Leopards never change their spots

As someone on the Autistic Spectrum, I have had a lifetime of meeting people who raise red flags, often for very good reasons. Human beings are, by their very nature, generally unsympathetic to anyone with any differences, so I got the brunt of the bullying at all but one of my schools. One thing I have observed is that bullies never change, they simply become better at hiding how unpleasant they are because it is inbuilt not learned behaviour. The bullies at school become the managers and the politicians that make our lives more difficult. They are a self regarding set of people who in the majority of cases put their own ‘brilliance’ front and centre and delight in using their status to make others miserable.

The main difference between work when I started in the 1980s and now is that it was eminently likely that your manager was an expert in the job they were doing, having worked their way up. That meant that if you had a problem they would almost certainly have faced that problem before or at least seen it before and would be able to suggest a way to tackle it.

Now, the vast majority of management is in place because they know the right people. As they get further up they gain more and more contacts and get jobs more and more easily. They pay no price for failure and often benefit from it in the form of huge pay offs before they get their next job. They don’t need to know anything about the area they are responsible for and this leads to constant low level bullying in the form of micro management because they know very little about the jobs their staff are expected to do and care even less.

If you are experienced in the job, you will show them up for their lack of ability, so you will get overlooked for promotion in all but the best workplaces. If you genuinely care about the people you manage, the same applies. As you get further up the greasy pole, the number of genuinely decent people in power becomes ever smaller.

The weapons these people use are weapons of attrition and demoralisation. Unnecessary staff meetings, the constant fight against working from home and the passive aggressive comments and emails are all subtle ways to bully people who they have no respect for.

I would never trust anyone who has ever bullied others. They don’t regret their behaviour because they so rarely acknowledge that they do anything wrong. If a school bully ever apologises it is for their benefit not yours. It’s their get out of jail free card. You hear that all the time with the ‘I’m sorry if you felt…’ apology which means nothing and is so popular amongst politicians and managers. They are in the ascendancy now and they are going to stay there.