I’ve worked with exactly two workplace bullies in my career. Both were high performers. Both outlasted their targets. And both taught me that the distance between what we say we value and what we actually reward is wider than most HR departments care to admit.
The first was brilliant at their job and terrible to people. Senior management knew it. One C-level executive even described this person to me as “like a misbehaving dog — you need to tap them on the nose once in a while to correct the behaviour.” Imagine reducing someone’s pattern of abuse to a house-training metaphor. Then imagine doing nothing more substantial than that tap for years.
The second bully was even craftier. When someone finally filed a formal complaint, this person didn’t lash out immediately. They waited. Months turned into years. Then, with the patience of someone playing a strategic game of chess, they built a case and had their accuser shown the door. The revenge was cold, calculated and completely successful. And very much noticed by the teams around them.
I thought about both of them when I read a recent TalentLMS survey of 1,000 U.S. workers. Sixty-two per cent of employees agree that misconduct is more likely overlooked when the person involved is a top performer or leader. Forty-five per cent have seen people promoted after mistreating others. Nearly half say managers actively discourage employees from escalating harassment complaints.
While these may seem like fringe cases, they’re not. How do I know? Because you likely have a couple of stories from your career that pretty much line up with mine. Arguably, it’s more a case of a system working exactly as designed.
The performance premium
Here’s what we tell ourselves: Organizations are meritocracies. We promote the best. We hold everyone accountable equally. Behaviour matters as much as results.
Here’s what we actually do: We give high performers a longer leash, a bigger benefit of the doubt, and a discount on consequences that would end someone else’s career in an afternoon.
The math is simple, even if we pretend it’s complicated. A top salesperson who brings in millions gets to be “difficult.” A star programmer who ships products on impossible deadlines gets to be “intense.” A rainmaker partner who lands major clients gets to be “old school.”
The euphemisms pile up while the bodies pile out.
Meanwhile, the person who does solid work without making waves gets exactly what that approach promises: nothing special. No protection. No allowances. Just the rules, applied as written.
We’ve created a two-tier justice system, and everyone knows it. The survey found that 42 per cent of employees worry that speaking up will label them as difficult. That’s not paranoia. That’s pattern recognition.
The silence economy
Twenty-five per cent of employees who witnessed or experienced misconduct didn’t report it. When asked why, 56 per cent said reporting wouldn’t make a difference. Thirty-six per cent feared retaliation.
Think about what it takes to arrive at those conclusions. You don’t wake up one morning and decide your employer is indifferent to abuse. You watch. You test the waters. You see what happens to people who raise their hands. You draw the obvious conclusion and you shut up.
The survey also found that 77 per cent of employees would consider leaving if they didn’t feel protected. So we’re not just tolerating bad behaviour — we’re actively selecting for people willing to tolerate it. The ones with options leave. The ones without them stay and learn to keep their heads down. We’re reverse-engineering our workforce to reward silence and punish courage.
The training theatre
Sixty per cent of employees say compliance training has improved workplace behaviour. That sounds encouraging until you read the next line: 45 per cent say the training is disconnected from real situations they face at work.
Pardon my cynicism, but of course it is. Compliance training isn’t necessarily designed to stop the managing director who humiliates people in meetings. It’s designed to create a paper trail showing we tried. It’s insurance, not intervention.
One in five employees received no compliance training in the past year. Only 33 per cent got DEI training. And 31 per cent feel less protected as their organizations pull back from diversity initiatives.
We’re teaching people the rules while simultaneously demonstrating that the rules don’t apply to everyone equally. Then we act surprised when cynicism takes root.
The tap on the nose
That C-level executive who compared a workplace bully to a misbehaving dog wasn’t wrong about the behaviour. The problem was the remedy. You don’t tap a dog on the nose and expect it to stop barking when barking keeps getting it exactly what it wants.
High performers misbehave because misbehaviour works. They’ve done the cost-benefit analysis. A tap on the nose, a stern talking-to, maybe a note in a file somewhere that everyone knows will never matter — these aren’t consequences. They’re the price of doing business. And business, apparently, is good.
The smart ones, like my second bully, learn to be patient. They understand that formal complaints create exposure, so they wait until the heat dies down and the organization’s attention moves elsewhere. Then they strike. By the time they’re finished, the person who complained is gone and the bully likely ends up with another promotion down the line.
Organizations love to talk about accountability. But accountability without consequences is just conversation. And conversation, as the survey makes clear, is something we’ve gotten very good at while the problems we’re discussing get quietly worse.
Seventy-one per cent of employees say they feel protected at work. I wonder if they’d say the same thing after watching what happened to the people who actually tested that protection.
