The Bully-Free Workplace: Stop Jerks, Weasels, and Snakes From Killing Your Organization

It's a War

Bullies have declared war. They don't care about your mission, your responsibility to ensure fiduciary soundness, or your commitment to the health and well-being of the majority of employees. Bullying prevents work from getting done. It undermines your mission. It satisfies only the perpetrator's personal agenda, and it does so at the expense of people, their productivity, and their passion. It is the antithesis of work. And the only simple way to distinguish “tough” management from bullying is to ask, “What has this (action) got to do with work?”

Ideally, we could approach the task as pacifists. We could preach the gospel of kindness, altruism, and reciprocated cooperation among all employees. In fact, that is exactly what Buddhism would lead us to do. (Although we doubt that the speed of transmitting the message of compassion would be quick enough to counter all of the aggression in our contemporary, hurried workplaces.)

But, because it is a war, we treat the campaign to stop workplace bullying as seriously as you would an external competitor. It requires preparation of various internal groups, the troops required for the battle ahead in order to win. As an aside, we are ambivalent about using any war metaphor to ensure respect and dignity for employees, however counterintuitive it may seem.

Aggression and its rewards are communicated throughout the organization at lightning speed. The research findings from game theory unequivocally show that it is suicidal for a ...