Day 7 – Solving Workplace Bullying – Toolkit Time!

Friday-Sunday, December 12-14, 2025

By Sunday night, I was still working. The week caught up with me. The blog posts I’d planned to write during the day got pushed to evening. The content that should have been polished got finished in the final hours. But the delay served a purpose: it gave me time to sit with everything I’d learned and crystallize it into something useful.

This final post for week 1 isn’t about my journey. It’s about giving you a toolkit—a framework for recognizing bullying in yourself and others, so you can intervene before it becomes normalized, entrenched, or catastrophic.

Understanding the Architecture of Bullying

Experts Einarsen and Zapf identified five main categories of bullying behavior:psychologytoday+1​

1. Work-related bullying: Attacks on someone’s ability to do their job—removing responsibilities, blocking opportunities, creating impossible workloads, micromanaging, or sabotaging their work.
2. Personal attacks: Direct assaults on someone’s character, appearance, or identity—name-calling, insults, ridicule, or denigration.
3. Social isolation: Deliberately excluding someone from conversations, social events, or information—the cold shoulder, being left out of meetings, or being treated as invisible.
4. Verbal threats: Explicit or implicit threats to someone’s job security, reputation, or safety—”watch yourself,” “people like you don’t last here,” or threats of demotion.
5. Spreading rumours and gossip: Deliberate circulation of false or exaggerated information designed to damage reputation or relationships.

But understanding categories is only the first step. The insidious part of bullying is how it operates on a continuum, often starting so subtly that no single incident seems worth addressing.

The Bullying Spectrum: Aggression and Camouflage

Bullying comes in two distinct flavors, and recognizing the difference is crucial.

Aggressive bullying is overt and obvious. Screaming. Blaming. Physical threats. Public humiliation. It is loud, undeniable, and easier to name as bullying. Most people would look at aggressive bullying and immediately recognize it as wrong.​

Passive bullying is the more dangerous form. It’s subtle, camouflaged, and deliberately hard to identify. It operates through undermining, sabotaging, dividing, and isolating. The target often doesn’t know where the attack is coming from or who is responsible. It creates a fog of confusion that makes it nearly impossible for victims to effectively describe what’s happening, let alone prove it happened.

Passive bullying is also more common in professional environments, especially among people with positional power. It allows the perpetrator to maintain plausible deniability while steadily eroding someone’s confidence, relationships, and standing.

The Bullying Continuum: From Banter to Criminal

This is the most important insight: bullying rarely starts as overt aggression. It begins with what seems minor and escalates over time into something that can become life-threatening to someone’s career, health, and wellbeing.​

Here’s the continuum, from least to most severe:​

Early Stage (Often Dismissed)

• Bantering or “just joking”: Repeated jokes at someone’s expense, framed as harmless fun
• Teasing: Comments that make someone feel uncomfortable or diminished, often dismissed as “not serious”

Escalation (Normalized Disrespect)

• Verbal abuse: Raised voice, harsh language, sarcasm, or cutting remarks directed at someone
• Blame: Attributing failures to someone unfairly or publicly holding them responsible for team problems
• Humiliation: Being corrected, criticized, or made to look foolish in front of others

Advanced (Professional Damage)

• Personal and professional denigration: Being described negatively to others; having your competence, character, or abilities questioned behind your back
• Overt threats: Explicit statements about job loss, demotion, or negative consequences
• Harassment: Repeated unwanted behaviour based on protected characteristics (race, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, disability)
• Discrimination: Exclusion, differential treatment, or denial of opportunities based on identity
• Manipulation or sabotage of job requirements: Changing expectations, withholding information, giving incomplete instructions, or deliberately setting someone up to fail
• Unrealistic workload: Assigning impossible amounts of work designed to ensure failure
• Micromanagement: Excessive oversight designed to undermine autonomy and confidence
• Cyberbullying or notes: Using digital communication to intimidate, threaten, or humiliate
• Professional and personal exclusion: Being left out of meetings, decisions, social events, or informal information networks
• Sabotage of career and financial status: Blocking promotions, undermining reputation with clients or partners, damaging earning potential

Severe (Institutional Harm)

• Whistle-blower attacks: Retaliation against someone who reports wrongdoing
• Blackmail: Threats to expose personal information unless demands are met
• Overt aggression or violence: Physical threats or actual physical violence
• Criminal assault: Actions that cross into criminal territory

The critical insight here is this: by the time bullying reaches the “severe” stage, most people have already been damaged, isolated, or have left. The work of prevention happens much earlier—at the bantering and teasing stage, when behaviour is still reframing-able, when cultures can still shift without massive organizational upheaval.

