Bullies: Hard to spot, harder to shift.
Five tips to avoid recruiting a bully
When it comes to recruiting, it pays to be wary. Once bullies get in, they’ll build themselves a power base that makes them hard to shift. All too often, an organisation without strong anti-bullying policies spends thousands of dollars to silence the victims rather than giving the bully the shove, as many HR managers have found to their cost.
Organisations can easily lose $300-$400,000 in legal fees and settlements, says an HR manager who saw many employees take personal grievance cases against one bully. “That’s just what you can put your finger on and quantify in monetary terms. Then there are costs like loss of morale and institutional knowledge,” she says. The bully lost all of the cases against him and the company had to pay out substantial settlements. Sadly, rather than dealing with the problem, the company promoted the bully.
Five Tips from an HR Manager who has been there:
1. Always ask for a reference from a previous manager. The applicant will frequently say they can’t give you a reference as the manager doesn’t know they are looking at another role. However, insist! There is usually one person that knows the applicant know well enough to be able to speak on their behalf. If not, warning bells should ring around the nature of the applicant’s relationships with colleagues.
2. Don’t be swayed by what you hear on the grapevine – i.e. "s/he is a good bloke", "s/he’d be really good" etc. Don’t let these comments allow you to take short cuts - ask the hard questions, and probe the answers. Sometimes when we are busy, it is easy to not be as careful as you could be because we think we know the answers (as we have heard on the grapevine) and we think we have the best person without really doing the work.
3. Consider your ‘gut’ feeling. How did you feel when s/he had left the interview? Did s/he answer the questions well, but was there a general lack of emotion, especially when you asked the questions around relationships etc?
4. Don’t interview alone – have at least a panel of two people, or if this can’t be done, arrange a second interview where another person can also form a view. Discuss each point in depth afterwards – review each skill/competency required for the role.
5. Don’t let pressure from your manager / vacancy manager, to fill the vacancy make you move too fast – “I’m concerned about slippage in timeframes”, “this is a key role and I need to get it filled”, etc.
One HR manager commented that a bullying situation arose when organisational leadership was weak, with the CEO close to retirement and against a background of a lot of pressure to fill a management position. “We were looking for somebody to move into a role that had had three people go through in quick succession."
Bullies can see HR managers as an obstacle in their path
A survey in British employment magazine Personnel Today has found that bullying of HR managers is a serious problem. Over half of them reported being bullied and more than a third of them suffered the bullying for over a year.
A New Zealand human resources manager with 25 years’ experience says that HR managers are particular targets because they are often in the role of protecting staff and defending a company’s management protocols. If a bully is intent on manipulating the workplace, he or she will see the HR manager as an obstacle. Bullies commonly seek to keep them away from higher management by various strategies, she says. “Bullies isolate them from other people, demanding that people not talk to certain other people. We have to not condone this and we have to be able to stop the victim being the one that leaves.”