“Until this new female leader came on board, I had amazing relationships in the organization. I had many friendships and I was well respected. I already had one person on the team, a peer, who was an absolute bully herself. She was attempting in different ways to humiliate and belittle me, to put me down and break me. But my previous leader had been very switched on and aware of the team dynamics. She didn’t allow her to bully me or others on the team.

I’m not sure what this bully did with the new female leader, but it felt like she was actually running the department by bullying the leader herself. I kept looking at the interactions, conversations and asked myself: “How does she allow herself to talk to her leader in that way?”. It just felt very odd.

Initially, I was feeling sorry for the leader. I felt like maybe she couldn’t stand up for herself and was unable to speak up, so I tried to be even more supportive of her. She told me: “You are so respected, you have a lot of credibility and good relationships.” She started to ask me questions about our colleagues, kept saying stuff about other executives and found it difficult. I wasn’t joining in these conversations or gossiping. My peer though, the bully, enjoyed it a lot.

I realized a friendship was forming between them. In the meantime, the peer ramped up her bullying against me and the new leader was just observing, doing nothing about it.

I kept quiet because I had been there for over 10 years, and I didn’t want the new manager who had just come on board to assume that I was a troublemaker. I tried to manage alone, be nice and just work harder to prove myself. At some point, the manager also started bullying me. She would belittle me in front of the team. I started feeling like somehow I was to blame for this.

I had reached out to our company’s free counseling services, because I couldn’t deal with this any longer. And then, a colleague who had observed the tension between the bully and me, reported it to the leader, who only then raised it with me, despite being fully aware for a while. I was in tears, I was very upset, and she pushed me to run an investigation.

“All that I want is for these behaviors to stop and the situation not to be the same. That’s all that I want. How we get there is your decision. Any process that you want to run, I will participate in but I’m not asking for any investigation.” was my answer.

She took matters into her own hands and ran an investigation. She appointed an investigator who I later found out was suggested to her by the company lawyers. This person was not an investigator at all, she was a career coach, so, a very sham investigation. The investigator opened our meeting by saying: “Well, you know, we have some managers who we like, and some we don’t like. But you have options, you can leave.”

I was staring at her trying to figure out what was going on. This was not a fact-finding mission to establish whether I was bullied or not. She prepared a report saying there was no bullying and that she was suggesting that our team needed to restructure. That is not the role of an investigator.

I was the most experienced of the 5 of us in that department, but we were paid more or less the same. The leader shared the new structure with me as she wanted to hire two new people and make my role redundant. Cost-wise it was all the same, she wasn’t saving anything. I hadn’t even said anything, somebody else had told her that bullying was going on. But because I was subjected to it, she decided to make my role redundant.

I was the oldest on my team, only a few years away from retirement.”