What to Do When the Boss Is a Bully
Like it or not, the cutthroat nature of corporate America today has created the perfect petri dish for bullies, manipulators and psychopaths to thrive.
In their unwavering pursuit of profit, corporations tend to prioritize a very specific set of character traits. Unfortunately for the ethically uncompromised among us, many of the most useful corporate traits also happen to align with some of the DSM-V criteria for antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders.
Think about it for a second. Do any of the following qualities sound like they would be useful in a business environment?
Superficial charm, aggression, low fear, stress tolerance, high self-confidence, absence of anxiety, lack of empathy, manipulative behavior, the ability to identify and exploit vulnerabilities, ruthless pursuit of objectives, arrogance and magnified self-importance.
If you ask me, they very much sound like prime ingredients for the situational-ethics “special sauce” that is required to make cold, calculated and take-no-prisoners decisions behind closed boardroom doors.
While I’ve experienced quite a great deal of bad behavior in my 15 years at public relations agencies and working with executives at massive corporations, don’t just take my word for it.
In “The Wisdom of Psychopaths,” Kevin Dutton interviewed Dr. Robert Hare, criminal psychologist and creator of the Psychopath Checklist-Revised (PCL-R). This test is known as the gold standard for measuring psychopathy, a personality disorder characterized by antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited and egotistical traits.
“Without a doubt, there’s a greater proportion of psychopathic big hitters in the corporate world than there is in the general population,” explains Hare. “You’ll find them in any organization where your position and status afford you power and control over others, and the chance of material gain.”
In 2010, Hare gave 200 top U.S. business executives the PCL-R and compared the corporate prevalence of psychopathic traits with the general population. Dutton notes that “not only did the business executives come out ahead, but psychopathy was positively associated with in-house ratings of charisma and presentation style, creativity, good strategic thinking and excellent communications skills.”
Paul Babiak, co-author of Hare’s paper on corporate psychopathy and leading industrial and organizational psychologist, further explains that: “Organizational chaos provides both the necessary stimulation for psychopathic thrill seeking and sufficient cover for psychopathic manipulation and abusive behavior.”
Don’t worry. All executives are not psychopaths.
Many managers are empathetic and do genuinely care about employee wellbeing. In fact, there have been numerous stories during the coronavirus pandemic about leaders and businesses pushing profits to the side in support of employee health and stability during this precarious economic period.
That said, it’s not a matter of if, but when, you’ll interact with a manipulative manager. During my career, I’ve lived through some painful political battles and earned my fair share of corporate scars.
Tap into my experience on the front lines and follow these 10 tips to navigate booby-traps and effectively manage manipulators and bullies.
- Don’t try to prove you are right
“You can be right, or you can be happy.” — Gerald Jampolsky, child and adult psychiatrist
Proving a bully wrong can be a very dangerous move. Trust me. I’ve made that mistake on more than one occasion.
People who manage through intimidation and fear do not like to be proven wrong or have their judgement questioned, especially not in public and in front of junior staff. This will be perceived as a threat to their authority, and they may use it as an opportunity for an aggressive discharge of emotion, essentially turning you into a sacrificial lamb to reinforce their power to a broader audience.
If you absolutely need to point out an error to avoid a significant negative business outcome, it’s best to frame it carefully. A safe approach is to start with an ego stroke about why their direction makes so much sense and how you wouldn’t have figured that out on your own. Only after you’ve acknowledged their intelligence and authority can you add your critique— potentially noting something along the lines of “I just want to make sure that your idea has maximum impact.”
But whatever you do, don’t call their faulty judgement an error or a mistake!
2. Draw clear boundaries
This may sound simple, but it can be a challenge to operationalize in the era of 24/7 communications. A bully will often want to demonstrate their power by requesting that you drop what you’re doing and deliver what they need immediately, regardless of whether or not the request is after hours or on a holiday.
