Strategies for dealing with a workplace bully

Caveat emptor

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This is a continuation of a piece that was received with praise and contention in April 2022. The piece was an unpopular opinion about not being the upstander or whistleblower when witnessing a bully’s actions for the brief high of moral righteousness you get to feel from being a temporary Saviour. It’s now June 2023 and people seemed to have discarded their idealistic ‘see something, say something’ mantra for a more realistic approach while licking upstander injury wounds.

Who is the workplace bully in this scenario? Photo by Obie Fernandez on Unsplash

There are definitely ways of dealing with a bully. But there are a number of conditions you need to meet before you can execute the strategies. One of the conditions is you have a manager or supervisor who does nothing to improve the situation and tells you all to ‘just work it out’.

Unfortunately, most people are unable to spot the early warning signs of what will unfold as bullying because too many people assume that bullies and aggressors are a bug rather than a feature of most competitive and hierarchical workplaces.

More unfortunate is that most workplace conditions are fertile ground for bullies as well as phenomenal people, who often become targets, with a group of witnesses who have learned that it’s not safe for them to push for improvements when they notice that bullies continue to align with those in positions of power and are always protected.

So in my effort to hack narcissism at work, here is my to do list of strategically dealing with a workplace bully as a collective (when it’s clear being reasonable with that person is only going to make things worse for you):

1. Spot the bully or aggressor colleague. Some of those conditions rely on your ability to spot the bullshit through the veneer of charm, charisma, compliments and other grooming strategies.

2. Discern truth from bullshit with everyone in the office. Rely on your ability to discern truth from bullshit among office gossip and conversations expressing concern about the welfare of others.

3. Develop mutual trust with others who work with the bully. You need to work out who else knows about the bully and compare stories with your own experience. Those who deny any wrongdoing or challenges are not trustworthy. Those who have seen the things you have are more likely to feel as helpless and frustrated as you to want to do something about it.

4. Negotiate an agreement among the circle of trust to ensure that gossip and power plays won’t divide you. Make a plan to strategically deal with the bully before the bully goes off the rails. You need to ensure solidarity or the plan will fall apart and you and others can become new targets.

5. Develop a documentation strategy to collect data that will from a strong case against the bully. Once the bully is reported, the bully will try to DARVO members of the group and you will each have the same solid body of evidence that is irrefutable.

6. Develop a boundaries strategy plan for how you will each consistently communicate, behave, respond to the bully’s attempts to control and dominate you or others. When everyone responds to the bully in the exact same way, they will get frustrated and their veneer will begin to crack.

7. When others who are outside of the group come to you with similar complaints about the bully, you can share what you do to respond to the behaviour, nonchalantly. They don’t need to know that several of you are working on a workplace rehabilitation plan.

8. Once the bully cracks, no one will unsee it. When the bully is called to HR, they will have explanations that pins blame on you and others. You will have evidence to present to HR will be forced to escalate to a higher power to have the bully coached or removed.

This entire process can be avoided if everyone was able to stand up to the bully in the same way from the very first act of hostility or attempt to manipulate you. If all workers had the ability to use bully blocking and negotiation strategies that can command respect while also targeting their ego, perhaps the bully could be enabled to change their ways.

It is possible.

What do you think?

Thanks for reading, sharing, stacking, subscribing and discussing this piece,

Nathalie Martinek, PhD

The Narcissism Hacker

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I believe that a common threat to our individual and collective thriving is an addiction to power and control. This addiction fuels and is fuelled by greed - the desire to accumulate and control resources in social, information (and attention), economic, ecological, geographical and political systems.

While activists focus on fighting macro issues, I believe that activism also needs to focus on the micro issues - the narcissistic traits that pollute relationships between you and I, and between each other, without contributing to existing injustice. It’s not as exciting as fighting the Big Baddies yet hacking, resisting, overriding and deprogramming our tendencies to control others that also manifest as our macro issues is my full-time job.

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