Chapter 12: Coaching your People Through Tough Situations

Hopefully, you are the type of leader your staff gets to follow rather than one they have to follow. Assuming you are a good leader, helping your people through episodes of workplace bullying (WB) or workplace intimate partner violence (WIPV) will be easier when your people trust you. Neither WB nor WIPV are situations that anyone wants to occur; however, they do happen, and in the case of WB, they happen too often.

In 1970, the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) was enacted into law, and it required employers in the United States to provide employees with a hazard-free workplace to avoid serious harm or death to their employees (Occupational Safety & Health Administration [OSHA], n.d.). While some employers may consider hazard-free to mean a workplace free of physical obstacles, working in a toxic environment where employees feel emotionally unsafe or devalued can be just as dangerous, if not worse. The organization best known for researching and exposing the dangers of WB is the Workplace Bullying Institute (the Institute). The Institute has defined WB as, “Repeated mistreatment of an employee by one or more employees; abusive conduct that is: threatening, humiliating, or intimidating, work sabotage, or verbal abuse” (Namie, 2017, para. 1).