How Workplace Bullying Bystanders Can Break the Cycle

In the previous chapters, I wrote about how helping the victim at work is a good way to stop bullying in society in general by breaking the cycle of victims becoming bullies who bully other victims and make them bully others too in a futile attempt to regain lost power. The cycle must stop somewhere and this can only be done by courageous people who understand that by helping each of the participants in the game, we can reverse the cycle towards a considerate, supportive, understanding and caring society (can I get an “Amen”?).

In this chapter, I want to offer some tips to help the bystander of workplace bullying. Just to refresh, workplace bullying bystanders are the people who watch others bully and take a stand by participating, encouraging the bully actively or with body language, doing nothing or defending the bullied victim.

As you probably understand, most of the people in our society are bystanders (thank God!) and by watching or being aware, they become either bullies or victims (fearing to defend) themselves. Their help in changing the bullying phenomenon is crucial, because not being directly targeted, they have more power than the victim or the bully and are in a better position to make a difference.

Here is a list of suggestions and tips for workplace bullying bystanders. Sometimes, using a single tip can make a difference in someone’s life. Never underestimate how much power you have to make a difference!

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How to Stop Workplace Bullying (2)

Stopping the bullying at work has a very important impact on the bullying in our society. Many bullies come from bullying homes or are subject to some form of bullying at work and try to regain power by picking on the people around them. It is a cycle we can break by helping each participant in the “game” break their powerless perception.

In the previous chapter of the bullying series, I wrote 30 tips to help the bullying victim at work. Here are the next tips and I am sure that implementing each of them can make a huge difference in your life.

Remember, if you are a bullying victim, you have the power to break the cycle.

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How to Stop Workplace Bullying

Workplace bullying has an enormous impact on other bullying on our society. To gain some power back, workplace-bullying victims search for weaker people in order to take that power from them. They search all around them for any person who appears weaker, even if that person is their partner, family member, friend or child.

If we want to stop bullying completely, we must have a holistic approach to it. We must help everyone involved in bullying, because bullying is a cycle that start with big bullies who feel inferior in some way and bully others to regain their sense of power, which makes their victims feel inferior in some way and bully others to regain their sense of power… can you see the cycle? Let’s stop it!

To stop bullying at work, we can help three entities: the victim, the bystanders (those who witness the bullying) and the organization who is suffering from it directly or indirectly by loss of working days, motivation and productivity. In the upcoming posts, I will write tips to each of these entities and what they can do to stop the workplace bullying. Find out who you are and use these tips to make a difference where you work.

Bullying it is everyone’s business and sometimes, a single tip can make all the difference. You can stop workplace bullying by stopping the bully, but also by changing the behavior of the bullying victim.

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Top Parenting Bloggers Discuss (12): Parenting Boys and Girls

Gender is no doubt a huge factor in parenting. Many parents would like to know their baby’s gender before it is born, because gender matters to them. In our society, the role of girls and women is different from the role of boys and men. It is hard to ignore these roles and treat kids equally, because in the eyes of our society they are not equal.

So what should we do? Should we parent our kids differently if they are boys or girls or should we treat them just the same?

Research on people’s attitude towards boys and girls has found that parents and adults generally treat boys and girls differently even when they are just babies. In a famous research done with a group of babies that were dressed in pink or blue (without any relation to their real gender) the researchers discovered that the pink babies (presumably the girls) were picked up more by the adults and received more eye contact than the blue babies (presumably the boys).

How do you think this translates to parenting?

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Parenting Styles

Last year, my 21-year-old daughter Eden started studying Psychology. She said she wanted to study Psychology since she was 10 years old. Having a mother and an aunt in Special Education, another aunt in psychology and Social Work and being inspired by our amazing psychologist friend probably all contributed to her desires to learn about the human mind.

Whenever I talk about Eden and her desire to study Psychology (by the way, at this stage, she still just wants to study and being a psychologist is not on her radar yet), it takes me back to a research project I did during my own studies, titled “Why do people choose to study Special Education?”

Besides finding out why people chose Special Education, I also discovered some interesting relationships between teachers, Special Education teachers, social workers and psychologists, which I now use as models for parenting styles.

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What are you made of?

From time to time, being so involved with parents and parenting, people send us stories and video clips about special parents who truly go above and beyond what most people would do for their kids. It makes me wonder about what parents are made of.

Imagine you are in the delivery room, having your baby boy. You are overjoyed, until the doctor examines him. You already know something is not right and then you hear this, “I’m terribly sorry, but your son was born with no eyes and with a certain debilitating problem in the joints that will make his movements very limited”.

If you are feeling the urge to get up and run for your life, away from the enormous burden of dependence, struggle and hopelessness, please stop for the next 6 minutes and see how a special pair of parents, especially the father, have handled such a fate and turned it around into the most inspiring story of dedication and triumph over the odds.

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How to Praise Your Kids (5)

For over 24 years, I have been focusing on emotional strength and I believe this is the key to any type of success in life. I think rewarding kids for emotional stretches is the best way to praise them. As a special education teacher, working with kids who struggle and kids who are gifted, praising for effort was always one of my main tools. Remember, it is not the success that counts, but the emotional stretch. Although it may be a cliché, “Good try” has real power.

Research on emotional intelligence has found that persistence is a powerful ingredient in any success formula. So how do you teach persistence? My answer is “Reward every attempt and praise it, regardless of the outcome”. As I said, in special education, it is a major teaching tool and I have countless examples. Here is one from my own home that happened recently.

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How to Praise Your Kids (4)

You can see them on the sports filed or in a lesson. They are smart kids, but they need constant reminders of their abilities and reassurance that they are OK. I often wonder how come those kids are so good, so smart and so capable, no one else around them can compete with their skills and abilities, yet are still very competitive.

It is because over-praising can backfire.

An analysis of over 150 studies about praise discovered there is a risk in praising. Being praised caused students to be less persistent, to need more eye contact with the teacher and to be less confident when answering a question (you know those uncertain answers that sound like questions). Students who were praised a lot were less independent in their schoolwork.

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How to Praise Your Kids (3)

In 1969, Nathaniel Branden wrote that self-esteem is the single most important factor in people’s life and people need do all they can to achieve positive self-esteem. Later, as it happens sometimes in the psychology field, the self-esteem movement took this idea to the extreme. Every kind of feedback was suddenly considered as criticism and swapped with “rewards” to build self-esteem.

However, this sometimes created over-rewarding and achieved nothing, if not the opposite.

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How to Praise Your Kids (2)

Yesterday, I wrote about Prof. Carol Dweck’s research on the difference between praising effort vs. praising natural talent. I encourage you to read about this research (if you have not already), because it highlights some of the issues with the impact of praising on kids’ self-esteem.

One big question that came out this research was “What can parents and schools do to still build kids’ self-esteem and enhance their performance (possible after the “mistake” of telling the kids how smart they are)?

Dr. Lisa Blackwell, Dweck’s assistant, conducted a research to improve kids’ math scores using the knowledge and information gathered in her work with Dweck.

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