Twenty years ago, I was shocked to hear of a client’s colleague who had been bullied at work. Not only had they been bullied, but they had put up with it for a long time – over a year.

When it reached breaking point, the bullied person at last made a stand and lodged a formal complaint. The complaint went all the way up the line to HQ.

HQ (and this involved the main board) looked at the complaint, looked at the commercial performance of the bully and…. because those commercial results looked good… decided to sweep the whole thing under the carpet.

The bullied party was offered some compensation but was also asked to leave. The bully was retained.

I gave the bullied person the number of our employment lawyer. They fought the case. The company ended up paying six times the original compensation offer, plus costs.

But the bullied person had still been sacked and the bully retained.

(by the way, for the record it was a female director bullying a male manager)

But that was twenty years ago, right?

Yes. But I’ve just heard about another case – almost a carbon copy of the one from 20-year-old history – that’s just unravelled in exactly the same way.

How can this be?

I wonder whether it’s in part a cultural thing. I mean business culture.

(I don’t believe all bullies are innate bastards – there’s no excuse, but there may be reasons why it occurs).

Perhaps some people simply don’t know where to draw the line between firm leadership and unwarranted bullying. They think that aggressive is good leadership (which rarely is).

So, is there an issue of management training missing here?

And there are – of course – two sides to the coin.

The other side of the coin is that I have also, over the years, heard plenty of examples of people abusing the system – making false claims of bullying when in fact they were underperforming, lazy, incompetent, unconfident, entitled, whatever.

So, we have two things going on.

Senior managers confuse nasty abrasiveness with good leadership. And when any normal business pressure comes on tap, some employees immediately reach for the ‘harsh’ button.

I believe one primary cause of this is an atmosphere of sycophancy and yes-people around senior directors. If you are surrounded by fawning colleagues, then it’s natural that some directors are fooled into thinking they are God Almighty. Then they misbehave because no-one dares to push back.

The answer – don’t let directors surround themselves with obsequious flatterers. Call it out. And that has to be done by colleagues of parallel seniority. They are usually the only ones with enough clout to be listened to. It’s NOT alright to ignore bad behaviour and let it continue.

From the other end of the telescope, directors are also being trained nowadays to be so nicey-nicey to all employees that it’s becoming difficult to have the confidence to impose normal disciplines.

If someone’s not coming up to scratch, then their managers need the confidence and authority to discipline them, not be gainsaid by the next layer up of directors telling them to look for mitigating circumstances (in order to show the companies’ ‘modern’ culture, ‘caring’ credentials).

There’s woke at work you know.

So, all-in-all, I’m not sure that business culture has got much better over the last two decades.

It has changed. But it now has different vagaries.

There will always be bullies.

Better management training could help reduce it.

There will always be employees who abuse the system.

The room for firm management must be allowed to nip this abuse in the bud.

In the end, the responsibility really lies with each of us individually…

…not to be overly aggressive in our leadership…

…not to be afraid to call out system-abusers…

…not to abuse the system ourselves.