is that most bullies bully people in isolation, not in front of others, and so the individual thinks there is something wrong with them. The first thing is often that the victim has to become aware that what is happening to them is not normal; then that it has happened to other people and finally that there are techniques for confronting bullies.
The other problem is that bullies often find that bullying gets them what they want; so even if they do not succeed with everyone, they find they succeed with enough people not to be motivated to give up unless someone really significant in their lives challenges them.
That’s probably the hardest thing, but most important: realizing that is what is going on!
lol!You mean that you have never been savaged by a developer?
Could be fun… if she’s cute 
Difficult to tell these days, especially with electronic communication. Better be careful.
dragonbite wrote:
> With all of the recent news of suicides due to long-term bullying
as far as i can tell it is a localized problem…
that is, i’m unaware of wide spread suicides due to bullies in all
cultures/societies of earth…
you might prove me wrong with google…i await the links…
–
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To a degree, does it really matter where it happens? The definition of bullying may vary by region, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, and shouldn’t.
There were 2 attempts in my case, but it ended up badly for the bullying initiators. Since I never cared what will happen after, they were afraid of me. Mostly not in physical way, but I never had my tongue tied up, and they faced total authority destruction in front of other employees, so they never even thought to attempt that again.