Bullyproof Yourself at Work!: Personal Strategies to Recognize and Stop the Hurt from Harassment (The Work Doctor Bullying Series)

Rating:
Summary: bullies (liars) are everywhere
Review: Bullies get what they need personally because one of their major needs is to look good at the expense of others, especially in a
workplace that allows such behavior to multiply. Government organizations where executives prefer to isolate themselves from frontline workers are particularly vulnerable since the lies that bullies pass on to executives are accepted as de facto truth. Managing by walking around is unheard of in these places.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Addition to any "Work Abuse " Toolkit
Review: This book helped to "fill in the holes" for me. I am a manager who has witnessed innumerable incidents aptly described in this book. There are no "official" guidelines or information available from my employer for addressing this phenomenon...if it doesn't fall within the classical "legal" definition of harassment...many of my peers either ignore the behavior, engage in the behavior or collude with the "system" to perpetuate it. This book and another great book, "Work Abuse: How To Recognize and Survive It" by Judith Wyatt and Chauncey Hare have been invaluable aids in helping me to identify and implement actions that have strengthened my management skills, by encouraging change and authentic healing.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Addition to any "Work Abuse " Toolkit
Review: This book helped to "fill in the holes" for me. I am a manager who has witnessed innumerable incidents aptly described in this book. There are no "official" guidelines or information available from my employer for addressing this phenomenon...if it doesn't fall within the classical "legal" definition of harassment...many of my peers either ignore the behavior, engage in the behavior or collude with the "system" to perpetuate it. This book and another great book, "Work Abuse: How To Recognize and Survive It" by Judith Wyatt and Chauncey Hare have been invaluable aids in helping me to identify and implement actions that have strengthened my management skills, by encouraging change and authentic healing.

Rating:
Summary: excellent theoretical foundation
Review: This book provided the one thing I found missing in all the similar books I have read: a valid theoretical explanation of why bullying occurs -- the characteristics and dynamics of both the targets and the bullies. Essentially, bullies and targets (victims of bullies) come in all varieties, except that targets have one quality in common: they foster collaboration. Bullies, in turn, also have one trait in common: they are hierarchial. This leads to the inevitable crash when the bully percieves that the target is "giving away" the very things that the bully wishes to "sell". The driving force behind bulling is the need to control other people. The vulnerability of targets lies in their incomprehension of why anyone would want to control others when they could instead cooperate with them. These mental models are fundamentally incompatible. In addition, bullies are comfortable using aggression to gain control while cooperators are not. Bullies want to crush targets, targets want to "get along" with bullies. This really excellent book explains the basis for the mental models, the dynamics of the interaction between bullies and targets, and offers targets strategies for survival.