Bullying in the workplace

It happens - there are bullies not only in the school playground, but in the workplace, too.

I once worked somewhere in which my immediate "superior" (inverted commas because he was my inferior in every way except title and physical dimensions), was a bully.

He used bullying on a daily basis to get his way in the organization. It was very interesting to watch the dynamic that was soon set up when he arrived. The actual boss and owner of the company started to defer to the newcomer in the oddest of ways: allowing him to get his way in all things because "That was his job", as Head of Department. The owner couldn't allow himself to see that, so often, the decisions of his appointee were unfair or self-interested or just plain not nice. To have seen that would have been to acknowledge that a mistake had been made in hiring him, in the first place - and whose fault would that have been, but the owner's?

He was a bully in the most direct of ways, even using physical attacks, veiled though they were, in the workplace to intimidate, humiliate or get at it his "subordinates".

One day, he was holding a plastic file in his hands when he turned to face me, upon being asked a question. He stopped dead for a moment, file in hand and stared down at me (he was about seven inches taller than me). I noted that the file was not moving, for a long moment. Suddenly, he jerked the file forward and it struck my head, just above my eye.

"Oops." he said, with not a sign of concern in his cold voice. "I really must look where I am going."

I said nothing. I just looked up at him and the file in his hand and turned away. What could be said to such a one as him?

He bullied in other ways, too. Feedback forms would be given out to all our clients and gathered in to be used in staff appraisal. I had a look at my forms one day and had good a idea of what they contained. When it came to the weekly meeting, he presented a "summary" of my forms that contained feedback that simply had not been in the forms I had received, at all. He had doctored the feedback and changed good feedback to bad, altering the forms, himself.

I raised the matter with the owner, but he did nothing other than say: "I know what is going on there." He didn't actually do anything about it, though. He just recognized that the bully saw me as future competition and was trying to eliminate the threat.

Finally, the day came when the bully overstepped the mark. He got very angry one day and started knocking the owner around the office. He actually physically pushed the owner from one end of the office to the other, throwing him around like a little doll. He was, of course, fired on the spot.

He returned the next day demanding immediate payment of his final cheque or he would "Smash your face in!", as he so delicately put it to the cowering owner.

He got paid and left.

The mystery of all of this was that his nature as a bully and rather psychopathic character was obvious from day one - yet no-one did anything about it. They let him dominate. No-one had the character to stand up to him. Though, I pointed out to the other staff and to the owner exactly what sort of person they had hired, on several occasions. No-one listened until the day the owner himself got knocked around.

The bully was a British Northerner, incidentally and he seemed to have learnt his manners from the street and his whole way of looking at the world seemed to be that of the thug. Yet, he was the Head of the Department: amazing.

Bullies thrive in the workplace precisely because upper management often doesn't listen to feedback from their subordinates. No-one listens to what is going on - until it is too late. Often, in fact, to raise the issue of the bully's nature and personality is to court reprisals against oneself. Thus, the bullies come to dominate their organizations and make working life hell for everyone.

Once the bully had left, everyone felt free to talk about how "stupid" he had been. Oddly, no-one had had the courage to say it when he was there. They just bowed before his every bullying whim.

Bullying should not be tolerated in the workplace - just as it should not be tolerated in school. Once identified, the bully must go, at once. The organization should not wait until a catastrophic moment arises - as my organization did. Only when physically attacked did the owner wake up to what he had done in appointing the bully. No organization should wait so long to act.

By the way, I learnt of the bully's final showdown long after I had left the organization. Like others, I could not wait for the situation to be recognized and something to be done - so I moved on to other things. So, bullies cost the organization greatly - good people just leave when bad people are allowed to thrive. It doesn't take many people like that to ruin a business.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

We are the founders of Genghis Can, a copywriting, editing and proofreading agency, that handles all kinds of work, including technical and scientific material. If you need such services, or know someone who does, please go to: http://www.genghiscan.com/ Thanks.)

Fintan resident fashion expert.

