People who are bullied find that they are:
• Constantly criticised – explanations and proof of achievement are ridiculed, overruled, dismissed or ignored.
• Forever subjected to nit-picking and trivial fault-finding (the triviality is the giveaway).
• Undermined, especially in front of others; doubts are expressed over a person’s performance or
standard of work – however, the doubts lack substantive and quantifiable evidence, for they are only
the bully’s unreliable opinion.
• Isolated and excluded from what’s happening (this makes people more vulnerable and easier to
control and subjugate)
• Singled out and treated differently (for example everyone else can have long lunch breaks but if they
are one minute late it’s a disciplinary offence).
• Belittled, degraded, demeaned, ridiculed, patronised.
• Threatened, shouted at and humiliated, especially in front of others.
• Taunted and teased where the intention is to embarrass and humiliate.
• Set unrealistic goals and deadlines which are unachievable or which are changed without notice or
reason or whenever they get near achieving them.
• Denied information or knowledge necessary for undertaking work and achieving objectives.
• Denied support by their manager and thus find themselves working in a management vacuum.
• Either overloaded with work (this keeps people busy [with no time to tackle bullying] and makes it
harder to achieve targets) or have all their work taken away (which is sometimes replaced with
inappropriate menial jobs, eg photocopying, filing, making coffee).
• Have their responsibility increased but their authority removed.
• Have their work plagiarised, stolen and copied – the bully then presents their target’s work (eg to
senior management) as their own.
• Are given the silent treatment: the bully refuses to communicate and avoids eye contact; often
instructions are received only via email, memos, or a succession of yellow stickies.
• Subject to excessive monitoring, supervision, micro-management, recording, snooping etc.
• The subject of written complaints by other members of staff (most of whom have been coerced into
fabricating allegations – the complaints are trivial, often bizarre [“He looked at me in a funny way”] and
often bear striking similarity to each other, suggesting a common origin).
• Find requests for leave have unacceptable and unnecessary conditions attached, sometimes
overturning previous approval; especially if the person has taken action to address bullying in the
meantime.
• Denied annual leave, sickness leave, or – especially – compassionate leave.
• When on leave, are harassed by calls at home or on holiday, often at unsocial hours.
• Receive unpleasant or threatening calls or are harassed with intimidating memos, notes or emails with
no verbal communication, immediately prior to weekends and holidays (eg 4pm Friday or Christmas
Eve – often these are hand-delivered).
• Do not have a clear job description, or have one that is exceedingly long or vague; the bully often
deliberately makes the person’s role unclear.
• Are invited to “informal” meetings which turn out to be disciplinary hearings.
• Are denied representation at meetings, often under threat of further disciplinary action; sometimes
the bully abuses their position of power to exclude any representative who is competent to deal with
bullying.
• Encouraged to feel guilty, and to believe they’re always the one at fault.
• Subjected to unwarranted and unjustified verbal or written warnings.
• Facing unjustified disciplinary action on trivial or specious or false charges.
• Facing dismissal on fabricated charges or flimsy excuses, often using a trivial incident from months or
years previously.
• Coerced into reluctant resignation, enforced redundancy, early or ill-health retirement.
A favourite tactic of bullies which helps them evade detection is to undertake a “reorganisation” at regular intervals.
This has several advantages:
• Anyone whose face doesn’t fit can be organised out through downsizing (redundancy) or transfer.
• Ditto anyone who challenges the reorganisation.
• Ditto, their job can be “regraded” or “redefined” to the person’s disadvantage
• Each reorganisation is a smokescreen for the bully’s dysfunctional behaviour – everyone is so busy
coping with the reorganisation (chaos) that the bully’s behaviour goes unnoticed.
• The bully can always claim to be reorganising in the name of “efficiency” and therefore be perceived by
those above as a strong manager.