We live in an era when brazenly abusive bosses like Donald Trump and chef Gordon Ramsay find fame and fortune on reality TV shows, so it's no surprise that a lot of loathsome behavior is tolerated, even rewarded, in American workplaces.
There are plenty of bosses out there who believe their job is to "just get results, it doesn't matter how. If I grind people up and spit them out, hey, it's a cruel world out there. The beatings will continue until performance improves. If you can't hack it, see ya later, loser."
Even bosses who aren't tyrants may allow a toxic bully to wreak havoc on unfortunate co-workers.
You know the kind -- the angry, aggressive jerk with a hair-trigger temper, so you constantly feel like you're walking on eggshells. Or the chameleon -- nice to your face but trashing you behind your back. Or the Jekyll-and-Hyde type who sucks up to the boss while treating underlings like prison camp inmates.
If any of these situations sounds familiar, you may want to check out a new book, "Beating the Workplace Bully," by Alaska Dispatch News business advice columnist Lynne Curry.
Standing up to bully
Curry has seen plenty of low-down, dirty behavior in her 37 years of training and coaching employers and employees. Drawing on that experience, she has produced a valuable training manual for standing up to the bully and helping victims restore their sense of confidence and self-worth.
If you're a public radio fan, you might say Curry offers a real-life version of Prairie Home Companion's Powdermilk Biscuits, which "give you the strength to get up and do what needs to be done."
It does no good, she writes, to turn the other cheek; often the bully will just slap it. Instead, set firm boundaries and stand up to your aggressor.
The goal, she says, is to "create the you who won't knuckle under."
Curry's book is a personal training manual, but it goes beyond explaining what to do; it's full of exercises designed to "teach you how to do it."
Each chapter offers examples of bullying based on cases from Curry's professional experience. She says "each (example) is a composite of two or three of the many targets and bullies I've coached merged into one story. I have changed the names and specific facts out of respect for those I've coached."
Exercises and tools to use
At the end of each chapter are prompts that help apply the techniques and tactics she mentions. She offers a whole Home Depot full of tools for coping with workplace bullies (or bullies elsewhere in your life) -- from snappy comebacks to startle the bully, to breathing exercises, positive visioning, practicing confident posture, learning "mental martial arts" and "detoxing" by coming home at night and venting in a journal.
There are exercises to diagnose your style of dealing with conflict and check your own behavior to see if you have a tendency toward bullying.
Curry also discusses effective ways to alert management about damage the bully is inflicting. (Key advice: Frame it as a problem affecting goals management cares about, not just a personal problem for you.)
Unfortunately, workplace bullying per se isn't against the law in Alaska, but Curry notes that bullies often violate laws on discrimination, sexual harassment or whistleblower protection, and she guides you on how to document your case. Her advice includes using a smartphone to record what the bully is doing. (It's OK to do that without the bully's consent or knowledge in Alaska, but it's not legal in some Lower 48 states, according to Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.)
I was a bit surprised about Curry's advice in dealing with a boss who is a bully but stops well short of breaking any laws on harassment and discrimination. She favors accommodation, even bordering on flattery, rather than confrontation. Amid the cornucopia of tips and tactics she's offering, it will be easy to find your own comfort level with what she recommends.
As one who's never suffered a bully at work, I was stunned at the range of bad behavior she's encountered.
At the hard-to-believe-how-petty end of the spectrum, a bully repeatedly rattles a self-conscious colleague by staring at the turkey wattle on his neck. At the other extreme, she mentions cases where a scorched-earth adversary creates fake Twitter, Facebook and email accounts to spread bogus complaints and personal attacks, causing no end of trouble with management, clients and customers.
Not a breezy read
The stories in "Beating the Workplace Bully" feel more authentic when Curry is clearly telling them from her own professional experience, rather than presenting abstract third-person accounts cobbled together from multiple situations.
In an almost poignant case study, she writes about a good-hearted boss run out of the company by bullying and sabotage from a devious underling. Two remaining co-workers contacted Curry and asked her to intervene. She did and helped management learn it had a bully, who was then eased out of the company.
"Beating the Workplace Bully" is a detailed how-to manual, not a breezy read. Curry could probably reach a much wider audience if she wrote a memoir full of real-life stories about the horrible things horrible people do to decent people in the workplace. No doubt, confidentiality requirements and professional ethics would require her to blur identifying details, as she does here.
But with her well-honed writing skills, Curry knows how to tell a good story, and she surely has many good ones to tell from her years looking at the underside of the American workplace. I look forward to that kind of book after she retires, when she can be more free in telling her tales.
Matt Zencey is a former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News. He is now retired and living in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Contact him at mzencey@hotmail.com.