I would like to tell every young person starting out in his or her career not to be cowed and bullied. Most people you’ll meet in the workplace are awesome, or at least decent people, but a few of them are jerks.
It doesn’t matter what company you work for or which industry you choose. Everywhere you go you’ll find warm and supportive people along with fearful, not-to-be-trusted bullies.
Fearful people will try to intimidate you, whether you are a new college grad or a long-in-the-tooth business veteran like me.
They will put you down and try to get you to shut up. There is only one reason why a person would act this way, and it’s important for you to know the reason.
People will bully and try to intimidate you in the business world if their spidey sense tells them that you are someone to be reckoned with — someone to take seriously.
You don’t even have to do anything to bring on the bullying behavior. Sometimes just being yourself can make people fearful, especially if they are fearful people to begin with!
I use the term “weenie” and the hotdog character in my drawings to illustrate a certain kind of behavior at work. I call it Weenie Behavior, and it’s what you see when a person is afraid and deals with his or her fear by putting down, boxing in and trying to squash other people. Maybe this has happened to you!
Weenies enact and enforce the stupid rules and policies that I write about all the time. Weenies love rules. Rules reinforce the fear of new thinking or stepping outside the lines that fearless people do naturally.
Weenies hate independent thought. A new idea might threaten a weenie’s place in the world. That’s why you can easily throw a weenie into an extreme fear state just by being yourself, telling a joke, having a good idea or being someone that seems to know what you’re doing.
Weenies hate for anyone competent to show up in their domain. Here are five things a fearful, weenie-state bully will say to try to knock you down.
Don’t fall for it!
Did You Just Arrive from the Sticks This Week?
Bullies love to knock other people off balance. You will hear people say “You don’t know much about business, do you?” or “So, have you ever dealt with a Professional Recruiter before? It doesn’t seem that way!”
They will tell you that you’re a rube and and an amateur who doesn’t know how things work in the Real World.
Don’t be intimidated! This is no different from a fifth-grade bully on the playground.
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