…Or How A Chocolate Muffin Became The Last Straw That Broke The Camel’s back

If you let a bully intimidate you , he’s going to do it again. You’ve got to stand up to these strong-arm tactics.

Charles Djou

Ignorance is bliss, they say. That was my mental state when I started a new job in a new department, a new corporate function, and in a new city, all within the same company. This was 2016, and I was excited and ready to go, believing that I had joined a new team where everybody was ready to support me in delivering my new role  as a commercial adviser for one of our group joint venture companies.  I was blissfully unaware that I was going to spend the next months in a battle for my mental health, my reputation and literally fight my way through a situation that I never thought would escalate to the point where I would need support. I had no idea I’d have to deal with a real bully, let’s call her Mayne (which rhymes with pain because that’s all she caused me at the time).

Mayne was my boss; she was a smart, accomplished almost-40-year-old woman on an expat assignment in my country, from one of the European countries known for their candor. We were almost birthday buddies—we were born in the same year and month, but 16 days apart. I had never met her face-to-face before I resumed work, as I only had a virtual interview before I was offered the new job. Interestingly, I found out later on that she had been the most vocal person on my interview panel while the decision on my job application was being discussed.  We both could actually have been friends if we didn’t have to work together. She sounded nice at the interview, calm, intelligent, and quite accommodating in her way of questioning. Maybe it was something about the way I looked, because she certainly acted like she questioned her decision to take me  on after I resumed on the new job.

Then the bullying started. Initially, it was the subtle retorts whenever I made any kind of verbal submission on any topic, whether job-related or not. In a discussion within my team about the global energy situation once, I mentioned that I thought that renewables would become a big thing, explaining that a number of big energy players had started investing heavily in alternative energy and renewable energy sources (solar, wind, hydrogen, etc.). She quickly told me rather loudly that I didn’t know what I was saying, that I was wrong, and that renewable energy was still unprofitable as an investment area and that our company had invested heavily in it in the early 2000s but eventually closed down the business (which was true). I showed her my data, and she said I didn’t know what I was saying. Ironically, about a year and a half later, Mayne took a leave of absence from the company to go understudy a local renewables business to gain experience; she later returned to work and got a job reporting into our Group Renewables business. I was so indignant.

Bullying consists of the least competent, most aggressive employee projecting their incompetence on to the least aggressive, most competent employee and winning.

Tim Field

Mayne had a weird habit of asking the team for ideas on how to resolve commercial issues with the company we were providing governance support to, and when I responded to her mail with my suggestions and ideas, she would reply not only to me, but to everyone, saying that my ideas were basically useless because of this, or that reason. She never considered any suggestion I made to be even remotely reasonable, and she was quite rude in her responses to my mails. She did this so often that one of my other colleagues, Aaron, a great guy who worked hard and got along with everybody, had to ask ” What exactly is up with you and ….?” Why does she keep doing that to you?”. I responded that I honestly had no idea. She would not acknowledge my capability or skills at all; she treated me like I had an IQ in the negative numbers, sometimes literally over-explaining very easy concepts to me, while ironically not being able to answer harder concepts about the job which I would ask her to explain. When she went on leave she would publish an out-of-office notification asking clients to call or text her mobile if they needed support, completely ignoring the fact that I was available to provide support while she was away. This went on and on. I tried to raise it with her a few times, but she did not change after we spoke, so I didn’t raise the issue again and tried my best to work around her disrespectful behaviour… until she did the unforgivable.

One day, she baked chocolate muffins for the entire team. She brought the tray of muffins to work, and went round the room, offering everyone a piece and giving them a paper napkin to wipe off crumbs after they selected the particular muffin they wanted. When she got to me, she didn’t let me pick the muffin; instead, she picked it up with her bare fingers and placed it right on my desk, without a saucer or even a paper napkin. She just picked it up and basically threw it on my desk with no courtesy, no napkin…and a lot of meanness, like she really didn’t want to give it to me, but she had to because she had already given others. For me, this was just too much. Now, I had endured so many things from her– veiled insults, put-downs, being ignored when I went to her with a work question, being left out of key email distributions that had to do with my job…..but honestly, this just took the cake for me (pun intended). Where I come from, food is very serious business, and the way you present food communicates a lot. If the food is not presented in a respectful way, we just don’t eat it. So that’s what I did. I didn’t eat it, didn’t touch it, didn’t say ‘thank you’, or even acknowledge that she gave me anything. After work, Ieft the chocolate muffin there on my desk, all dark and dangerous-looking, like a bad omen. 

