The Serial Bully and his victim

Monday afternoon and I have just arrived home from listening to one man's story. An intelligent hard working man who has suffered from the attention of a bully at his place of work. I have no intention of breaching confidentially or compromising my position and all that I believe, but the opportunity now exists for me to bring the topic of bullying to the fore. Over the years I have spent a considerable amount of time counselling the victims of bullying and helping them over come their stress. The question of “why” always comes to mind, “why does one person bully another” and “why do companies allow it to happen in the first place?".

The Scene.
The company is a medium to large company with European connections, the bully in question is I believe a serial bully, and his target, a quiet intelligent male who could easily be you or me or some one we know.

The Bully.
The profile I am building in my mind of this serial bully from the evidence shown to me is one of a man who has a Jekyll and Hyde character, vicious and vindictive one moment perfectly charming and innocent the next. I do not underestimate this bully’s capacity to deceive, he is plausible and convincing when his superiors or others are present but his charm is used to deceive and cover for lack of empathy. This bully holds deep prejudices against the opposite gender, people of a different sexual orientation, other cultures, religious or ethnic background.

He is self-opinionated, arrogant and has a superior sense of entitlement and sense of being invulnerable or un-touchable. “I am the second most powerful man in this company” (even though his position is low in the company). He has a compulsive need to control everyone and everything his subordinates do, “If you want to get on in this company you better do as I say”. He is manipulative and undermines and destroys anyone who the he perceives to be an adversary or a potential threat. It is almost as though he has a need to find a weakness in someone then expose and exploit that weakness until his victim leaves the company, normally through illness and depression. The bully then goes to ground until he thinks he is safe, then, finds his next target.

The Victim.
This victim is competent and popular but vulnerable. This victim is intelligent, honest, trustworthy, and conscientious middle aged man who is sensitive, helpful, always willing to share knowledge and experience. He is tolerant, forgiving and inclined to think well of others. He has high moral standards and a strong well-defined set of values. He has low assertiveness and a strong need to feel valued. He is quick to apologize for anything he “might” have done wrong, he is a perfectionist with a strong sense of fair play and has a tendency to keep anger bottled up rather than express it.

In this respect our “victim” is a really nice man who the company would do well to employ.

The Company.
The company is a medium sized British company with expanding European connections. It has a well manned human resource department who are aware of the numerous complaints regarding this bully, but the department has been totally ineffective in dealing with this issue. The company does have a policy regarding bullying, discrimination and harassment, which is intended to protect both employees and the employer, but has failed dismally to protect the victims and in one case even supported the bully when he cleverly switched from being the persecutor to being a victim.

When the companies Human Resource Department writes off a bullying incident as a "personality clash" and sweeps the incident under the carpet, the company and individual managers are then wide open to litigation. A personality clash can only occur between two people of equal rank, status or power. To take the attitude “We don’t like him but he gets the job done” is to ignore the cost to the company in:
1. Low morale,
2. Poor productivity,
3. Poor customer service,
4. High sickness absence,
5. High staff turnover,
6. Frequent grievance,
7. Legal action.

In July this year, judges in the House of Lords decided that former health service worker William Majrowski could use the "Protection from Harassment Act 1997" to sue his former employer for workplace bullying. The Act was introduced to deal with stalkers but has been so loosely drafted that its remit has widened as clever lawyers has sought to put it to new uses. This latest development has important implications for employers.

Even if a company can show that they did all that could have reasonably been expected to protect an employee from harassment, the company will still be liable.

I expect that this law will be challenged in the due course of time, but at present an employer will held responsible if work place bullying is not controlled.

Conclusion?
The failure to tackle bullying head on or denying of the existence of the serial bully with in the company not only serves to discredit the target or victim, but invites the company manager’s behavior to match the profile of the bully. If the pattern of daily, trivial nitpicking and criticism, isolation and exclusion persists the individuals morale, resistance, and immune system weakens resulting in sickness, absence from work and depression.

Should the target then end his life as a result of negligence on the part of the company or it's failure to tackle bullying, then charges of Manslaughter or Corporate Manslaughter can be brought against the company and its managers.

I am only interested in taking the seagulls eye view of the incident within this company and to offer confidential emotional support to those who look for it and this includes the bully, because I believe he may have been a target or victim, at a young age, and the script he learnt then he is putting into practice now.