A colleague decides to act on a workplace bully everyone else has been too afraid to challenge, after management’s own attempt to fix things made the problem worse. Michelle and Mel use the story to ask a harder question: how do you work out whether you’re actually safe enough to speak up, and what should you be asking for when you do?
In this episode
Mel and Michelle discuss a true story from Michelle’s network: a long-tenured bully in a 20- to 25-person team, protected for years by management inaction and then by a badly designed intervention that asked the whole team, bully included, to speak freely. A colleague, weighing their own employability and financial security against what their more vulnerable teammates stand to lose, decides to file a formal complaint and back the newly appointed manager who is trying to fix things.
Truth Bomb: leadership shows up at every level of an organisation, in acts like this one, using whatever power, safety and privilege you already have on behalf of people who have less.
What you’ll learn
* Why sitting an entire team down together, including the person accused of bullying, and asking everyone to “be honest” is a psychological safety failure, not a fix
* Why are some employees structurally unable to speak up, even when the misconduct is obvious to everyone else
* How to work out whether you have enough positional power, financial security or professional standing to act safely, and why that differs from person to person
* Why a woman is so often the one parachuted in to clean up a mess that several managers before her failed to address, and what that costs her
* The difference between alerting someone to a problem and asking for a specific outcome, and why “what outcome are you seeking” changes the conversation
* What a proper workplace investigation looks like, and why standing someone down while it happens protects everyone, not just the person who complained
About the hosts
Michelle Redfern is a gender equity strategist and author of The Leadership Compass. Mel Butcher is a consultant and facilitator with an engineering background and more than 15 years of experience. Both women are mission-driven to teach women the business, strategic and financial acumen it takes to reach leadership.
Go Deeper
If you’re weighing up whether it’s safe to speak up in your own workplace, that’s exactly the kind of decision Lead to Soar Network members work through together:
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