Cultures of Fear

Story time. Early in my career, I worked for bully. It was both the worst, and the best, work experience of my life.

It would make the story more interesting if I was able to say the bully I worked for was meaner than Scott Rudin, or more of an ice-queen than Anna Wintour, or more of an egotist than Joss Whedon. She wasn’t. She combined the lack of self-control Rudin showed with his employees (Rudin apparently has a habit of throwing anything within his reach at employees who displease him) with the constant chilly disapproval of Wintour (one my Bully Boss’ favorite control tactics was engaging in the “you should know what you did to make me angry” gaslighting mindgame). Bully bosses work from the same playbook as playground bullies – it’s usually a toxic cocktail of unprovoked aggression coupled with psychological warfare. My Bully Boss was no different.

At the time I was working with her, my coworkers and I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what made her the way she was. Two decades later, my non-scientific observation based on years of experience working with leaders, is that Bully Bosses tend to be leaders who escalated into leadership early in their careers and didn’t go through some of the formative experiences other leaders go through – the ups and downs, failures and successes, frustrations and triumphs, that forge character and solidify values. What’s more, they haven’t spent very much time working for other people and experiencing what it’s like to be the employee, working for a boss. They may not ever have the experience of working for a bad boss, which I can assure you, was one of the most formative experiences of my career, and the reason why I am an organizational development practitioner today.

This could be the part of this post where I recant juicy stories about my bully boss and her terrible behavior, but it’s nothing you haven’t seen before, either in your own workplace (in which case, I am sorry) or on TV or in the movies. Objects got thrown at employees. People got yelled at or icily told off for no reason, or a reason they didn’t understand, or a reason that Bully Boss made up on the spot. People got unexpectedly fired for minor offenses that had been completely acceptable behavior the day before. Bully Boss would blow up about something she had already been told, or had said was no problem, or had explicitly agreed to, and verbally excoriate whoever was unlucky enough to be standing in front of her.

All these years later, it isn’t Bully Boss’ behavior that I find fascinating. It’s the coping and compensating behaviors all of us who worked in the organization developed to deal with the craziness we experienced on a daily basis.

Like in Scott Rudin’s office, we tried to develop elaborate manuals or guides on how to perform certain office tasks, plan an event, lay out a document, etc. so the outcome or product wouldn’t trigger her rage. (These documents never helped, as whenever we thought we’d figured out her preferences and requirements, she’d change them.)

We’d try to clue in new employees on the way the office worked using oblique language and a lot of euphemisms. But we learned not to get attached to anyone too quickly, because many new employees didn’t last long. (A popular happy-hour activity for employee get-togethers after I’d been there a couple of years was to try to count how many people had come and gone in the time the longest-tenured one of us had been there. We always lost count.)

That scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Miranda Priestly is coming into the office and everyone frantically prepares so they don’t become the target of her wrath? We did that. I was one of the people racing around making sure the break room was tidy and there wasn’t anything on my desk that might prompt an unscheduled stop-and-grill, which could escalate quickly into something really ugly if Bully Boss was in a bad mood. (I was unfortunate enough to have been assigned a desk that was visible from the main hallway Bully Boss would walk down as she came into the office. It was a huge relief when an office reorganization put me in a cubicle that was out of her line of sight/fire.)

I saw things in that work environment I have never seen since, even in client organizations I thought were in fairly dire straits. Professional people with impressive resumes and families to feed quit with no notice or even a resignation letter – they would just walk out in the middle of the day, or at quitting time, and never come back. (Some even left personal possessions on their desks when they walked out, which someone would box up for them.) People would fail to show up one morning and never return phone messages we’d leave to try to figure out where they were. I saw someone quit via a Post-it note left on a computer monitor (this was a few years before the infamous Post-it Breakup on Sex and the City).

Like in Rudin’s office, we saw Bully Boss chew up and spit out assistant after assistant after assistant. I lost count, at one point, of how many executive assistants didn’t even make it a week. Assistants were advised not to keep anything personal at their desks they couldn’t fit into one box, because so many quit on the spot, or were fired. (I was told that multiple temp agencies in our city had banned Bully Boss from using their services to find assistants.)

