Great article and agree you must be thoughtful and self controlled in your handling. Unfortunately in my 31 year career at a major corporation iI witnessed and was the object of dysfunctional management. Be aware of the office politics sometimes there is a dysfunctional and even abusive boss for a reason, albeit the wrong reason. The ultimate solution is to leave, therefore your must manage your career so that is possible. Many times we see the best people leave because of the boss. But that said the article is the word to the wise to be thoughtful and self-controlled in your response..

The author of this article assumes that people are generally reasonable and will respond well to reason, which contradicts the very subject he is writing on.

Dave & George,

Thank you both for sharing your thoughts. I too have had several bad bosses throughout my career who behaved badly and some who believed they needed to resort to verbal abuse to manage others.

Through it all, I learned what Dave mentioned, that you "must be thoughtful and self controlled" when handling these types of people.

It does no good to lower yourself to the level of people who are unreasonable by acting the way they do (poorly). In most cases, it merely hurts your own career if you stoop to their level.

Yes, one option is to leave the company due to a badly behaving boss. However, I've never liked the idea of a bad boss negatively impacting my career by making me leave a job or company.

My personal choice has been to always act professionally and work together with other reasonable people within the department/company to alleviate the person's bad behavior, or, in the worst case, to rid the company of the bad apple so they cannot do any more harm - even if the bad apple is the boss.

~ Lisa Quast

Lisa,
How to act professionally when you do the work which is done by no less than seven people in the same company's other field office,
when you work 16-hour days for five months, and then 20 hour days for six weeks, and have continuous stretches of work of 40 to 60 hours,
when, though being signed up as manager and being promised a team, you do not get any people for the team,
when your own mother dies because you were unable to attend to her needs in nursing home,
when you get racial insults and taunts and work,
when safety and HR people are the first to insult you like that,
when you develop double vision towards the end of the work day after working for +20 hours,
and you actually have to cover one eye when you drive home at night to get that precious one hour of sleep,
when your work gets praised for quality on a $2 billion project (which is a portion of a $40 billion project),
and when you are wondering how come you are able to function at all after nine months of that.

And, when, despite calm and controlled warnings and cautioning for months, all you get from managers is laughter.

You have to leave just to stay alive.

And then, when you find out that a person actually committed a suicide by hanging on that same project about ten days after you left, you are quite sure that you have done the right thing.
But it does not help you find new job, because nobody believes something like that is possible.

Any better examples for "damned if you do, damned if you don't"?

Yes, this is a real life example, from a project in a well paid industry, for biggest companies in the world. And it is a first-world white collar job in the richest country in the world, in a labour market with the lowest unemployment in the world.

I was diagnosed with PTSD after leaving a job I'd had for 2 1/2 years with a 'team' of 4 people, all of whom seemed to find time to back-bite, sabotage, or report any minor error to our Manager (who was one of the 4 people in the Department.) I can relate to BK's scenario, because HR is NOT the employees' friend; they shield Management from any negative feedback from 'underlings'. My Manager hid e-mails from other Managers who praised my performance, berated me in front of others, and acted completely inappropriately when a Company Sales Rep tried to give a professional presentation. 1:1 meetings with him went nowhere. I watched this Manager bully employees in other Departments, insult colleagues behind their backs, and take up 5-6 HOURS for a monthly 'meeting' for the Department. A total of 3 people were required to sit listening to this man bluster and tell tales while we had other urgent work to do. On my last day working, I had a full-blown anxiety attack when one colleague called to say the Manager was, "on his way to our office, and that I should 'hide somewhere' so he would not see me, since he would probably fire me". The constant negative input, verbal abuse and micro-management put me on Leave of Absence for over a year while I tried to heal from the experience. The final insult was being fired while on Physician-Approved Sick Leave. There is little an individual can do when subjected/targeted for bullying. Nothing done is good enough, no initiative is rewarded, no action is valued when a Manager crafts an employee's failure. I tried to transfer to another Department without success. Sadly, observing my colleagues become willing participants in on-the-job-torture was the final straw. It's been over two years and I'm still job-hunting. It is difficult to find employment when you're over 60.

For those dealing with the after-effects of workplace trauma (bullying), try reading "Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression" by Rachel Simmons. It's mostly about young girls' bullying in a school environment, but I've found there to be a lot of parallels between it and the modern workplace, also a place where typically male displays of aggression are looked down upon. (In fact, I've personally found the book's stories to be more analogous to my workplace experiences than to my school experiences. Sad, isn't it?) Workplace abusers (male and female) resort to subtler, but more destructive, forms of abuse such as verbal intimidation, back-biting, rumor spreading, exclusion, and gas-lighting to achieve their goals and to distort the victims' senses of reality. Bullies gain their power by selecting victims who are close, then manipulating others into ganging up on the victim. And heaven forbid another person try to stand up for the victim, lest the bullies' attentions turn to them.

And to previous posters: while it's hard to find employment over 60 -- or at any age if you don't have a piece of paper to "prove" you can string three words together (as is my case) -- I'd argue it's far harder to work with a bunch of colleagues who behave like teenaged girls. Like the other poster, I consider myself lucky for getting out of such a toxic environment -- because when it comes down to it, those people will ultimately have to answer for their actions, not me.

Try the book. At the very least, it will help you to know you're not alone. Worst-case scenario: you'll pick up a few tactics in case you're ever forced to stoop to a bully's level again.

Lisa, how about a series of entries on workplace bullying and surviving toxic environments?

If a boss has a concern, he or she needs to address it immediately and directly with the employee, and in a respectful way while also conveying how serious the problem is (or isn't). I know I've reacted negatively in the past to a negative evaluation -- not because the feedback was bad, but because I couldn't help but think, "You waited this long to tell me how serious that mistake was, when you only mentioned it in passing when it happened several months ago? What else have I screwed up that you haven't told me about? Am I truly getting the feedback and guidance I need from this place?".

How should employees handle it when real criticism from the boss only comes in the form of performance reviews that are conducted semi-annually, at best? If a teacher waited until the end of a term to grade students' work, he or she would be out of a job. Is it not in the best interest of an employer to help its employees grow, as long as it can do so while meeting its bottom line?

As an aside, if an employee wants to voice a concern to his or her boss, there should be a way to do so without the boss overreacting and summoning human resources (which, as another poster pointed out, often serves little purpose except to intimidate employees when they express any concern -- no matter how valid -- about management). HR departments used to be there to serve all employees. If employees were lucky enough to be unionized, that just meant having at least one full-time representative in human resources -- so that the employer learned to work *with* the union (the employees) instead of against them. Because while everyone wants safe working conditions, a living wage and decent health benefits; most also want to work with our employer to make sure the company's goals are being accomplished (i.e., no one wants to be the guy who complains to the union about every little thing). Employees also want consistent, unambiguous, and above all, transparent workplace policies that cover every major scenario and that clearly outline everything from performance expectations and discipline procedures, to dress code. Unlike employers, we don't have multiple teams of lawyers to cross-reference 6 different handbooks, 2 contracts, and God-knows-how-many riders and addenda for months on end while we cautiously mull over how to address catty co-workers or bosses who behave badly.