The Manager's Guide to Bullies in the Workplace

Coping with Emotional Terrorists

Vali Hawkins Mitchell, Kristen Noakes-Fry

• Publisher: Rothstein Publishing
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781944480127
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Insurance
• Index: Business

As a manager, you can usually handle disruptive employees. But sometimes, their emotional states foster workplace tension, even making them a danger to others. Your own confidence is at risk. In The Manager's Guide to Bullies in the Workplace: Coping with Emotional Terrorists, noted counselor Dr. Vali Hawkins Mitchell gives you sensible advice for keeping the bully from dominating the workgroup and destroying productivity – and maintaining your own healthy emotional balance at the same time.

Sometimes the difficult person is an overt physical bully, which makes it easy to simply fire the person. Much of the time, however, the problems are more subtle and build up over periods of time. They undermine your ability to manage your team – and they can spread to the rest of the team, destroying teamwork and productivity. In this short book, Dr. Vali helps you to:

• Recognize the types of upsetting work situations that bullies exploit to their own advantage, such as change, grief, and violence.
• Understand why emotional terrorists make it so difficult for you, as a manager, to deal with their behavior..
• See the symptomatic tools and techniques of the emotional terrorist, such as harassment, lying to supervisors, tampering with documents, etc..
• Conduct training to help other managers and team members recognize and handle the signs of impending emotional conflict – you will love the "Snakes in the Schoolyard" exercise..
• Know exactly what to say and not say when you must have a one-on-one interview with someone you consider to be a bully..
• Be an effective manager in a world of challenges – protecting and preserving the mental health of your employees and yourself..

Dr. Vali uses realistic examples and humor to help you handle the challenges you face – and to show the degree to which she really understands your situation. With her guidance, you will be more comfortable with knowing when you can handle the situation through simply being the good manager, when you need to call in an outside mental health professional, and when you need to call 911.

Part 1

Bullies and Emotional Terrorists

1.1 Emotional Terrorists: ExtremeBullies

Because emotional terrorism is domestic terrorism that uses human feelings for ammunition, nice people don’t want to think about it. Assuming that you are a nice person, the reason you need to read this chapter is to address and absorb the reality that there are employees who have an agenda to destroy the well-being of others, using emotions as weapons. They are prepared for you, and you need to be prepared for them. They are getting better at what they do, and you need to be better at recognizing them while protecting yourself and others. They hope you don't get this information. They will discredit this topic. They will distract you and encourage you to be nicer. You need to read this chapter because emotional terrorism is real, and it isn’t going to go away anytime soon.

Emotional Terrorists and Bullies

If you have ever worked with or for a bully or what I call an emotional terrorist, you already know why you want to read this chapter - for validation. No, you are not crazy; that person you thought was dangerous to your mental health may indeed have been trying to make you go mad. If you have never worked with or for an emotional terrorist and survived, consider yourself lucky. You will want to read this chapter for self-preservation for the long-haul span of your career. If you are an emotional terrorist, you will want to read this chapter to find out if someone is on to you - because someone is! And eventually you will have to move on and find another place to be seriously annoying!!

Emotional terrorism is an emotional and behavioral phenomenon in the workplace that has eluded or been ignored by business leaders for a long time. This subset of actions and emotions is at first illusive and intangible. Business writers have made attempts to deal with the visible or overt nature of these phenomena by writing about jerks at work, or angry employees, or other references to people at work who are difficult. Managers have read books, gone to countless workshops, talked secretly to each other, consulted psychologists and therapists, and have found themselves unable to wrap their minds around a specific blend of human behavior that seems to go beyond the normal definitions of disruptive employees.

Why Dealing with Emotional Terrorism is Difficult

At closer scrutiny there are three reasons why dealing with the phenomenon of emotional terrorism has been so difficult:

1. Emotional terrorists do not fall into the range of regular to dysfunctional people and need a separate category;
2. Most employees are nice people; and,
3. Emotional terrorists count on nice people to struggle with the definition and use that discrepancy to gain emotional territory.

Staying good, nice, and friendly is what most human beings do. The majority of people do not like to upset other people. Emotional terrorists have a different approach to life. They actually seek and find pleasure in the discomfort of others. As workers, managers, and administrators have been concerned with productivity and not offending anyone, emotional terrorists have crept into workplaces and felt right at home.

If Steven Spielberg did a scary movie called “The Emotional Terrorist in the Workplace,” managers could see it on the big screen while eatingpopcorn.

Such a public validation would create a forum for discussion. It would be out in the open. As it is now, emotional terrorists at the workplace continue to stir up emotional chaos and are getting away with it on a daily basis. It is time to put some light on this and make it less possible for people with an agenda of destruction to have their way.

1.1.1 Emotional Terrorism

• Emotional terrorism: Domestic terrorism that uses human feelings for ammunition.
• Bully: A person who is habitually overbearing especially to weaker people. Bullying is a form of abuse that attempts to create power over another group or person to create an imbalance of power through social, physical, emotional, verbal coercion or manipulation; an emotional terrorist.

