Psycho Killer (Que'st-ce Que C'est?)
If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next
Bullying in the workplace is, sadly, all too common. The majority of people have experienced it directly or indirectly, and watching someone being bullied is no fun either.
Only it’s not bullying. It’s abuse.
It’s important we name it as such.
Bullying is too soft, with its connotations of childishness and the playground. Bullying is something people ‘grow out of’, it’s unpleasant but we ‘all go through it’ and we ‘get over it’.
Only that’s not true of what happens in the workplace. The ‘bullies’ haven’t grown out of it, they’ve developed into abusers. And it’s not just unpleasant, it’s psychologically damaging and it causes permanent harm to people. They don’t ‘get over it’, it blights their life and even, in the worst cases, ends it.
Think I’m being over dramatic?
I’d have probably agreed a few years ago. I was talking to someone about my own experience of bullying when he corrected me. “It’s not bullying,”, he said, “it’s abuse. If someone did that to a child, that’s what you’d call it.”
I reflected on what he said but I still felt uncomfortable calling it abuse. That seemed a bit extreme, a bit over the top. However, over time, I came to realise that my reluctance was to identify as someone who had been abused, to accept that I was a victim. It seemed to me to signify some sort of weakness (wrongly, as I now know, thanks to Brene Brown), some failing on my part, so I was in denial about the damage I’d suffered and sought to understate it.
Eventually I came to realise that he was right and that by downplaying it I was just prolonging the abuse and increasing the damage. That’s what abusers play on, of course, your reluctance to admit it to yourself and your fear of telling others because you think it will diminish you in their eyes. So you hide it behind your pride, because that’s the only thing you’ve got left.
As soon as I framed my experience as abuse, it became clear to me what had happened and the impact it had on me (although it took me much longer to accept it). I could see that my relationship with my manager had been an abusive one, and that he had done many of the usual things an abuser does - isolating, demeaning, gaslighting, making impossible demands, continually shifting the goal posts, manipulation, creating dependency.
All of this was done in plain sight. Helped by my own refusal to acknowledge what was going on (born partly out of naivety and lack of knowledge and awareness).
For a while I wondered what I did wrong to become the subject of this abuse, what could I have done differently. When we’re abused we often blame ourselves and feel it must be our fault - encouraged by our abusers, of course. That pushes us into shame and shame leads to silence.
I concluded that I did nothing wrong. I was just being me. The abuser was the one who was at fault, I was just unlucky to come to his attention. I now refer to him as ‘my psycho boss’, I disempower him by bringing him out of the shadows and into the light.
Too many people have ‘psycho bosses’ in their careers. Too many workplaces are both abusive and enable abuse. I want us to change that but the first step is to call it out and acknowledge for what it is.
Stop calling it bullying. Name it. Let’s start to stop the abuse.
TOXIC
Of course, the behaviour of my psycho boss was enabled by the environment we were in. It was a very hierarchical, command-and-control power structure ruled by fear. I joke that bullying wasn’t just tolerated, it was the dominant management style.
It went further than that, the way that division operated was abusive. The hyper-masculine traits of assertiveness, self-confidence and charisma were celebrated and rewarded, leading to a male-dominated environment characterised by aggression, arrogance and personal feifdoms.
This was evident from the language that was used. People were ‘put under the spotlight’ and ‘given a bollocking’. Bosses had ‘turf wars’ and ‘pissing contests’. You were punished if you didn’t ‘toe the line’ or you ‘went offside’.
The whole way the organisation worked was to promote and encourage psychopathic behaviours. Brutality and ruthlessness were lauded. If you wanted to get on, you had to show these behaviours. They were baked into the processes (although not to the degree of Jack Welch’s ‘rank and yank’ policy at GE) and so you had to go along with them just to survive.
And that’s how you ended up with good people doing bad things. Either directly, or through inaction. Either by being abusive, or by turning a blind eye.
This is going on everywhere. If it can happen in part of an organisation generally considered a ‘good’ employer, it can happen anywhere.
(Thanks to Dr. Richard Claydon for his insights and his recent LinkedIN posts on Jordan Peterson that developed my thinking on this topic).
Stuck
At one point I tried to make a business out of my experience, to be like Chiron, the ‘Wounded Healer’. (Let’s face it, who doesn’t like to borrow a bit of mythology to big things up! Besides, he was bloody centaur - how cool is that?)
Anyway, ‘After the Mothership’ was intended to share my experience with others who wanted or needed to transition out of corporate life and make it a much better - and shorter - experience than mine. It didn’t really work because, as I eventually realised, I was scared it would drag me back into the pain and confusion I’d been trying to escape. However, what I learnt was that my experience was far from unique. In fact, it was frighteningly common.
Time and again, when I explained what ‘After the Mothership’ was about, people would share their own experiences. I found out that lots of people have had a psycho boss at some point, and even more have witnessed abuses in the workplace.
For some, it was just a minor blip in their career and they navigated their way past it. However, for many it was much more serious and had caused them long-term damage. For some, it would be a particular boss or an incident. For others, it was just the long-term impact of chronic abuse, a wearing down of their identity and character until they just had to get out.
And everyone said much the same. When you’re in it, you don’t really realise what is happening. You feel trapped, your resources are depleted and you’re in a state of confusion and pain (which is what the abusers intend, of course).
So I worry about the people who are still stuck in those situations. Who feel they don’t have any option other than to grin and bear. Who can’t really see what’s happening to them and around them, like the frog sitting in the ever-warming pan of water.
How can we help them?
True
Well, that all went a bit heavy, didn’t it? Where’s the Dad jokes, I hear you ask? Where’s the obtuse references to Monty Python sketches? Look, I got a reference to a mythical beast in, will that do?
And there’s Pirates, of course!
One of the most important things the Pirates did was truth-telling. They saw the injustices in the world around them and they called them out. Nothing mealy mouthed about their pronouncements, they got straight to the point. This was quite a big deal in those days, as questioning authority was seen as treasonous and met with brutal and summary justice.
We might get a bit of pushback on social media, maybe be the subject of a twitter pile-on, but we’re not going to get hung, are we? So let’s be truth tellers and speak truth to power.