When I got back to work the next day, it was still there on my desk. I eventually got tired of it being on my desk, and I threw it away into the shared bin that we had on our office floor, and I said to myself…”This has just  got to stop. I am no longer going to pretend that all is well here- there is a real problem here…”, and my problem-solving mind immediately began to go to work. “How do I solve this problem and get this woman to stop treating me so badly?” I realised then that I needed some advice, and because I did not want to speak with any of my teammates about it, I decided to seek HR advice, so I planned to talk with someone in HR…and I did.

On the day I spoke with HR about it, I actually did not mean to make a formal report about it. My intention was to ask for advice on ways that I could communicate to my boss about how her behaviour was impacting me (I had mentioned to her a few times that I was uncomfortable with how she engaged with me..and she claimed she was sorry about it, but she kept right on treating me the same way). Unfortunately for Mayne, the HR lady I spoke with was very efficient and took my statements about all she had been doing very seriously. She observed that I had written notes with dates describing many of these bullying behaviours (I think she was a bit alarmed that I wrote them all down- it’s just a little habit of mine). That same day, she requested a meeting with Mayne, and only God knows what she told her because some 20minutes later Mayne came to me in a huff, half-upset, half-apologetic  and asked that we have a quick meeting. She apologised profusely, saying she was sorry, and said she did not know that she was coming across as being mean, and that she meant me no ill-will.

She explained that sometimes she felt I made suggestions or brought up new ideas without thinking them through, or looking at the cost-benefit of that action, and that used to annoy her. She explained that she had nothing against me personally, but that she did not know that she had come across so negatively. She was willing for us to start all over again to build the relationship. I listened to her and although she sounded sincere, I was determined to not let her off so lightly (I guess I was on a roll!), so I enumerated to her the specific things she did that felt to me like a putdown – like keeping me waiting for inordinate stretches of time by her desk when I approached her for help, responding rudely to my emails especially when others were copied in the distribution, and beating down all my ideas even when we discussed one-on-one. I told her that she was exhausting to work with, and totally unpleasable (impossible to please), and that I regretted taking the job. I told her that I had no problems with her disagreeing with my suggestions, but that she had no right to be disrespectful to me. I think she was a bit shocked at my bluntness and surprised at the level of detail I went into about her actions. She seemed unsettled at my boldness in telling her exactly how her actions made me felt.

The good thing is, she apologised and offered to change.  She seemed sincere. To be honest, after that conversation, I  did see her make genuine efforts to change, even though she still struggled with allowing me a bit of autonomy on the job ( she was a micro-manager, possibly because she was a first-time manager at the time). I eventually left that role to start another role in my company, but I am happy to say our relationship greatly improved after that discussion, even though I cannot say that we became the best of friends. We were more like frenemies.

On the job , we found a mutually respectful space where both of us accorded each other some level of respect and were able to work as a team. I eventually made some work analysis and recommendations that caused us to win some global recognition in our business- she was obviously quite pleased about this and she actually even allowed me on one occasion to stand in for her while she was on leave. That was a bright spark in our relationship. We ended up working really hard, and this enabled us to realize all our business goals for the year, despite our initial bad start. Our relationship improved so much so that when she was leaving to begin her leave-of-absence, I even bought her a gift – a book on ‘Chasing your dreams’.  I left the team to another one before she returned from her leave, so what initially was a nightmare relationship , eventually became something that I gave me some good lessons, which I will share here:

1. Never ignore bullying behaviours because it doesn’t get better.
2. Try to take note of the specific behaviour, the context,  how it affected you, the dates it happened and who was there when it happened. This provides the detailed situational context which will help you when you are recounting the experience to a third party. You may forget key details if you rely on your memory.
3. Try to engage the bully yourself, if possible, and let them know how they are making you feel by their actions. This gives the person an opportunity to be faced with the real impact of his/her behaviour and offer to make an attempt to change.
4. Escalate if you feel like the situation is not changing even after step (3) above. If you also feel like you cannot address the situation yourself successfully, feel free to bring in a respected third-party (HR, another manager, or a senior employee who knows the bully)
5. Realize that many times, bullying behaviour stems from insecurities that the bully has about themselves, and may not necessarily be about you.
6. If the bully apologizes , watch to see if there is a change in behaviour. If there is no change – then run through the above steps again.
7. Never be a bully. Never suffer bullies gladly. Never think a bully cannot change. Many times, you have to demand the change.

In all, I can say that I learned a few things from my experience of being bullied. It wasn’t a pretty experience, but I hope it helps you with some action steps on what to do if you ever find yourself in a similar situation. If you enjoyed this, please share, give it some claps and send your comments on other ways to address bullying. Thanks!

Published in http://www.thefabfolio.blog