As a member of Quora, I try to respond to as many questions as I can, as briefly as possible, but as one who has been bullied, I have long been a vocal opponent of bullying, and I will use every platform I have to keep the pressure up on those who think it is fun or useful to berate, belittle, and demean someone else. This particular Quora question brought out my long-form reply: If you are bullied at work, were you also bullied during your childhood and teen years? Does it feel the same at its essence? How does it feel?
I am reminded of two different Huffington columns I wrote on the subject of bullying. The first appeared earlier this year in a piece I wrote about Donald Trump, the other appeared in 2013 directly addressing the issue of workplace bullying in the federal government.
Having now made sure I am taking credit for plagiarizing myself, let me place excerpts from both columns here, expanded and/or edited, as a combined response to the question.
When I was in junior high school in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the early 1960s, I was one of a number of students bused into town from a nearby Air Force base. The usual “townie” versus “base” relationships I’d experienced in previous postings in other parts of the country played out much as expected. The base kids were generally accepted — the girls more than the boys — and the town kids were tolerant, if just a bit standoffish.
Friendships did form, but as the military kids knew, such friendships were always compressed — starting quickly and ending quickly — simply due to the transient nature of our fathers’ assignments. Additionally, the intra-military-kid relationships were often just as fleeting; when you attend 12 schools in 12 years as I did, it’s hard to form lasting attachments even among your peer group. The bottom line is, as a military brat attending a school in a town you don’t know well, with other military kids who really don’t know you well, you frequently fend for yourself in some social situations.
In 1962, I found myself in just such a situation.
I was a scrawny 13-year-old, in no way wise to, or prepared for, the world of a band of street-smart town kids whose leader, a swaggering 14-year-old boy, singled me out as an object to be bullied. The group of toughs would wait for me to come down the front steps of the school at the end of the day, on my way to the air base bus that shuttled the military kids back home. The band’s leader would grab me and pull me to the side of the steps, hit me once or twice and demand whatever money I had left from my lunch allowance. Of course, I gave it to him. My bus-waiting base companions stood by, possibly sympathetic, but certainly not sympathetic enough to step in on my behalf. Sometimes, the bully would just hit me because he could. Surrounded by his circle of thugs, I rarely made a move to fight back — I simply didn’t know how, and I doubted anyone would help me even if I tried.
After a few weeks of being a punching bag for a school-yard criminal, I began to show some bruising that long-sleeved shirts or pajamas couldn’t hide. A swollen and purplish mark on my face finally caught my father’s attention, and after a few minutes of beating around the bush, I came clean and confessed my weakness. My father did something I had not expected. He did not call the school; he did not try to find out who the bully was. He taught me to fight back.
In a few short lessons, he showed me the simplest, most effective way to deliver a punch to the face, and he reinforced the lesson with one mantra: “Hit first, hit fast, hit hard.” He said he’d learned the same thing while a cadet at West Point, and because he didn’t like boxing, he’d figured out how to end a match quickly so that he wouldn’t have to pound or be pounded for any unnecessary rounds. He also told me that I shouldn’t expect any of my friends to come to my aid — not because they didn’t like me, but because they were too afraid, at that age, to do anything. I would be on my own.
A few days later, as I left the school to catch the bus, I saw the mean gang waiting for me at the bottom of the steps. I was still their scrawny target, and my base pals began to distance themselves from me. The bully stepped forward, putting himself between me and the bus stop. I cannot remember a single thought that prefaced my action, but I suppose weeks of being terrorized came to a boil. In one flashing moment I punched cleanly into the bully’s face and he went down like a 100-pound bag of sand.
Nothing more was done or said. I got on the bus. None of my base friends commented or displayed any kind of support or relief. My dad took it as fact and I went on with being a 13-year-old. The bully never approached me again.
As almost anyone who made it through junior high school (as it was called in my day), or middle school can tell you, bullying is not just a stain on our society; it is, in fact, deeply woven into the very fabric of our national being.
Thanks to my father who peeled back the layers of my embarrassment and my reluctance to reveal my insufficiency, I was able to confront the lead bully and put a period to the sentence of my adolescent torture. But, as I was to discover several decades later, that did not put an end to the bullying, or my reluctance as an adult to call it by its real name.
Federal employees are also subject to bullying. Whether they are on the staffs of senators or congressmen, or work in the myriad halls of cabinet departments and federal agencies, a large number — and I’m only guessing here, but after 35 years in the system I had some standing — find themselves on the short end of the stick with little recourse.
I’m not talking about employees who are unsuited for the work and find themselves in disciplinary encounters; I’m not talking about employees who purposefully abuse the privilege of their station, get caught, and are summarily dismissed. The employees I’m writing about are just your everyday Joes and Janes who put a lot of effort into their work, often exceeding their position descriptions, working overtime without necessarily logging it, and doing their best to contribute to the mission of the federal government. And all the while, they are being dogged, stymied, abused — bullied — by one or more ego-inflated superiors who fly under the radar in a system so big they know they can act with imperious impunity.
