Week 1: Solving Workplace Bullying – A Week(ish) in Review

Week 1: From Purpose to Pain Point and Back Again

This week started with a simple question and ended with a simple toolkit to help solve workplace bullying. In between, I moved from asking why this is my purpose to grappling with how I actually do it—and what it costs to try!

On Day 0, Simon Squibb asked me what my biggest pain point had been in nearly 30 years (Linkedin Article here). I said workplace bullying. He replied: “There’s your business.” The audience put their hands up. My body responded by crashing out and I spent the next day in bed, processing years of suppressed stress that finally had permission to be felt. Day 0 – Simon Squibb Says…Your Purpose is to Solve Workplace Bullying

By Day 7, I’d built a website, a contact system, daily blog posts, and a framework for recognizing bullying in myself and others. I’d also realized something crucial: this work is too big for one person, and that’s exactly the point.

Here’s what this week taught me.

The Personal Foundation: Why I’m Building This

Workplace bullying isn’t abstract for me. I was bullied by my step-dad early on and by colleagues in my first real job (Day 4 – Solving Workplace Bullying: Am I A Bully?). I’ve experienced it in my career. I’ve watched it destroy colleagues while organizations protected the perpetrators. Notably, I supported someone through a legal investigation into bullying. The outcomes were ignored. The victim resigned. The bully remained.

That pattern repeats itself because we don’t talk about bullying openly. We feel weak admitting it happened. We develop learned helplessness and stop trying to change it. Organizations avoid the conversation because the problem feels too large to solve.

I’m building this because silence enables bullying. And silence can be broken.

My expertise isn’t academic. It’s lived—from supporting others through bullying, from my own experiences, and from years of training in transactional analysis, neurolinguistic programming, emotional intelligence, and transformational coaching. I can feel organizational culture when I walk into their office. I can spot micro-aggressions and patterns others miss. That sensitivity is both a gift and something I’m still learning to carry as a burden that impacts how I behave as well as who I am close to (Day 6 – Building an Infrastructure to Solve Workplace Bullying with Empathy?!).

The Psychological Architecture: What Bullying Really Is

Three critical insights emerged this week:

First: Bullying is a cycle, not a moral binary. Studies show 30-35% of bullying victims later become bullies themselves. When people are chronically victimized, their nervous systems can shift from freeze to fight mode—and sometimes they wield that power against others to counteract or rebalance their own hurt. I’ve seen multiple angles of this cycle, and it forced me to ask myself the hardest question: Am I a bully?​

The answer isn’t simple. What matters is honest self-examination, which most people avoid. Bullies aren’t always predatory villains. Many lack self-awareness, are trapped in primitive fight-or-flight responses, or are unconsciously replicating patterns from their own victimization. Understanding this doesn’t excuse the behavior—it makes it addressable.

Second: Why people don’t speak up. Fear of retaliation is the biggest barrier. Employees worry about losing their jobs, being labeled “difficult,” or facing backlash. When people witness bullying, most do nothing—unsure how serious it is, afraid of consequences, or feeling partial guilt, or that it is just them. Organizations exploit this silence by blaming victims instead of addressing systemic culture problems.​

Third: The role of empathy and emotional intelligence. Higher emotional intelligence correlates strongly with less bullying behavior. Empathy—understanding and sharing others’ feelings—is a key prevention factor. In a future where AI handles transactional work and humans manage humans, emotional intelligence becomes the competitive differentiator. Organizations that ignore bullying aren’t just being cruel—they’re unpreparing themselves for the future of work(Day 5 – Solving Workplace Bullying with Emotional Intelligence).​

The Strategic Opportunity: IQ → EQ → AQ

The 20th century valued IQ (Intelligence Quotient). The 21st century learned to value EQ (Emotional Intelligence). The future demands AQ (AI Intelligence)—the skill of managing teams of AI agents.

But here’s the leverage: as AI handles more transactional work, human interaction becomes what remains uniquely human. If your humans can’t collaborate, trust, or lead because they’re operating in a bullying culture, you don’t just have a moral problem. You have a strategic disadvantage.

This reframes the work. Solving workplace bullying isn’t about being nice. It’s about future-proofing your workforce. Organizations investing in emotional intelligence now are preparing for a world where psychological safety and healthy relationships are competitive assets.

