Essential Business Behaviors - Healing the Toxic Organization #Bullying

How Union Stewards Can Stand Up Against Workplace Bullying

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 23:45:39 +0000

For the past five months, I have been working on finalizing the second edition of The Union Steward's Guide to Dealing with Workplace Bullying. This was a book that refused to settle down and often mirrored the chaos in our national environment. Minor errors and printing problems kept popping up. Even as I worked on sections covering the backup support of federal agencies that were being dismantled, I persevered, maintaining my faith in a judicial system that would not allow an authoritarian despot to strip away the few protections that most workers have. Of course, these are not the same agencies that Trump attempted to dismantle in 2016 with his first attempt to undermine worker protections. However, the fact that they still exist is hopeful when faced with an administration that relies on retaliation as a means of governance.

The fact is that unions represent one of the most powerful means of protection for workers in the United States, despite their tendency, like many organizations, towards toxicity and corruption. This is why Trump wants so desperately to dismantle the National Labor Relations Board. Unions—despite their many problems —still represent a form of democracy in action while providing much-needed and seldom available direct support in the working environment. This support depends on well-trained union stewards who are supported by their organization. This training is what The Union Steward's Guide hopes to provide.

Union stewards and their bargaining unit counterparts have the distinct advantage of being equal to management in terms of worker protections against unreasonable, discriminatory, and harassing behaviors. While this Union Steward's Guide primarily focuses on California State government workers, the book also provides a process map for determining how to build a bullying case that will withstand abusive management, along with strategy tips and communication tips for dealing with abusive managers. One chapter focuses on supporting the member who is often stressed and suffering from trauma due to undeserved abuse.

My co-author, Jeffrey Recht (retired. SEIU Local 1000 steward), and I hope this book will find additional stewards in other states who will want to work with us to create training guides to detail the laws and pathways available in their states, along with their hard-earned strategy tips and insights. Overall, we hope this training approach can strengthen the union's stance against workplace bullying and harassment.

The United States of America clearly has a bullying problem that needs to be addressed from the top down. We are currently seeing the results of what a bully can do to federal worker protections and the chaos that results from narcissistic authoritarianism as an approach to a "management style." Bullying is an excuse to abuse. It has never been a management style that works. It harms workers, makes them sick, damages their brains, and affects families in the most negative ways possible.

Workplace bullying is like having domestic violence in the workplace. It's long past time for states to adopt a solid anti-bullying law that holds abusers accountable and protects whistleblowers and targeted workers from being harmed for simply doing their jobs and being accountable to the rules. Companies (and the federal government) should be willing to extend a duty of care to their employees to protect them from this undeserved abuse, often from those who are their best employees and most valuable yet unrecognized assets.

The Union Steward’s Guide to Dealing with Workplace Bullying: Featuring the Bad Boss Campaign is currently available on Amazon.com for a discounted price in order to make it more accessible in these times of whiplash tariffs and climbing expenses.

Take a Stand Against Workplace Bullying

Now more than ever, union stewards and worker advocates must be equipped with the tools and knowledge to defend their members from abuse, retaliation, and toxic management. The Union Steward’s Guide to Dealing with Workplace Bullying is more than a book—it's a battle plan for protecting workers and rebuilding a culture of respect and accountability in our workplaces.

Grab your copy today at a discounted price on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4dBRlOM

Know a fellow steward or union leader? Share this with them. Together, we can strengthen the fight for fairness and dignity on the job.

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How We Get Trapped: The Narcissistic Promise and Challenge

Mon, 19 May 2025 00:00:55 +0000

I wrote this blog several years ago after reading Shahida Arabi's excellent book entitled Becoming the Narcissist's Nightmare. With Trump's second term just beginning, I thought a return to the concept of the narcissistic pattern would be appropriate. In Arabi's first chapter, Recognizing the Narcissist, she described the abuse cycle of this relationship as Idealize, Devalue, Discard, Destroy, and Hoover. I'd like to expand on the "Idealize" section that she described as the "honeymoon phase, where I was properly 'groomed,' complimented, flattered, placed on a pedestal, followed by incidents of devaluation littered throughout the idealization phase." (p. 45)

I call my experience of the idealization phase "the narcissistic challenge," and it is always tied to a promise. Many of the narcissists in my life have used it--an aberrant serial bully professor at a world-class university, my mother-in-law, and two female consultants that I worked for. It has been one of my most sensitive traps based on a constant need to prove myself and to excel. (Being raised by abusive parents will do this to you.) As far as weaknesses go, this need to value myself in the workplace by meeting the needs of my employer should fall under "employee engagement." Unfortunately, because we are discussing narcissists, the narcissistic promise and challenge are always boosted by acts of deceit, manipulation, and devaluation, in which the stakes for success are raised ever higher. Ultimately, success is impossible because the narcissist does not want you to succeed, and they are in control of the game.

In my case, this narcissistic promise and challenge was marked by a "you are special" ploy that was designed to set me apart from some other person: a former or current employee, a sibling, or another family member. It always played to my strengths with a false promise that I would be rewarded: receiving a needed boost in pay, a position, or some special item I needed. However, the promise was a trap that was never fulfilled. No matter how hard or long I worked, the work was devalued, and the challenge to achieve the promise was replaced by another challenge with a higher bar. This increasing challenge was presented as, "Well, if you just do this one more thing, then I can do this for you. However, you are so much better than the last person. I'm sure you will have no problem doing this."

You can see how seductive this proposition can be in the workplace or in government, especially if the narcissist has already placed you in a position of dependence. But the dependence is the point; the promise replaced orput off by another challenge or yet another promise is designed to keep you hooked into the narcissist and waiting and hoping endlessly for that promise to be fulfilled – whether it is that promised salary or a lower price for groceries. For the narcissist, this is a source of pleasure or satisfaction of just getting another one over on you in a continuing cycle of abuse. By now, some disappointed voters are waking up to this ploy.