I could offer several examples in my own career, a work history ranging from Capitol Hill — both House and Senate — to three cabinet departments and one federal agency. I suggest that these exemplars are common across the board of federal service, more common than one might imagine. In my opinion, the bullying that flows from the White House—the president’s angry drumbeat to publicly humiliate those individuals or organizations he does not like, trust, or believe—is the most visible form of bullying we have seen in my lifetime.
In my career, one act of bullying directed at me when I was the Department of Veterans Affairs included a blatant violation of the Hatch Act; in another, a Congressman for whom I worked assumed that I would be willing to miss the birth of my second child in order to continue participating in a Congressional campaign 800 miles from home; and the third example was a Senator who literally graded my speeches in red pen as though I were still in elementary school.
There are numerous other examples just from my personal experience, but I’ve observed many others, including deliberately crass and demeaning behavior and language used in front of female employees by a supervisor. And, of course, the government shut-down by the Tea Party several years ago is the dramatic example of how bullying held an entire, powerful nation hostage. The effects of the shutdown — emotional upset, fear of reprisal, loss of confidence — were no different than those effects felt by vulnerable teens or beaten wives, or low-wage employees in the private sector.
My story is not unique; bullying of the sort I experienced during my career occurs across the federal government; though it is not rampant, it does exist in many departments. It manifests itself in ageism, sexism, and racial preference. It can be seen in the old-boy networks some leaders bring with them to their cabinet positions.
The federal bullies are empowered by their positions and supported by a culture of leadership that is blindly results-driven — even if the goals are so poorly drafted, amorphous, or ambiguous as to be practically unattainable. Only this past week, President Trump subjected his chief of staff to a subtle bullying that put General Kelly in the White House press room, telling a lie to the media, a lie that was easily fact checked.
In all fairness to most of my bosses for whom I worked gladly over my three-and-a-half decades serving the citizens of the United States, there were and are many fine leaders in the legislative and executive branches. I had the privilege of working for quite a few of them, and I’m grateful for those experiences. But there were at least three in my career who bullied hard and meanly, and if there were three in my span, I can only imagine how many more are out there, spoiling the meaning of federal service for thousands like me who are just trying hard to be good public servants. My thoughts are with them. I got lucky. I got out.
I’m not talking about employees who are unsuited for the work and find themselves in disciplinary encounters; I’m not talking about employees who purposefully abuse the privilege of their station, get caught, and are summarily dismissed. The employees I’m writing about are just your everyday Joes and Janes who put a lot of effort into their work, often exceeding their position descriptions, working overtime without necessarily logging it, and doing their best to contribute to the mission of the federal government. And all the while, they are being dogged, stymied, abused — bullied — by one or more ego-inflated superiors who fly under the radar in a system so big they know they can act with imperious impunity.
I could offer several examples in my own career, a work history ranging from Capitol Hill — both House and Senate — to three cabinet departments and one federal agency. I suggest that these exemplars are common across the board of federal service, more common than one might imagine. In my opinion, the bullying that flows from the White House—the president’s angry drumbeat to publicly humiliate those individuals or organizations he does not like, trust, or believe—is the most visible form of bullying we have seen in my lifetime.
In my career, one act of bullying directed at me when I was the Department of Veterans Affairs included a blatant violation of the Hatch Act; in another, a Congressman for whom I worked assumed that I would be willing to miss the birth of my second child in order to continue participating in a Congressional campaign 800 miles from home; and the third example was a Senator who literally graded my speeches in red pen as though I were still in elementary school.
There are numerous other examples just from my personal experience, but I’ve observed many others, including deliberately crass and demeaning behavior and language used in front of female employees by a supervisor. And, of course, the government shut-down by the Tea Party several years ago is the dramatic example of how bullying held an entire, powerful nation hostage. The effects of the shutdown — emotional upset, fear of reprisal, loss of confidence — were no different than those effects felt by vulnerable teens or beaten wives, or low-wage employees in the private sector.
My story is not unique; bullying of the sort I experienced during my career occurs across the federal government; though it is not rampant, it does exist in many departments. It manifests itself in ageism, sexism, and racial preference. It can be seen in the old-boy networks some leaders bring with them to their cabinet positions.
The federal bullies are empowered by their positions and supported by a culture of leadership that is blindly results-driven — even if the goals are so poorly drafted, amorphous, or ambiguous as to be practically unattainable. Only this past week, President Trump subjected his chief of staff to a subtle bullying that put General Kelly in the White House press room, telling a lie to the media, a lie that was easily fact checked.
In all fairness to most of my bosses for whom I worked gladly over my three-and-a-half decades serving the citizens of the United States, there were and are many fine leaders in the legislative and executive branches. I had the privilege of working for quite a few of them, and I’m grateful for those experiences. But there were at least three in my career who bullied hard and meanly, and if there were three in my span, I can only imagine how many more are out there, spoiling the meaning of federal service for thousands like me who are just trying hard to be good public servants. My thoughts are with them. I got lucky. I got out.
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