Even in organizations with toxic senior leadership, there are people with conscience who see the problem and want to solve it. They’re HR leaders exhausted by turnover. They’re mid-level managers watching talent drain. They’re senior leaders horrified but unsure how to act. Finding these internal allies—and giving them frameworks and permission—is where real change begins.

The Practical Reality: What This Actually Takes

I spent Day 3 (Day 3 – Wrestling with Workplace Bullying) wrestling with video editing software, learning new software platforms, and realizing that building this alone is overwhelming. I spent Day 6 building a contact system in Notion, using AI to transcribe and summarize calls, and tracking every conversation so I wouldn’t lose people or momentum.

The website is live (two pages, a form, a video, a blog waiting to be written). The contact system is running. Daily blog posts are published. But the cost is real: I spent my entire weekend catching up because too much work collapsed into too little time.

This taught me something important: if I try to do this alone, I’ll burn out, and nothing changes. The work requires a network—victims willing to share experiences, allies willing to act, leaders willing to shift, researchers willing to study, HR professionals willing to implement.

The Toolkit: How to Spot Bullying

This is what you can use immediately. Experts Einarsen and Zapf identified five main categories of bullying:​

1. Work-related: Removing responsibilities, blocking opportunities, impossible workloads, micromanaging
2. Personal attacks: Insults, ridicule, denigration, name-calling
3. Social isolation: Exclusion from meetings, conversations, information, social events
4. Verbal threats: Job security threats, implicit or explicit intimidation
5. Spreading rumours: Deliberate circulation of false information to damage reputation

Bullying operates on two levels:

• Aggressive: Overt, obvious, easy to name (screaming, public humiliation, explicit threats)
• Passive: Subtle, camouflaged, hard to identify (undermining, sabotaging, dividing)

Most workplace bullying is passive. It starts innocently—bantering, teasing—and escalates into something that damages careers and health. The critical window for intervention is early, before patterns become entrenched.​

Use this framework on yourself first. Do you make jokes at others’ expense? Exclude someone from information? Micromanage one person more than others? Speak negatively about someone behind their back?

Then use it to notice patterns around you. Is one person consistently excluded? Are jokes directed at them more than others? Are expectations for them vague or unrealistic?

Recognizing bullying is the first step. Naming it is where change begins.

What’s Live Now

• Daily blog: Posts Wednesday-Monday-Friday documenting this journey with psychological depth
• Website: MartinLewisKnowles.com with simple video, feedback form, and blog (part of MLK Beyond)
• Contact system: Tracking conversations so no one gets lost and I reply to everyone
• Toolkit: The Einarsen & Zapf framework and continuum available to everyone

Focus Next Week

• Daily blog: Posts Monday-Friday documenting this journey with psychological depth
• Linkedin Newsletter: Get this post out as a Newsletter and link to the website and maybe a group?
• Video: Takes ages to record, ages to edit and I think I need to interview some guests to make it pop!
• Website: MartinLewisKnowles.com add some video, and blog as above, perhaps email signup?
• Contact system: Tracking conversations so no one gets lost and following up with people I missed.
• Toolkit: Explore some sort of self-assessment for The Einarsen & Zapf framework and continuum
• Youtube: Think there is a podcast type format that would be great here but need to work on channel
• MVP and VIP: Update my supporters and formulate a strategy for taking this concept further

Where You Come In

If you’re a victim of workplace bullying and you’re still carrying that silently, this is the space to share. Comment, message, or book a time to talk. Your experience matters and it informs this work.

If you’re an ally—someone who spots bullying but doesn’t know what to do—I need to hear from you. What have you witnessed? What stopped you from acting? What support would help?

If you’re in HR or leadership and you’ve tried to address bullying but hit resistance, your insights are invaluable. What worked? What didn’t? What barriers did you face?

If you’re someone with high empathy or sensitivity who feels others’ emotions deeply, you’re exactly the kind of person who can help shift cultures. But you need scaffolding and allies so you don’t burn out.

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

Read the daily blog posts for deeper dives into each topic. Comment, share, or reach out if anything resonates. This movement only grows if we build it together.