Suing the Bully Boss
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Did anyone else see this on Headline Prime news? Apparently there's legislation up in some form of the U.S. government (unsure if it's state or federal) to allow employees to sue bully bosses.
But who decides the difference between a true bully boss and a one who's gotten stuck in a hard place due to corporate rules? And, as the report stated, who gets to decide the definition of the word boss?
I didn't get to see the whole report, just the tail end of it, but I was wondering how many people saw it and what you thought of it if you did see it.
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I saw your post and went looking for some trace of this... I'd love to see it. If you should happen to dig it up - please share!
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again? -
I can't find the specific report on CNN.com (searched on "Bully Boss" and "Bully Boss Legislation"). I got a lot of hits, but not the specific report that I happened to see right before I posted my original posting.
Still I did come up with a lot of hum-dingers: http://www.thestate.com/business/story/161664.html is one newspaper article similar to what I saw on Headline Prime. Here's a whole website dedicated to it also: http://www.badbossology.com/searchresults?keywords=abuse
And if you Google "Bully Boss", you'll come up with a ton of stuff. Still, I wish I could find the exact report I listened to...
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While I'm sure there are cases where this applies, it could easily be abused as well. The US is a little sue-happy at times and I'm not sure this should be allowed.
I think if your boss is that bad and it's not harassment, you ought to look for another job. It's not always easy, but not every job fits each of us, either.
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I talked to a labor lawyer, unless when your boss talked to you including sexual or racial slur, then you can sue for harassment, otherwise look for a new job.
What is the definition of 'BAD' anyway? We can both work for the same person, I consider that person is a bully, but you don't. It is hard to judge.
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I honestly don't know that the Bully Boss laws are necessary. Why? Well, because there is such a thing as "Hostile Workplace Environment" which a lot of people overlook. Usually it's included in the definition of proving racial or gender bias, but I'm pretty sure I remember reading about a few people who have successfully sued on proving this single point alone.
A Hostile Workplace is simply one in which your co-workers or supervisor or someone makes it impossible for you to work because of "X" behavior. It doesn't have to be just harrassment. Here's a close definition I found on the web:
"Hostile Work Environment refers to harassment by supervisors, managers, coworkers, agents of the company/organization and outside vendors. Hostile Work Environment consists of a condition where employee cannot do their job without feeling harassed or threatened. (1)
According to most legal definitions, Hostile Work Environment refers to harassment or discrimination that is a violation of a person's civil rights - based on gender, sexual orientation, race, color, nationality, ancestry, ethnic origin, religion, physical handicap/disability, medical condition, physical appearance, marital status, veteran status, education.
Webster's definition of Hostile (2):
of or relating to an enemy
marked especially by overt antagonism: UNFRIENDLY
not hospitable.
Webster's definition of Hostility:
a hostile state, hostile action or overt acts of warfare
Conflict, opposition, or resistance in thought or principle.
Recent news reports quote research that people who witness harassment have stress symptoms almost as severe as those who are the target of harassment.
Consensual Behavior consists of voluntary, mutually welcome relationships between coworkers at any level. Consensual behavior is not regulated by laws nor do laws try to interfere in the personal private lives of coworkers. However, be aware, other employees may feel discriminated against, harassed or work in a hostile environment if denied equal opportunity due to a consensual relationship of coworkers. (1) "
Note that the quoted text says "most" legal definitions. As I said, there have been a few cases when people have sued where there is no specifically protected civil rights being violated but the Hostile Workplace definition still ensues. Though, proving HWE all by itself, outside of the civil rights violations is such a pain that I'm not surprised that people don't general consider suing on that point alone.
BTW, I found my definition reference at: http://www.itstime.com/apr97.htm
Lookup the site and see what they have to say about their definition of HWE (which is a little broader than the above legalese).
Also, lest we forget, acts of workplace violence are up in recent years. How much of this, I wonder, is caused by HWEs or by Bully Bosses? Doesn't HR have a responsibility to protect employees at all levels even if the workplace violence is only verbal in nature BEFORE the responses to it get physical?
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If I knew earlier, I would sue my former employer - a marketing research company. I was basically verbally abused by the DBA and my manager everyday for two years. They kept telling me I did everything wrong. Nothing I did was up to their standard. I was at the edge of the nervous breakdown, my doctor could prove that.
Later I had a friend went to work for their accounting department, she had the same treatment by her manager, within nine months, she was so depressed that she said she could not even take care of her family. She had to quit the job.
One employee went to HR to complain, he got escorted out the door immediately. HR was on the side of the company.
It is not just the IT department, it is the whole company. The turnover rate of that company is unbelievable. Their pay is higher than the other company to attract people who do not know anything about that company. That was the reason why my friend accepted the accounting job, she actually had two offers but this company's pay was much higher.
I am sure I was not the only one who got the verbally abused, but no one sued the company.
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What's lacking from this discussion so far is any definition of what is bullying or hostile. This last post from "Loner" looks like a clear example of one person's perception that is likely out of touch with reality. If you are incompetent and/or lazy your boss has to communicate that to you in some way, and discuss ways in which you need to improve. It would be helpful to this discussion to hear some of the specific comments (word for word without embellishment) that are considered abusive.
