December 1, 2009

When the workplace betrays you...

Okay, let's say you had a friend who came to you for advice about his workplace. Here is a brief scenario:

There is a powerful man who has a great deal of influence at work. This is because he is in charge of a lot of money. But TheBully shits on most of his colleagues, who for some reason just accept this as his "personal style."

Your friend was not hired by TheBully, but by another person who directly supervises him. He simply borrows space in the TheBully's factory because the supervisor has a different kind of factory. And so, there are weekly meetings with his direct supervisor and TheBully.

In these meetings, however, TheBully verbally beats up on your friend.
Meeting One: TheBully, calls your friend, "Not passionate enough."
Meeting Two: TheBully claims, your friend is not working hard enough or fast enough, that TheBully will have to find someone else to replace your friend.
Meeting Three: TheBully tells your friend that he has two strikes against him. That he is not meeting expectations.

Now you know this friend quite well and you know that he works really hard. You know, for example, that your friend spend a month of unpaid work to learn the job from a previous factory worker who was leaving. That he didn't take a Christmas holiday so that he could replace the raw materials in a production line. Finally, in the course of literally one year, your friend has managed to get enough raw materials to produce two finished goods. By way of comparison, the person previously employed by TheBully for six years produced raw materials of very poor quality and thus no finished goods. Not only that, TheBully's factory has not produced any goods of high quality in the last 5 years. Needless to say, your friend's real supervisor has been quite happy with your friend's job performance so really it isn't a question of productivity.

Finally, Meeting Four: TheBully shouts questions at your friend about the raw materials. Remaining calm, your friend tries to answer the questions. But this was a 'question and answer game', where your friend answered, "Yes" and the bully would say "Wrong, it's no." Similarly if your friend said, "No" the bully yells, "Wrong, it's yes." After angrily spitting false accusations at your friend about stealing company materials, TheBully screams at your friend calling him arrogant. Several times, the supervisor tried to intervene but TheBully shut him down too. Then, TheBully stormed out of the room several times, and when he finally came back, asked your friend to get his raw materials out of his factory. Furthermore, TheBully ended the relationship not just with your friend but with his supervisor, saying he didn't care what the hell they did.

The next day, worried about some of the raw materials still in production in the TheBully's factory, the supervisor approaches TheBully. He tries to ask him what to do about the raw materials and to address the angry words in the previous meeting.

TheBully denies ever asking your friend to get his raw materials out of his factory. He denies it all.

What advice would you give your friend about this workplace situation?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'd tell my friend that I do not think their workplace is a healthy emotional environment. While scary, I would suggest that they cut their losses and get the hell out of there before things get worse. It sounds like TheBully is an emotional abuser, whom may slowly erode the sanity of your friend.

After some time, as the dust settles, I would ask my friend if there was any way that they could have learned about TheBully's true nature before starting to work at the factory. Avoiding similar situations in the future would be advised.

Zen Faulkes said...

There was a feature about workplace bullying on CBC0’s The Current yesterday. There may be some useful tips there.

http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2009/200911/20091130.html

Lots of bullies have someone that they are answerable to; a district manager, say. If so, find TheBully’s boss.

chall said...

First> Tell them, "Get out of there now".

Second> Tell them "Maybe you should really think about a new job, talking really truthfully to the supervisor (who by the way, seems to have NO spine) and look for some other allies in the quest for 'not getting crushed by TheBully' "

Third> or maybe first acutally. I would do what you just did, list ALL accomplishments the person has done (it sounds like he has done a good job) and then go to either supervisor or higher above. Ah well, might as well do both. hopefully the supervisor can back your friend up.

I guess it will not be a good thing for the relationship with TheBully, but if that isn't TheOnlyGodInTheField, I'd cut my losses as soon as possible.

You can always email if you want some more advice on how to approach the nasty buiness of saving your ass without getting burned too bad in the collision with Idiots aka TheBully.

It isn't a good environment and clearly TheBully should be bullied into "you don't have to like other people but you sure as hell have to not be abusive to them'.

The liability of a brown voice.

 It's 2am in the morning and I can't sleep.  I'm unable to let go of the ruminations rolling around in my brain, I'm thinkin...