If waterboarding is an “enhanced interrogation technique”, does that make bullying an enhanced management technique? The question is flippant but also serious.
What constitutes bullying is in the eye of the victim. It is hard to be objective about it, except in the most extreme cases. Is your boss’s behaviour merely harsh but fair, or something more malignant? The verb might be conjugated like this: I am assertive, you hit below the belt, he is a bully.
Needless to say, some bosses will have no time at all for a discussion on the subject. But some people have argued bullying may have been a contributing factor to the financial crisis we find ourselves in. Clearly, something went wrong with the culture of certain organisations and it is worth asking if bullying was part of the problem – and whether or not we can stop it getting out of hand.
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Lucy Kellaway, FT columnist and associate editor, offers her solution to your workplace problems in a column in the Financial Times. In the 
