Name-calling and taunts aren’t limited to the playground and school hallways.
Bullies can turn up in boardrooms, Zoom meetings and at office water coolers too. Nearly 75 million workers in the country have been affected by workplace bullying, according to this year’s survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute.
Turns out lawyers, who are trained to make pointed arguments and are often stereotyped — though there’s truth to it also — as hard-nosed and combative, aren’t immune to being negatively impacted by bullying either.
Here’s evidence: 25% of lawyers in Illinois experienced bullying this past year, a new report from the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism found. The bullying — “acts or comments meant to intimidate, humiliate, embarrass, or control” — got so bad, almost 20%, or about 10,000 practicing attorneys, left their jobs.
Not surprisingly, attorneys who are most bullied have similar demographics to children who are most at risk: they are women, members of racial and ethnic minority groups, LGBTQ+, younger and those with disabilities.
Meanwhile, only 20% of lawyers who were bullied, sometimes by a judge or a higher-ranking colleague, reported the conduct to their supervisors. Those who chose to stay quiet didn’t want to lose their jobs and were worried about being perceived as a “complainer” or “weak.” Sometimes bullying is even encouraged, the Commission on Professionalism report said.
Some lawyers were told that bullying is just an “inherent part” of the legal world and that “they should learn to accept” that notion.
We object.
Lawyers should be held to the “same standard or higher, since they are officers of the court and pursue justice for clients,” as the commission’s Executive Director Erika Harold told the Sun-Times’ Amy Yee.
Being resilient and able to tackle challenges are reasonable traits to expect, from a lawyer or any other professional. But learning how to stomach, or dish out, abusive remarks, excessive criticism and preposterously heavy workloads should never be part of the actual job description.
An impact on mental health, the bottom line
Employers and employees who think tough jerks are assets are misguided and out of touch. Bullying, in fact, can have adverse effects on workers’ mental health and self-esteem. Additionally, when employees stay silent about abusive behavior, they could — as you might expect — become disengaged, lose motivation and be less productive, research has shown.
Those itching to get ahead also need to reassess equating a tyrannical personality with success. Disagreeable people do end up in positions of power, but those who are selfish, combative and manipulative were no more likely to attain power than generous and trustworthy workers, according to a 2020 study by researchers at the University of California Berkeley and Colby College in Maine.
Bullying shouldn’t be rooted out of the workplace just because it can hurt the bottom line or doesn’t correlate with a flourishing career. Root it out as wrong. The #MeToo movement put the spotlight on sexual harassment. Bullying among working adults deserves the same scrutiny.
Anti-bullying policies and training, as the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism recommended for legal workplaces, should be in place in most offices. More importantly, employees should undergo bystander training, something proven to be most effective in curbing workplace harassment.
There are no shortage of bullies. When some elected leaders behave like Biff Tannen from the “Back to the Future” series, their conduct rubs off on others. It is up to those of us who view bullying as gravely unethical to call it out on the job and elsewhere.
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