It got darker, the longer I worked there. People would leave for lunch and drink on their lunch hours and came back to the office tipsy. Or they kept alcohol in their desks and drank at work. People would go to lunch together and talk about how much they drank at home, every night, to forget what had happened that day and steel themselves to walk in for another day of mistreatment the next morning. People had panic attacks that landed them in the emergency room. People lost their sense of what was normal adult behavior and would get into verbal altercations with coworkers, family members, people at the grocery store when they responded to simple questions aggressively. Single people had problems dating as the job left them with no emotional space (and little time) to pursue relationships. Marriages fell apart.

Some survivors were able to develop coping mechanisms and keep going – I guess you could say I was one of them. I developed a support network within the organization – friends I still have – and we supported each other. Making fun of what we were living through made it tolerable.

I got asked at the time – and asked myself – why I put up with the craziness and the dysfunction. That’s not an easy question to answer. I think you have to work in a situation like that to understand both what it offers you, and how it breaks you. I have seen a lot of questions on social media lately about “Why did ANY of Rudin’s employees stay?” Or “How was he able to keep recruiting employees in the first place?” Rudin’s present and former employees probably each have their own (possibly different) answers to that question. I’ll answer for myself why I kept working for Bully Boss as long as I did.

I say above that working for Bully Boss was both the worst and best experience of my life. I think you get the idea about what made it the worst experience. Here’s what made it the best.

I learned a lot in that job about detail orientation – making sure every.single.thing related to an event, a publication, an activity, a meeting, has been thought through, accounted for, taken care of. That orientation has served me very well in my career.

I learned not to procrastinate, because to Bully Boss, deadlines and project plans were meaningless, even if she’d agreed to them. She wanted what she wanted when she wanted it, so putting things off wasn’t a great idea, as if you couldn’t deliver at least some partial product when she asked for it, that set you up for a mental beatdown.

I learned that even a terrible situation can be tolerated if you have good friends who will laugh with you about it.

I learned that trauma bonds people, because no one in the world understands what I went through, and who I was before and after that work experience, than the people who went through it with me.

I developed a fascination with organizations and how they work (or don’t work) that lead me into my current career path, where I’ve now helped dozens of organizations create productive, empathetic, positive cultures where bullying isn’t tolerated.

I also learned something valuable about myself, which helped me tremendously not just in my career, but in my life. A large part of the reason why I stayed in the job is because I was an achievement-chaser and a praise-lover, and subconsciously, I saw gaining Bully Boss’ approval as an accomplishment. Her behavior disgusted, frustrated and astonished me. But I desperately wanted her approval. Twisted? Absolutely. Did I need therapy? You bet, and I went out and got some. But having the experience and gaining that knowledge benefited me in innumerable ways. Once you have that self-knowledge, and recognize that kind of situation for what it is, you know better, and next time you avoid it.

I’m grateful that as a society, we’re finally calling out bully bosses, and talking about what kind of behavior should and should not be tolerated in the workplace. Unfortunately, I think we have a long way to go before we reach the point where bully bosses are held accountable. The Scott Rudin situation – where the Bully Boss is now “stepping back” and “working on his issues” is the exception, not the rule. There are thousands of Scott Rudins out there, getting up every day and making their employees miserable by ruling through terror and creating cultures of fear in their organization.

20 years later, I’m telling this story not out of any kind of need for revenge, or as a catharsis, or even really as an object lesson. I’m telling it because I feel like for the first time, people might listen and not shrug their shoulders and say “yeah, some bosses are like that.” People might read this story and say, “Man, we really shouldn’t tolerate people acting like that” and hold their employees (and bosses) to a higher standard. We no longer tolerate bullying in schools. We shouldn’t tolerate it from bosses (or coworkers, or clients) either. Bullying hurts people. People don’t go to work every day to get hurt. The only way to stop the hurt is to break the silence.