The Workplace Bully

A Personal Experience from The Bully Manual

I don’t even really know what to say or how to say it and it is still very difficult to talk about it even though it is several years after the fact.

I’d say I experienced almost two years of intense work place bullying even after asking for help, and I will be the first to admit that being bullied as an adult has changed a great deal about me. That is exactly what bullying does. It diminishes the power or sense of well being of the individual being bullied while creating a sense of power for the bully.

While I try not to judge others, I feel pretty comfortable in saying that my workplace bully was not a good person and he really didn’t care who knew that. He said and did all sorts of nasty dishonest things at work, not just to me, but to anyone who had something he wanted.

After he’d unsuccessfully made a few attempts to flirt with me, he tried to pry into my personal life, spreading lie-laden gossip to my coworkers. All of the things he said and did were hurtful and were meant to be exactly that, but I’d say things really got bad when I began to object to the very apparent disparate treatment among student-athletes in our athletic program. This is a Title IX violation. Essentially, the male student-athletes and coaches were favored over the female student-athletes and coaches. That was true in terms of school community support and recognition, financial support, and administrative support. Because of that, I knew I would experience retaliation, but I had no idea it would run so deeply for so long.

Almost immediately after I formally noted the Title IX violations with an attorney and building level administrators, he began to “jokingly” call me out of my name. almost daring me to object. He always tried to insinuate I was just hypersensitive. He did whatever he could to turn his athletes, who just happened to also be my students against me, so when they attended my classes, they were unnecessarily rude and unfocused. To this day, I honestly don’t believe the students received the fullness of what I had to offer as a teacher because their “eyes” for me had been blinded by their coach, a man they trusted.

He kept my coworkers informed about everything that went on between us — actual events and the ones he fabricated — causing them to choose sides. Of course, they chose his side because I was new to the staff. I went from having one bully into being entrenched in a community of bullies, in what seemed like an epidemic of mean behavior on the job. The whole thing went entirely too far with no intervention from our direct supervisor or building level administrator. It was getting too difficult for me to walk into my workplace, a place I had once loved, with my head up.

Being a woman who had coached in a male dominated field for years, I tried everything I could to get along because I’d learned that although the average man will “try” you, once you’ve proven you can handle your own, they typically will leave you alone. Every time something happened between us, I’d come right back like it hadn’t hurt or phased me at all. I tried to maintain my professionalism, but he did everything he could to keep our situation from being anything but professional. He made it personal, so I began to document and report everything that was done. When it was too much to hang onto, I reported everything he had done and every new thing he did to the administrator.

The minute we were called into our supervisor’s office, I figured out that it would end badly for me. Instead of me being protected, I was told I better learn to get along with him or I wouldn’t have my job. Throughout the meeting, the bully actually smiled and winked at me as the administrator chastised me. I believe that I was not supported by administrators because my complaints of disparate treatment implicated them as well. Simply put, they were more concerned about getting rid of me, the “trouble maker,” than they were of stopping the bully and if they could use him to get rid of me, they would.