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Nov 1, 2022

In this episode, Anna returns to one of the common themes in leadership; that of bullying. This comes up time and time again with discussions with leaders wanting to improve their leadership and those embarking on trying to understand their own emotional scars of being victims of bullish behaviour. How does the experience of bullying now affect their ability to lead.

Anna is often consulted by people in leadership roles who are trying to deal with their bullish behaviour and by organisations who are trying to deal with bullying in the workplace. This subject is one of the central issues that inspired the My Kinda Leader® podcast and why it focusses on kindness in leadership. Kindness must be both within the person and so shared within the organisation. This podcast tells you why.

The effect of bullish behaviour is not only challenging and distressing it is traumatising. Victims of bullying can suffer years of torment, and then post-trauma symptoms. Some leaders come to realise later on that their leadership is affected by their early experiences of bullish behaviour.

Bullying cannot be acceptable, but it can be understood and addressed. We cannot continue to bullying is inevitable in the workplace. We, therefore, have to understand why this behaviour is happening, not condone it, but to understand it and so be rid of it.

Leaders who resort to bullish behaviour must be encouraged to take responsibility and become self-aware enough to adjust this behaviour and to not have to rely on it to make themselves feel better. Anna explains how a leader in good relationship with themselves will not need to bully another person be it a direct report, an assistant, or anyone within their life.

Anna describes trying to find ways to manage this issue for the greater good of people in small and large organisations. Nobody deserves to be bullied abused traumatised in their workplace. We therefore must find ways of understanding what's happening why and what we can do about it. There's no point in having a zero policy on something unless we are going to find a way to address it.

Just because it's difficult doesn't mean to say we shouldn't try. We must appeal to people taking responsibility for their own emotional and psychological experiences and take responsibility for their recovery and healing from them so that they do not go on to devastate someone else's life.

Anna describes how bullish behaviour can sometimes be cyclical (but often not) in that if people are bullied, they feel bad about themselves they are often appalled that they were not able to stop the abuse. They often turn it against themselves that they did not make a stand for themselves. If these things were possible bullish behaviour/bullying wouldn’t exist.

People who feel bad about themselves will often advertently go on to use bullish behaviour against others as a poor attempt at making themselves feel better. Of course, this rarely works, and so the cycle continues.

To watch and listen to more episodes of the My Kinda Leader® podcast, and for more information on the My Kinda Life Methodology® books, trainings, and workshops:

www.mykindalife.org