TVC074 Bullying In The Workplace With Tim Capelin
Bullying and intimidation is not just in the school yard.
In this episode I chat to leading workplace and employment law expert Tim Capelin from Piper Alderman about recognising the signs of bullying in adults, what to do if you’re facing this situation and steps to change mindset and approach around supporting your family, friends or colleagues when under pressure.
Tim has over 25 years of experience;  his commitment is to help people achieve greater success, and to do that through his expertise in employment law.

I like being able to assist on both sides of these matters. Most commonly I’m assisting employers to get the most out of their employees, and assisting executives approach their employment as they approach other commercial negotiations that they deal with and get the best out of it for them, which usually has a win for both them and the company.

There’s been a lot of coverage lately about confidence and career development and more recently in Australia how to tackle bullying in the work environment. This is a timely episode. Bullying is not just child’s play – and more often than not it’s the emotional forms of intimidation that are causing lack of performance, confidence and in worse cases extreme levels of stress and depression.
I have asked Tim to share his insight and join the discussion around

Identifying the signs
How to take measured steps to ensure you can get help if needed
Observe your own behaviour to be considerate of others.

What are the signs of workplace bullying?
How would you describe some situations that you’ve certainly had come across your desk?
Tim: Bullying for adults in many respects is not different to bullying for children in that the experiences emotionally and physically are probably very similar. Certainly the emotional impact of it can be very significant.

It usually arises from feelings of one party using their, particularly in the C-suite example, their positional power over others whether it’s a CEO or senior manager abusing their power to impose it upon the executives that report to them, or the CEO copying the behaviour  possibly from the chair.
They often say whether you’re an executive or a CEO, it’s very lonely at the top. That possibly highlights or exacerbates the feelings when people are under stress and being what they perceive to be being attacked by their boss.

Nikki: I think what’s interesting is a lot of talk about functional and strategic hard skills when we go through career development, but what we lose a lot of is our personal skills when we gain more responsibility in the workplace.
Dealing with emotional matters become much more difficult because there’s many more layers on top of it than there would normally be. Let us also be clear that this is right through the organisation.

I know people that actually when they wake up in the morning, they have heart palpitations, they’re drenched in sweat, and they’re actually afraid of going to work with exactly the same emotional repercussions as kids are afraid of going to school.

We have people that are in really good jobs and really good positions actually feeling anxiety because of people around them in the workplace and not being able to deal with these emotional issues. They’re having physical repercussions and physical results due to that anxiety level as well.

Tim: Absolutely, you can see that happen. It can be compounded by circumstances outside of the workplace as well.