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What To Do When You’re Bullied At Work
About 15 years ago, I worked with a college student who made me cry in my director’s office. Twice. That experience stayed with me, and I thought I had learned how to manage those experiences to avoid them.
I wrote about the experience in a series What I Wish I Had Been Told: As a First Time Student Staff Supervisor.
Some of the phenomenal students I worked with weren’t easy to supervise. One comes to mind very easily, because he made me cry.
Twice.
He was great at the work he did, but he had ownership of the work he thought was higher than mine. And for some reason, he thought he could call me out for not doing the work ‘on-time’ for him.
Mind you, I had a master’s degree and was the Associate Director for the department.
Looking back, and learning about his patterns of bullying behavior, his behavior was rooted in misogyny. I just happened to be one of his targets. At the time, I didn’t feel I had the power to confront his behavior and just cried in my director’s office.
Twice.
I’ve since learned that workplace bullying doesn’t require that it follow titles. This student, while very competent, just knew how to bully his way through his leadership experience. In hindsight, I should have fired him…