Another thing to keep in mind is that different companies and certainly different managers will have different expectations. If you work for a boss or company that expects high competence, performance, and productivity, (and perhaps that is the case with the higher paying company Loner mentions) and your ranking in these areas is mediocre to poor, the boss is not going to be telling you what a wonderful job you're doing. If you're sensitive or you have low self esteem, a wide range of perfectly acceptable communication about your performance may seem abusive to you but not to a reasonable person. This scenario should never even be considered grounds for a lawsuit.
Since this is a database related site, consider a situation where there is a group of employees writing applications to access data and generate reports. Let's say for example that one of the employees typically writes RBAR code (or take your pick of other questionable coding practices) that results in very long report generation times. When the complaints first come in from customers the boss discusses the issue with the employee and indicates the reporting performance must improve. Someone overly sensitive could perceive they are being bullied here.
If the employee is then unable to improve the performance, and his boss has one of the other employees in the group re-write the code and the report generation time is reduced by 90 to 95% or more, what is the appropriate communication to the first employee who wrote the inefficient code? What if this sort of pattern continues on other projects? Will the communication with his manager ever be pleasant for him?
I look forward to some feedback with full context and some exact comments that people perceived as bullying.
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I think you and Brandie both are touching on a fundamental aspect of this: focus / definition. Just in the same way as the Hostile Work Environment legislation exists in a generic context, but dovetails into more specific applications like gender bias/discrimination, ethnic discrimination or for that matter, ADA, this would have to be something crafted to specifically target unacceptable behavior that isn't easy to prosecute with the current set of laws.
There can be a fine line between hard-driving bosses, and those that beat on you for "no good reason". Examples:
- saddling a developer with a non-winning design proposal, with no ability to control the key points of the design; throw in a really short deadline and "I don't care what it takes - just get it done"...and then beat up on said developer for meeting the deadline with less than ideal code.
- dinging a web designer for outages in their applications when the "outages" are due to causes outside of their control (like - the firewall is toast, or a worm infecting the SAN controllers).
- no matter how dissatisfied - there's a right way and a wrong way to signify said dissatisfaction. Insults, taking pay for a bad outcome (often regardless of whether that's actually LEGAL), and various other punitive measures often border on abuse, or coud be argued to be.
Now - what then constitutes a "bully boss" versus just being a "bad boss", I don't know. I don't know what behavior they're trying to stamp out by this. No doubt it will get misused no matter how they write it, but that's true of anything....
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again? -
I've never actually had a bully boss myself. I had a paranoid micro-managing boss once, and a strict / insensitive boss another time, but never one that was an actual bully.
But, since we're on the subject, let me give you an example of a bad boss that isn't a bully.
Customer Service sector. The Customer Service Manager is also, oddly enough, head of HR (which consists of her and her assistant). Hours for this company are very strict. 8-5 and the customer service people cannot re-arrange their hours otherwise because someone has to be there to cover the phones.Company has an occurrence policy, which means once you're late so many times or absent without approval, you get automatically fired.
Based on that policy alone, a lot of people hated this woman because she's the one who had to show everyone the door. But then, someone gets sick. Hospital kind of sick. If she shows favoritism and doesn't give an occurence to this person, then other people will complain. So, she follows company policy and makes everyone mad. The bad boss part comes up in the following:
She doesn't defend her team to other managers. If another manager goes on a rampage about a problem caused by someone, she will happily let someone else take the blame. She tries to make members of the customer service team clean the breakroom and the bathrooms as part of their regular duties.
She tries to order around employees that work under another manager, using her HR position as leverage. And she's completey insensitive to the personal needs (time off requests, running lunch errands, etc.) of her employees.And a few things that happened to me personally... We were talking about a customer service issue once and in the middle of the conversation, she asked me if I went to church in the tone of voice that indicated if I did go to church, I wouldn't be having this customer service problem. Not quite sure where that came from or why it was any of her business. Also, I once asked her if I could re-arrange my lunch schedule so I could get allergy shots. The answer was, literally, "You don't need to go to a doctor to get allergy shots. Get your doctor to give you the serum. You can give yourself your own shots when you get home for the day."
That last was my final straw. I can appreciate her needing to obey company policy on occurrences and stuff, but when she tells me to jeapordize my own personal safety and health, that indicates to me that she has no business being a manager. But that doesn't mean she was a bully. When she wasn't being a manager or HR person, she was actually a decent person.
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Actually, any question related to religion can be interpreted as harrassment, unless you work for a church!
There actually are some ways to tell if a boss is "bullying" someone. Typically, if one worker is being held to a different standard than others doing the same job, it is harrassment, HWE, bullying, whatever name you want to call it. A good Human Resouces department will immediately "re-train" a boss who indulges in this type of behaviour, because it can lead to win-able law suits!
Brandie's example of a poor manager seems to indicate consistency across the board in enforcing company policy; the same standard applied to everyone. (excluding the church comment, of course!) Thus it is not bullying.
And I'm hoping no new law gets passed. No one can screw up a situation like legislators! (And I include all of them in that statement - same standard - no bullying here!
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Here there be dragons...,Steph Brown
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