If it’s during work hours and you’re working on a high-priority deliverable for another manager, don’t just say yes and overburden yourself by trying to do two things at once. The best approach is to be transparent with each manager and let them negotiate on which deliverable takes priority.
Depending on your industry, however, after hours requests can be necessary. Just know that it’s a slippery slope. Once expectations are set that you’ll willingly do work during off hours, you can easily become the “go-to” staffer for said requests. If they continue to increase, you can preempt them, noting that you will be offline after a certain time for an ongoing personal commitment.
3. Don’t tolerate rude and abusive communication
Some managers are…let’s just say…a little rough around the edges. They may be abrasive, immature and prone to have hissy fits in public.
I’ve witnessed managers swear at their team and storm out of meetings, slam their fists against office file cabinets, hang up on colleagues mid-conversation and yell at junior staff in open office environments.
Many corporations, it seems, promote employees into positions of management because of individual results and performance — not because of their ability to actually manage staff. While the examples mentioned above are completely unprofessional and inexcusable, people do lose their cool under pressure and take it out on those around them.
If you find yourself on the receiving end of one of these outbursts, it’s generally a good idea not to react impulsively in the heat of the moment. If you can, take a 15 to 20-minute walk, let the situation defuse and then return to the conversation in private, acknowledging their frustrations and trying to get to the root of the issue. If the person has calmed down enough (which they may not have), then you can also respectfully assert that a different communication approach will be more effective in the future.
It’s also a good idea to keep a record of these experiences on paper, noting the time, date, dynamics and any witnesses, in case you should need to summon the evidence at a later date.
Another approach, which my friend successfully deployed earlier this year, is what I’d call the Nuclear Option. If your boss is acting extremely rude and unprofessional and you feel that you are in a position of strength (i.e. you are extremely critical to business operations), you can threaten to walk out on the spot, explicitly noting that the treatment is unacceptable. It’s a bold move — certainly not for the faint of heart.
4. Be careful with HR
Some may argue with me on this one, but ask yourself this: Who do human resources employees work for? HR will say that they are there to protect you, but, ultimately, they are accountable to the company and protecting the company’s interests.
If your boss is toxic and abusive to you, the odds are that s/he has been that way to others. There have likely been other complaints, and your boss hasn’t been fired. There’s always the possibility that your “confidential” conversations with HR are not quite as private as you thought and could lead to retaliatory behavior.
The sad truth is that some companies prioritize revenue generation over all else and will knowingly turn a blind eye to psychologically abusive managers, until their hand is forced in the form of a employee lawsuit.
5. Build a strategic network of trusted confidants
Instead of showing your hand to folks in the HR department, I recommend documenting your bad experiences and quietly building a network of trusted advisors.
Ideally, this group will include managers from a variety of different departments. Your network of trusted advisors can help you think through challenges (in confidence), provide objective feedback and back you up behind the scenes during formal and informal management discussions. Your network can also help you identify alternative roles both inside and outside your company.
If push comes to shove and your boss is trying to get you fired, your confidants can offer third-party critiques of your boss to senior management, which can damage his/her credibility and call into question any blame directed at you.
6. Don’t take the bait
Manipulators and bullies often use anger and aggression to force others to either submit to their will or react impulsively. By trying to fluster or knock you off your feet, they are hoping to catch you in a bad decision that they can then use against you in the future.
Manipulating your emotions or anxiety level also gives them a perverse sense of power and control. It’s slightly disturbing behavior to be sure, but, if you’re not ready for it, they might catch you unprepared. A boss once attempted to scapegoat me for his inability to effectively manage our group. In an attempt to build a case against me, he regularly sent me nasty, unfair and rude emails in an attempt to bait me into saying something inexcusable.
The most effective approach to manage this kind of behavior is to not respond with any emotion whatsoever. I did not take the emotional bait. My objective and impersonal responses were effectively “non-response” responses. Because I had taken away his power to control my emotions, he grew more enraged and ultimately ended up melting himself into the ground.
