Took me a while to find your comment which I fully agree with.
Most managers are unwilling to deal with situations like that. They immediately reduce the importance of it and try to (gently or not so gently) coerce both sides to just get back to work.
It's kind of sad but also rather interesting to learn to deal with such bullies quickly and efficiently.
(1) "Remember those 20 minutes of outage on production because you couldn't be bothered to check for a nil, smartass? How about you get the fuck out of here and let me finish this?"
(2) "If you never screwed up at work in your life then by all means, please fire me. Right here and now. No? Then get the fuck away, my contract doesn't include listening to people with anger issues. I can hand you a therapist bill later if you really wanna talk. I take $150 an hour. Bye."
...are the rough formats I almost always use, depending on if I caught the attacker making a mistake in the past or not. Bullies aren't ethical. They don't care if they hurt you. Most of them actually want to hurt you. And as much as we want to believe in organizational systems, my experience has been that 99% of managers simply don't care.
We must learn to defend ourselves. And yes that includes being aggressive yourself. As a guy who was severely physically bullied as a teenager I can tell you that bullies don't listen and respond to logic. They are hyenas: if they sense you are weak they will push their attack even further. Only when you show teeth and bite back hard will they back off.
Most managers are unwilling to deal with situations like that. They immediately reduce the importance of it and try to (gently or not so gently) coerce both sides to just get back to work.
It's kind of sad but also rather interesting to learn to deal with such bullies quickly and efficiently.
(1) "Remember those 20 minutes of outage on production because you couldn't be bothered to check for a nil, smartass? How about you get the fuck out of here and let me finish this?"
(2) "If you never screwed up at work in your life then by all means, please fire me. Right here and now. No? Then get the fuck away, my contract doesn't include listening to people with anger issues. I can hand you a therapist bill later if you really wanna talk. I take $150 an hour. Bye."
...are the rough formats I almost always use, depending on if I caught the attacker making a mistake in the past or not. Bullies aren't ethical. They don't care if they hurt you. Most of them actually want to hurt you. And as much as we want to believe in organizational systems, my experience has been that 99% of managers simply don't care.
We must learn to defend ourselves. And yes that includes being aggressive yourself. As a guy who was severely physically bullied as a teenager I can tell you that bullies don't listen and respond to logic. They are hyenas: if they sense you are weak they will push their attack even further. Only when you show teeth and bite back hard will they back off.