The IVAT Conference and EPIC Moments for Healing Trauma

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 21:34:33 +0000

I just returned from 3 days of a 4 day conference in La Jolla, California that focused on dealing with trauma and violence in multiple forms. I was able to present about workplace bullying from the organizational systems perspective a room of over 100 military, VA and state employees working in mental health. It was a real honor and privilege to offer a new perspective to many nodding heads in the room. I was also honored to present with Jackie Garrick of Whistleblowers of America. We know that all whistleblowers are bullied, stalked and harassed despite the Whistleblower Protection Act. That is why I remind people that even if we have an anti-bullying law, compliance will always be an issue -- so we must continue to educate.

But more than that, the IVAT (Institute on Violence, Aggression and Trauma) provides practical as well as conceptual lessons on how to deal with trauma resulting from various forms of violence around the globe. I want to share an easy tool for helping yourself with stress and PTSD that I learned in one of the first sessions that I attended. This tool is called EPIC and there is a podcast that supports it.

EPIC stands for ENERGY, PASSION, INSPIRATION and CONNECTEDNESS. The goal of this tool is to flood your system with oxytocin to counteract the toxic stress that is building up in your system due to bullying. The processs is the develop a list of EPIC Moments using key words or phrases, lines of music, poetry, or events that have inspired you, filled you with energy, passion, and connectedness. Whenever you are feeling stressed out, you start repeated these words as you breathe.

The conference also practices what it preaches with the participants. There is morning yoga, therapy animals (ponies and doggies were in the bookstore area for us to pet and feed), reiki, collage making, and poetry sharing. All of these activities help us relax when we are stressed. I went to the collage workshop to make something that reminded me of my garden -- a place I often go when I need to de-stress. These are all important pieces of making a self-care plan for ourselves. In today's world and when dealing with bullies, that is one very important thing we can do to help ourselves.

Here is the link to the EPIC podcast where you can learn more about it from the creators, Dr. David Mathews, LSCW and Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist Raquel Buchanan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM9lb5XESUo

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WHAT IS BULLYING? Understanding the Abuse

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 20:36:00 +0000

When others were playing, they would stop if they saw Frodo because if he joined in, someone would get hurt. He attacked the visiting cartoonist, Gary Larsen. At his worse, he threw rocks and snatched and killed a human baby. He also threatened Jane Goodall, the woman who had been studying him his entire life (JaneGoodall.org, 09/29/2015).

For 56 years, Jane Goodall lived with chimpanzees like Frodo in the Gombe National Park of Tanzania. Jane not only named her subjects but also developed relationships with them. During her long years in the field, she described their individual personalities in detail in several of her books and in the films of her photographer ex-husband, Hugo van Lawick. Many of Jane's recorded observations of the social relationships and behaviors of the Gombe chimpanzees allowed her to make groundbreaking discoveries about our connections with the great ape species, including tool use, eating meat, and displaying human-like emotions in inter-species relationships. During Jane's tenure, she saw births, deaths, and hierarchical dominance played out among males and females. She also saw the original tribe split in two and wage war with each other. This “Four Year War” also revealed aggressive behaviors, as well as the details about two particularly violent females – Passion and her daughter Pom—who killed other mothers and infants without provocation in their own community,

Their goal was to seize the infants and eat them. In other words, they showed cannibalistic behavior. Between them they may have killed all 10 infants born during a two-year period. The attacks only stopped when both Passion and Pom delivered babies of their own… We still do not totally understand this unpleasant behavior. I felt I hated Passion and Pom at the time. Unfortunately, we have seen the same behavior in other mothers over the succeeding years. These violent behaviours – boundary attacks, the Four Year War and cannibalism – forever changed my view of chimpanzees: I had thought they were so like us, but nicer. This turned out not to be true – but it is almost certain that chimpanzees cannot fully comprehend the pain and suffering they inflicted on their victims. Nor can they plan physical and mental torture. Only we are capable of true evil (JaneGoodall.org. (07/20/2015).

Dominance in the Gombe chimpanzee tribe was linked to status, and with that status came better access to food and sex. A 2014 study of the offspring born between 1995 and 2003 confirmed this underlying motivation when it was found that the dominant and more aggressive chimps had fathered more babies.

These findings lead researchers to suggest that long-term intimidation tactics offered what may have been the first genetic evidence of sexual coercion as an adaptive strategy in any social mammal (Feldblum et al., 2014). As an explanation of our animal past, these chimpanzees indicate that bullyingmay have been encoded during evolutionary development as a reproductive means of survival. This adaptive strategy has also been suggested as narcissism's evolutionary root (Holtzman & Donnellan, 2015).

References

Feldblum, J. T., Wroblewski, E. E., Rudicell, R. S., Hahn, B. H., Paiva, T., Cetinkaya-Rundel, M., Pusey, A. E., & Gilby, I. (2014). Sexually coercive male chimpanzees sire more offspring. Current Biology, 24(23), 2855-2860. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.10.039

JaneGoodall.org. (09/29/2015). https:// news.janegoodall.org/2015/09/29/the-famous-chimps-of-gombe/7

JaneGoodall.org. (07/20/2015). http://news.janegoodall.org/2015/07/20/55-years-at-gombe-qa-with-jane-on-origins-of-life-work/

Holtzman, N. S., & Donnellan, M. B. (2015). The roots of narcissus: Old and new models of the evolution of narcissism. In V. Zeigler-Hill, L. L. M. Welling, & T. K. Shackelford

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