Emotional terrorism is everywhere. It can be found in homes, churches, synagogues, shopping centers, parent-teachers association meetings, city council meetings, and anywhere that people live, work, and play. Emotional terrorism at work is a significant risk. International and domestic terrorism are now factored into business risk management. Emotional terrorism must also be seen as risk.

The fact that international or domestic terrorism has emotional roots (someone is very, very upset about something) should immediately translate into the awareness that emotional terrorism is a constituent of these other forms of terrorism. Perhaps one way to discuss emotional terrorism at the workplace is to describe it as big terrorism's little cousin. Nevertheless, the agenda of either big or little terrorism is the same: control through the use of terror. All terrorists have a common agenda: to create fear, chaos, havoc, terror, and destruction in any way possible in order to have some sense of control, make a statement, divert attention, or call attention to something.

Mean, evil, bad, horrible, icky, intentionally dangerous, unconscionable, criminal, vile, scary, seductive, dangerous people exist. And they work with you. One very simple and horrifyingly daunting statistic may convince you. It is a statistic that is hidden from public view because of its nature and implications: the exact number of registered sex offenders in this country! The reported number, depending on the site, is daunting. One site says 600,000, and another says more, or less, but more than can be even considered without pause. And many are missing and don’t continue to report. This statistic represents only the ones who are registered. What makes you think they do not work with you? Or go to church with you? Or shop at the local market with you? Or sit with you at a PTA meeting? They do. And some of them are reading this book. If this does not get your attention, nothing will.

Knowing a statistic like this just is not enough. Protection of the vulnerable from the inherent risks of such dreadful behavior demands much, much more attention. Knowing that this statistic is a reality makes it difficult to continue making good management decisions that are based on a belief that "people are good” and kind. Instincts must be challenged. Nice and trusting instincts do not work when dealing with a sex offender. Their never consider harming a child for their own gain. Regular instincts do not work with emotional terrorists either. Their thinking process is completely different from regular people who would never consider harming a co-worker for their own gain. Terrorists do not operate by the same rules as regular people.

1.1.2 Emotional Terrorism at Work

Businesses and managers need new language to deal with the ranges of terrorist challenges at work. A disgruntled worker who arrives with a gun is obviously a workplace terrorist. The employee who systematically disembowels someone's reputation through gossip and innuendo is no less destructive. One workplace terrorist will make the nightly news. One will not. Both have far-reaching consequences.

Emotional terrorists are people who have an agenda to destroy the well-being of others using emotionally loaded information, behaviors, innuendos, direct assaults, inferences, rumors, and language to establish either disruption or decay within a system with no regard to the emotional well-being of others and to the benefit of a personal, albeit private or collective mission of control. Instead of hand grenades and weapons of mass destruction, they use emotions, vulnerabilities, implications, innuendos, gestures, rumors, subtlety, victimhood, deflection, games, and power plays to take territory and cause harm. These are not regular, healthy, well- adjusted, or nice people. If you consider the statistics of active sexual predators, criminals, addicts, or untreated mental illness, it must make sense to you that statistically you will meet these charming folks at work! Emotional terrorists do not live in isolation, nor do they wear black hats to identify themselves. Emotional terrorists have taken some of the least pleasant human attributes, dysfunctions, and pathologies and turned them into an art form.

Do this: Know beyond a shadow of a doubt that emotional terrorists are counting on your denial to keep their secret.

Don't: Let emotional terrorists hold you or anyone else emotionally hostage. Shine a light on them so they can scurry back into the shadows and play nice with everyone else, or go somewhere else.

Emotional terrorists maintain control over people by holding them hostage inside their own illusions of power and control. Terrorists do not feel obliged to live within the framework of regular society. Think about how someone might hold a company hostage emotionally.

Do this: While maintaining your kind heart, find a way to temporarily put your “niceness” aside in order to stay safe. Learn the difference between being nice and being compassionately smart.

Don't: Put yourself at risk.

As a malignant tumor that does not respond to chemotherapy may require removal, the only rational option for an emotional terrorist who does not respond to appropriate, nice interventions that would get the attention of nice people may be amputation: removal through termination. Transferring the employee simply moves the malignancy elsewhere as a stopgap. Eventually the disease will appear elsewhere in the system.

Some powerful religious organizations and churches have recently become aware of how a simple, logistical relocation of a priest who has sexually exploited children does not end the problem. Moving an offender to a different diocese worksite is a stopgap response that is ineffective when someone is an offender. That person’s behavior goes with him. The same is true with even a less severe representation of emotional terrorist.

There comes a time when it does not serve the company to keep a malignant person employed. Managers must be the ones to track the effects of one employee on others.

1.2 At...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Part 2: Dealing with Bullies And Emotional Terrorists