It is every bit as bad as I feared. The uphill fight has got steeper, just when I had momentarily allowed myself to think that the worst might be over. The books warned me, but unless you go through it, you can’t imagine it’s really going to happen to you. It seems so ludicrous. So cliched.
On the other hand, I suppose it’s obvious. One of the predictable dangers in standing up to people who are adept at twisting the truth, ganging up against you and casting you in a negative light is that they will continue to do what they are good at, just with a wider audience. It will get set down on paper which will make it true, though of course you can select the parts you want to consider as true.
Because the report has 16 different references to bullying and behaviours that amount to bullying, I felt relieved for a while; someone had heard me. However, despite those 16 references, the Trustees somehow have managed to read it without concluding that there has been bullying in the workplace! In a note of a meeting with 2 Trustees, it says the report refers to unacceptable behaviour “which in her [my] view constituted bullying” as if it were unreasonable and they couldn’t understand how I could possibly have concluded such a thing, or at the very least, that there is room for doubt!
And most galling of all, although the report refers to this as being the behaviour of long serving employees, those who served under the previous scape goat, I mean CEO, which I did not, I am the only one with personal recommendations. I am the one whose behaviour needs looking at. I need to learn how to listen, need to think about how others might react to what I need to say, how I might need to explain the context. No specifics, mind, so my request for examples was repeatedly met with the refrain about not going over the past. All these things that I have being trying to get Sandra and Yvonne to do are thrown back at me so that they get to walk away unscathed.
And just as I thought it couldn’t get worse, in discussion today, the Trustees let slip that they have had fed back to them BY THE ASSESSOR not only that I shout at people, but also that I throw things!!!!
This neutral assessment is all very well, but it has concluded things that have been said about me without me having any right to give my version of events. I’m not sure that that is an entirely fair way to go about things.
I must keep reminding myself of the words of Mahatma Gandhi quoted in Fighting Back; overcoming bullying in the workplace by David Graves, which has been one of my bibles over the last few months;
“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murders and for a time they seem invincible but in the end they always fall – think of it, ALWAYS.”
Tell that to the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Ukranians, the Iraqis. I hope with all my being that he is proved right.
Bully 4 U 