Over time, toxic managers tend to choke on their own toxicity.
7. Remember you’re not crazy
The term gaslighting seems to have made its way into popular vernacular today. While it’s probably a little overused, manipulative people do have a way of slowly making you question your own version of reality, especially when they coopt faithful minions to conspire against you.
Organizational complexity can enable manipulators to hide in plain sight by playing people against each other and obscuring their causal role in dysfunction. For example, bullies don’t treat everyone the same, and they have no qualms lying to cover their tracks. Sometimes bullies will single out one individual in a group, use them as a punching bag to berate and belittle, and then treat everyone else seemingly well.
When this happens, it can lead you to question your own judgement, wondering if you’ve been overreacting or maybe misinterpreting events in the past.
Remember that manipulative bosses didn’t just happen to become manipulators when they reached management. In all likelihood, they manipulated their way into these roles, tricking person after person and stepping over dead bodies all along the way. Don’t allow someone mistreating you to shake your faith in yourself.
8. Where you work is your choice
Bad managers like to dangle the threat of termination over their employees’ heads and justify the behavior as a performance-enhancing incentive. They paint a narrative in which the employee is “lucky” to have a job working with them because of ____. Fill in the blank with any number of marketing slogans: the company’s industry prominence, its brand name clients, the creative work it does, its entrepreneurial spirit, the opportunities to take on stretch roles, the awe-inspiring, award-slaying talent.
They will also describe employees who leave as “not being able to cut it,” as though they were somehow not up to the company’s standards or were weak and unable handle the cutthroat industry norms. This is a convenient narrative that absolves them of any responsibility and is indicative of what I call a “culture of blame” where managers spend more time pointing fingers than supporting employees through challenges. This company Kool-Aid also conceals the truth that the employee consciously chose that it was in their best interest to leave.
“It may be a patch of mud, but it’s my patch of mud,” my therapist often says.
Don’t cling to a toxic job because leaving is a blow to the ego or feels like failure. Push comes to shove — employees do transform into expendable numbers in spreadsheets. The harsh reality is that corporations do believe that there is always a younger, cheaper version of you out there. The flip side of that coin, however, is that they too are expendable. Struggling through a toxic workplace will only hurt you in the long run, and a little more money does not balance out psychological abuse.
9. Give yourself time to recover from abuse
Once you’ve made it through a toxic workplace environment or outlasted a manipulative manager, it can be tempting to push the experience aside and jump right back into a mountain of work. While your conscious mind may tell you that everything is just fine and dandy, the reality is that your body has likely been enduring a state of high stress arousal for far too long.
It’s okay to say that you need to take a break to lower your baseline stress level and reset, especially if you’ve been the lamb on the sacrificial altar. Speaking with a therapist can help to process the experience, heal effectively and spring forward into professional growth.
10. Hurt people hurt people
This is probably the hardest lesson to accept, especially if you’ve been treated poorly and are nursing wounds. The most manipulative and abusive people were likely treated abusively themselves. While it’s convenient to think of a ruthless manager lacking empathy and emotion as simply the devil incarnate, the messy reality is that they may have experienced their own traumatic past and internalized the behavior of their abusers.
In her book “Daring Greatly,” social researcher/storyteller Dr. Brené Brown shares another perspective to understand narcissistic behavior.
“When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong or to cultivate a sense of purpose.”
Indeed, when we peel back the surface layer of aggressive, arrogant and egotistical behavior, what we often find is self-centered fear and insecurity.
Don’t get me wrong. Bad actors don’t get a free pass. Everyone should be held accountable for how they behave, particularly when they are mistreating junior staff.
It’s just that nuance matters in life. When you have the patience to genuinely understand the perspective of a perpetrator, sometimes you can find common ground and move beyond the bully behavior.
Good luck out there in corporate America. Leave a comment and follow me if you’d like to hear more about interpersonal dynamics in the workforce.
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