BULLY FOR YOU!

Back to the 16th century when “bully” meant a fine fellow and several centuries later when “bully for you” meant “good for you.”

Times have changed since with several of Shakespeare’s plays now in danger of being cancelled. But we must tread carefully and listen well. As the recent furore over transphobia shows this is not simple as far as many people are concerned. Witness the extraordinary interview of Nicola Sturgeon on ITV Scotland last Thursday when she squirmed and struggled over the definition of what a woman is. 

Apparently – in her world – a man is a woman if he/she says that he/she is, unless they’ve committed a crime against women in which case she/he’ll be locked up in a male prison.  Peter Smith was the interviewer and he skewered her. You might even suggest he bullied her.

Bullying is very much in the news right now. Dominic Raab is being accused of persistently making Civil servants frightened and even reducing some to tears. Apparently on being presented with a paper with which he disagreed, or possibly thought was substandard, he shouted “bullshit.”

Dominic sounds like many senior people I’ve encountered. People who got their faces uncomfortably close to yours and shouted what they thought, what they wanted and why your offering fell short of their expectations and needs. There are many words beginning with “b” that I thought defined them, oddly “bully” wasn’t on the list. 

I talked to a now retired civil servant who described such encounters in his career as being in the course of a normal day of crises and dissipated like “water off a duck’s back” as far as he was concerned. He said his job in the 1970s was to make his minister’s life simpler and to smooth troubling issues using diplomacy and the seamless skill of a butler. 

There is not nor ever was any excuse for bad manners. There is not nor ever was any excuse for treating someone much younger and more junior to you unkindly. But…and it’s a big but, being in a senior job where a false step can lead to a falling share price, bad press reports, a political crisis and (importantly embarrassment to those senior to you) can fray nerves and tempers. Even bosses are human….most of the time.

Or are they? Julia Lieblich in the Harvard Business Review in 2015 said:

“From our experience working with several hundred bipolar executives, we estimate that as many as 5% to 10% of corporate America’s senior executives may be manic-depressive, with more than 90% going undiagnosed and untreated.”

When I read this I foamed at the mouth, jumped up and down and shouted “bullshit.” But it actually seems likely from my own experience to be a serious underestimate. I recall Phil Green, Fred Goodwin, Frank Lowe and Alan Sugar and think manic-depressive describes the mood swings of many of the most swinging of the swinging dicks in business and politics.

What are the consequences of creating a new, gentler and kinder world where we rewrite history and create stories which are more pleasing to us, where we place winning below participating in an everyone-gets-a prize culture?

We are edging towards creating a better world. Less than a century ago children were regularly caned at school, women didn’t have the vote, homosexuality was a criminal offence and there was a droit du seigneur mentality in many corporations.

We may be exaggerating bullying but we’re failing in helping people have the resilience to deal with it. 

Still it’s better now than the 1960s. So young, progressive people…bully for you!