Bullying the Bully

Often we encounter them. At work yes we do. Especially if you are in the business of challenging status quoi. Walk into a meeting and feel something not right. The energy levels in the room are un-balanced, the average body language is resigned and withdrawn. And then you spot that one person who like a hawk is sitting over his prey, quiet threateningly and all conclusively.

And that’s your first win. Spotting a bully for a bully. Unfortunately, that’s what a lot of us either take too long to do or I think we always know it but are unwilling to articulate it. Probably because acknowledging it would mean standing up to it. And who comes to work to deal with conflicts. We all want to have a nice day and get back home. But then who said refuse to acknowledge the tiger and the tiger will go away without having you for dinner.

So how do you navigate the bully-ness. Clearly he is in position of power over you. First - become immune. Refuse to hand over the power to him. Take nothing personally and be very clinical. This will ensure you “never react”. A reaction to his action will never get you the results you want. It will only lead you away from your goals. As you distance yourself from the power game, you end up taking away a lot of power from him.

The next step especially in a multi stakeholder complex project situation I think is resort to Technology. The biggest thing that, that will do is cut out the stronghold of given individuals on information, approvals and decision making. It brings transparency openness and takes the individual out of the game completely.

Make a detailed project plan with ownership set up automatic alerts put it on a shared site which sends notifications to one and all of any change any delay any decision (you can build very fancy ones in Excel). Essentially get all stakeholders on the same platform and kind of manage the whole show from the back end. The front end becomes the Plan - not you. Take the individuals out of the game.

More often than not a Bully is never the smartest kid on the block, hence all you need is to outsmart him by not putting emotion but brain power. Always be ahead of the game in terms of level of detail governance documentation. Since bullies thrive on emotional control sooner rather than later he will be so bored of the detail that he will back off and go look for the next prey. And you can smoothly accomplish your objective.