Fintan is a sharp-eyed boy, as I have pointed out before. He is also concerned with all things visual - including fashion. The weekend was a case in point.

We found ourselves in a shoe shop, with all three kids in tow. Ainan needed new shoes and kids being kids, we couldn't buy a pair for him, without buying a pair for each of them, too. So, it duly turned into a mammoth shoe hunt with various trendy offerings being tried on.

What struck me, though, about our experience in the shoe shop was how Fintan understood the shoes in the shops. For him, each one was unique. It went like this: "Daddy, those shoes are the ones my friend in K2 wears...and those are the ones my friend in..." He duly pointed out to me the various people in his life that he had seen wearing the shoes of each particular design that caught his eye. It was quite a surprise for me - because I never notice what shoes people are wearing. Fintan, however, had catalogued, in his mind, the things his friends wore - and was able to recognize them, in the shop, as being of a particular person.

To me, this shows two characteristics: a good visual memory - and an attention to detail in his environment.

When I cross-reference this experience to the one of Fintan shouting: "I'm an artist!" while chasing his unwilling art subject brother around the house, I wonder, indeed, if Fintan is, in fact, an artist in the making, as he states, spontaneously. He certainly has the tendency to evaluate the world in a visual way, in great detail.

I have only ever met one other person who could recall what people wore in such detail, before. She was a profoundly gifted girl who ended up working as an art dealer. Thus, if not an artist, I think he will be someone who works around the visual arts. (Though being an artist is actually fairly likely, for him, given the summation of his expressed attitudes and attributes.)

We will just have to wait and see.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

We are the founders of Genghis Can, a copywriting, editing and proofreading agency, that handles all kinds of work, including technical and scientific material. If you need such services, or know someone who does, please go to: http://www.genghiscan.com/ Thanks.)

The colleague I made one day.

I had no idea, when my first son was born, that in a few years, he would, essentially, become not only my son, but my colleague, too.

Before Ainan, I had never really had a close scientific colleague with whom I could discuss ideas and consider possibilties. Although Ainan is only eight years old, talking to him is not like talking to an eight year old - it is like holding a discussion with a very creative, fast thinking adult scientist. I find it refreshing. All my life I have lacked such stimulation (I didn't find it at Cambridge University, for instance) but, now, in my own home, I have as much of it as I want or could ever need - all I have to do is begin a sentence with "Ainan..." and I am soon deep into a wide-ranging, scientifically profound conversation. It is wonderful.

I don't know what the future of the intellectual side of my relationship with my son will hold. Yet, I can say: the present is pretty good. I have had the best scientific conversations in my life with Ainan since he was five years old. No other conversation, with adult scientists, has proven as remotely interesting.

Fatherhood is full of surprises - and some of them are much more rewarding than one could ever have anticipated.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

We are the founders of Genghis Can, a copywriting, editing and proofreading agency, that handles all kinds of work, including technical and scientific material. If you need such services, or know someone who does, please go to: http://www.genghiscan.com/ Thanks.)

The effect of arrogance in the media.

When I first came to Singapore, I noticed something very clearly: almost no-one spoke well in broadcast media. At first, I made allowances for it, assuming it to be a local language. Then, as the months and years passed I came to understand something else: the mistakes they made in pronunciation were neither English, nor Singlish, they were just pure ignorance.

At one time, I took to calling up Mediacorp to complain about the pronunciation of Channel News Asia anchors, pointing out, in detail, the errors they had made. I got no more than: "You have a very detailed mind." out of them. They said they would call back, but they didn't. I tried several more times to alert them to the deficiencies of the speech of their public figures - but no-one ever got back to me. In the end, I stopped complaining.

One day, however, I made a special visit to Mediacorp where I met a senior executive to make a proposal. I offered to help them with voiceovers, since there were innumerable errors that went beyond the easily correctable. He virtually laughed at me. He seemed most arrogant: he looked down his short nose at me, as from a great, unbridgeable height. He said they didn't need people to do voiceovers since they already had them. I thought he was an idiot, because he clearly could not perceive what was so abundantly clear to me - yet he was a senior man in the institution.