A Toolkit for Spotting It

Now that you understand the framework, here’s how to use it:

In Yourself:

Ask yourself honestly:

• Do I make jokes at someone’s expense, even if I frame them as harmless banter?
• Have I excluded someone from information, a conversation, or an opportunity without a clear business reason?
• Have I attributed a failure to someone without full context or blamed them publicly?
• Do I manage someone more closely than others, questioning their decisions more frequently?
• Have I threatened—even subtly—someone’s job security or opportunities?
• Do I speak negatively about someone to others in ways I wouldn’t say to their face?

If you answered yes to any of these, you don’t automatically become a “bully.” But you’re operating in a zone where your behaviour could be experienced as bullying, especially if it’s repeated or if there’s a power imbalance.

In Others:

Notice patterns, not single events:

• Is someone being excluded from meetings or informal communication consistently?
• Are jokes, teasing, or criticism directed at one person more than others?
• Is someone’s work being scrutinized more closely than comparable colleagues’ work?
• Are expectations for one person vague, changing, or unrealistic compared to the team?
• Do conversations about this person change when they leave the room?
• Is this person’s ideas dismissed, credited to others, or built upon without acknowledgment?
• Does this person seem to have fewer allies or seem isolated in social interactions?

The presence of patterns—behaviour that is repeated, intentional, and involves a power imbalance—is what transforms individual incidents into bullying.​

The Role of Sensitivity and Empathy

This is where my own sensitivity becomes an asset. People with high emotional intelligence and empathy often notice these patterns before they become obvious to others. If you’re someone who feels the “off” energy in a team or senses exclusion happening, trust that instinct. Your sensitivity is not a weakness; it’s often an early warning system.

But that sensitivity also means you need support. Noticing bullying without being able to address it is its own form of burden. If you’re spotting these patterns, you need allies, frameworks, and permission to speak up.

What to Do When You Spot It

Recognizing bullying is the first step. But naming it is where change begins. Here are simple starting points:

1. Document: If it’s happening to you or someone you care about, note dates, what was said or done, and who was present. Patterns are more compelling than isolated incidents.
2. Name it: Use the language from this toolkit. “That’s bordering on harassment,” or “That comment is a form of public humiliation,” or “Excluding someone from that meeting is a form of isolation.” Naming it reduces the fog.
3. Speak up: If you witness it, you may interrupt the behaviour and signal that it’s not acceptable.
4. Support the target: If someone is being bullied, they need to know they’re not imagining it, not overreacting, and not alone. Sometimes the simplest act is saying, “I see what’s happening, and it’s not right.”
5. Escalate thoughtfully: If addressing it directly doesn’t work, use formal channels—HR, ombudsperson, union rep, or external reporting mechanisms—but do it strategically, with documentation and ideally with allies.

Why This Week Matters

I spent all weekend catching up because this work matters. Not because I’m working myself into the ground, but because getting the toolkit right—giving people concrete language, frameworks, and permission to recognize and name bullying—is part of breaking the silence that lets bullying thrive.

Every person who learns to spot the patterns is a potential ally. Every person who recognizes their own behavior in this toolkit and decides to change is a culture shift. Every target who reads this and realizes they weren’t overreacting is one step closer to reclaiming their voice.

Your Turn

Use this toolkit on yourself first. Honestly assess whether your behavior—even unintentionally—creates the conditions for bullying. Then use it to notice patterns around you.

If you recognize yourself as a target, send me your story. Not for me to fix, but for me to understand, to amplify, and to help you find your voice and allies.

If you’re in HR, leadership, or learning and development, use this framework to audit your organization. Where on the continuum are things happening right now? What early interventions would shift the culture before bullying becomes entrenched?

If you’re an ally who spots bullying and doesn’t know what to do, comment below. Tell me what you’ve witnessed and what support you need to act.

This toolkit only works if we use it together. Share it. Discuss it. Push back on it. Build on it. Change it and let me know how you made it better!

The silence ends when we stop pretending we don’t see.

Resources that popped up:

1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-human-equation/202507/from-bullied-to-bully-to-butcher
2. https://www.highspeedtraining.co.uk/hub/am-i-being-bullied-at-work/
3. https://truesport.org/bullying-prevention/stages-of-bullying/
4. https://educate.bankstreet.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1087&context=independent-studies