It’s a provocative question, I know. If you’re not a bully, are you being bullied? Or have you seen someone else being bullied and wondered if - or when - you should say something, and to whom?
That these questions even need to be discussed in any modern workplace staffed by grown-ups is both an unfortunate reflection of human behaviour and a staggering failure of leadership and professional standards.
It’s perhaps more surprising that bullying is rife in legal services - a sector in which well-educated and highly qualified professionals have ethical obligations, oversight from regulators and (one would have hoped) a greater awareness than most of the implications of breaching employment or health and safety laws.
Yet the legal sector is not immune from the workplace bully, and it’s a topic that needs to be talked about in the open. Like other sensitive topics, from mental health to domestic violence, it’s an uncomfortable subject many people prefer to avoid.
It also something that many people (wrongly) think doesn’t really apply to them. “It’s something for HR to deal with, and I’ve never experienced or seen it myself,” you can imagine them saying.
You might even be thinking, “It could never happen to me, I”m not the sort of person who’ll allow themselves to be bullied.”
But if your workplace has a poor culture, it may just be a matter of time before you experience or witness bullying. Workplace bullying can happen to anyone, and it’s a consequence of a poor workplace culture.
The full article continues to discuss:
Research showing bullying is a problem for the legal sector
What is workplace bullying and why must we tackle it?
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Originally appeared in...
The original article was written for the Institute of Legal Finance and Management, and first published in the June/July 2024 issue of their in-house publication,Legal Abacus.