Yesterday, I was watching Arts Central, when I heard the voiceover (a typical deep voiced but poorly informed man), say "scarce" in which the first four letters were rhymed with CAR. It was most disconcerting. It was the first time in my life that I had heard anyone, anywhere ever say it that way. I knew it wasn't Singlish - and I knew it wasn't English - it was just pure ignorance, again.

I didn't call the station to complain. I gave up doing that long ago. Yet, it set me to wondering again about the effect of such verbal ignorance among broadcasters. TV and radio stations set an example to the nation. If that example is filled with errors of pronunciation or grammar, the quality of language of the entire population of the country will be lowered. That is precisely what is happening in Singapore. The reason this situation persists is that the powers-that-be do not know English well enough themselves - or care to know, it seems, from that senior executives' arrogant, narrow-minded attitude - to notice the deficiencies of their staff. It is true to say that virtually none of the staff employed in Singaporean broadcasting speaks English well enough to work in the UK broadcasting industry - and this is not a matter of accent, but of grammar and pronunciation.

There is no real concern for quality in language usage here. I find that worrisome - if a nation doesn't care about the quality of one thing, they tend not to care about the quality of many things. That attitude leads to poor quality in many areas, across the board.

Singapore would benefit from hearing good examples of language usage in public figures in broadcasting. There is a simple solution: fire them and hire better spoken ones. It would be a great help to the linguistic landscape of Singapore, in time to come.

It would also be pleasant not to hear jarring errors in pronunciation or grammar on national TV virtually every day (for someone who watches little TV...) However, given the way that senior executive responded to my suggestion, by scoffing, I don't think anything will ever change.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

We are the founders of Genghis Can, a copywriting, editing and proofreading agency, that handles all kinds of work, including technical and scientific material. If you need such services, or know someone who does, please go to: http://www.genghiscan.com/ Thanks.)

Fintan finds an identity.

Many people, whether they know it or not, are in search of themselves. By this, I mean they are in search of an identity: a means to describe themselves, to define their natures and perhaps to define their purposes.

Fintan, five, is well on the way to such a definition. A few days ago, he came into the room with his mouth all taped up. "emmmhhhuuuaaaatttt". He said, most unintelligibly. He was most intent. He looked up at me and tried to communicate a thought. "emmmmhhhhuuuaaattt.", he said, again. One further puzzled look from me was enough to make him give up. Then he stripped the sellotape from his mouth and went rushing after his elder brother, Ainan.

Ainan thought otherwise of Fintan's intent and promptly ran away. A farce ensued. Fintan ran after Ainan and Ainan ran away, both circling our bedroom, as fast as their feet would allow.

What struck me was the words Fintan chased Ainan with: "I'm an ARTIST!", he said, again and again, "I'm an ARTIST!", to justify his wish to tape up his brother.

I thought it a most splendid moment - an iconic one, even. For it showed that Fintan had a belief in what he sought to do, that was framed in artistic terms. He sought to use Ainan (involuntarily, though), in his self-imagined work of Art. Ainan was to become part of some statement that Fintan sought to make.

I let them run after each other for awhile, before Fintan realized that Abang Ainan wasn't going to co-operate.

Fintan, the artist, was left standing there, his sellotape art materials in one hand, an idea in his head and a distinct determination to become an artist, whether or not Abang (elder brother) Ainan wished to become involved.

If Fintan does become an artist - which, given that his mother is one, he might very well become - I will remember this moment as the first on which he concretely expressed that wish - whilst in the midst of creating a work of Art, with the intended participation of his brother.

I will now just have to wait to see what my Artist son does next. In the meantime, perhaps I should ask him what his work of Art meant to him.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

We are the founders of Genghis Can, a copywriting, editing and proofreading agency, that handles all kinds of work, including technical and scientific material. If you need such services, or know someone who does, please go to: http://www.genghiscan.com/ Thanks.)