Alright, this is going to be a long post because I need to give a lot of context to make this as interesting as possible. So grab your coffee/tea.
I used to work for a multinational retail company as a senior for the finance dept. The company got hit quite bad in 2020. That's when they decided to restructure all the departments. Our department was great, our manager was laid back and would never do anything against us. Well, after a big argument with his boss over how the company could cut costs by letting us working from home, reducing big bonuses which were paid to managers only — he got fired.
And a replacement was quickly found. Let's call him “Fred” A guy who was a control freak, abusive, a liar, arrogant, and often would take the credit for himself of what our team was doing.
That guy knew how to manipulate and to abuse people at the same time. He would be very nice towards you to gain your trust and then would be a dictator right afterwards to intimidate you when nobody was looking.
One big red flag for me was when right after he started, he called me into a room and started gossiping about everyone he just met. He was trying his best to get info out of me, cause I worked the longest over there.
Also he would brag about himself all the time. He would tell us how good he could lie and get away with it.
“Fred” would pick on people that seem weak to him and pull them down to the ground where they would see no hope but to obey his demands.
I could give lots of examples, but I will just give one that happened with myself:
After working about 3 months with him, he gave me a call and questioned me about a subject that I was supposed to solve. After a little discussion, he asked me to share my screen because he wanted to go through my emails with me. I, being naive about it, did so. He started questioning me regarding all the unread emails. To most of them I could provide an answer right away and to a couple I told them I needed to check. He told me that it was unacceptable for me to have more than 10 unread emails. Keep in mind that in my senior position I was receiving about 20-30 emails a day regarding different topics which could take 10 minutes to 10 days to solve depending on the request. Also the ironic thing is that the guy had more than 4000 unread emails when he left the company. When I asked him about his number of emails (which at that time was about 600 or so), he told me he was allowed to have that many because of his high position in the company. If you ask me how I knew the about how many emails he had, well every day at our group meeting he would almost brag about it to show how much he is important to the company. He told me to improve otherwise I would get fired if I had more than 10 unread emails.
After a year or so working with “Fred”, me and my colleagues would notice how little he knew about our job and his own job. He would ask questions that a junior guy/girl could answer after a month working with us. Everyone got pissed cause he was putting so much pressure at us and at the same time not knowing what he was talking about and of course making much more money than we did. Many times he would manipulate some people in our team to do his work for him while he would get the credit for it.
I and a couple of people from our team tried many times to complain about him to his boss and HR, but they didn't take us seriously because on the outside everything seemed great. A lot of people were afraid to say something against him cause he would thread and intimidate them.
After almost 2 years being bullied by him, I finally decided to do something about it. Trust me, it wasn't easy because I was being manipulated by him too.
I started recording with my phone all the meetings were having together. Even the group meetings. “Fred” was smart but his ego got so big that he started bullying us as a group. There was no more hidden abuse only.
One day, he created a 1 on 1 meeting for us regarding one email. I wasn't ready to record cause he was being quite friendly with us that day (again trying to manipulate us) and for a week or two he didn't give us any real trouble. And that email was nothing special. So he lured me – as the snake he is – to that meeting and he started to confront me about him knowing that I told a guy about his lack of knowledge and how he does tons of mistakes which we have to fix. I was in shock for a moment cause I realized he had set everything up just to look like a normal meeting. However, I quickly grabbed my phone and started recording (we were working from home on that day). I calmly responded to his objections, telling him that I indeed don't trust him and I don't feel comfortable at all having this kind of meetings with him. He felt empowered by my answer and started to abuse me even more, telling me that I don't have the balls to tell him that to his face. He turned on his camera and started saying : ” can you see me? Can you see me? Next time you see me face to face, say that to my face”
He ended the meeting quite angry at me and I finally had what I needed. I was pumped up and felt a rush through my veins. The audio was there, but I decided to take this even further.
That idiot was so furious that he decided to spam me with a lot of tasks via email while having his boss in copy, it seemed like he wanted evidence against me to get me fired. But he didn't even check the emails he was sending/forwarding me. 90% of the things were already solved. His boss contacted me and I explained to him about each email and how “Fred” was wrong on sending me solved emails, cause I was wasting my time to check and answer that it was already solved. His boss immediately became suspicious of him. I decided to wait with the audio, cause I know that “Fred” was still pissed and I could squeeze even more evidences against him. I could feel that his ego got too big for him to notice anything in front of him.
I talked to the people that I most trusted in my team and presented them with the evidence. Everyone got a little sense of hope to get that guy fired. So I told everyone to always record any meeting where he is in. And gather all the evidence possible cause I would set up a meeting with HR and all of us. And we would review all the evidence with the them. I had maybe 30% of our team there and all of them agreed with me. I thought that was enough, but the message got spread and eventually 99% of our team was in agreement and doing the same thing. I couldn't believe I was able to move so many people to the same direction, but it wasn't me really, it was Fred's abusive behavior, everyone was sick and tired (literally) at that point.
The timing was perfect because at that time we've just got a new person in charge of HR and she of course was trying her best to show her work in her first few weeks to the director of our company.
We had the meeting with the new HR manager and there were so many evidences against him that one 1 hour and a half meeting wasn't enough. We had multiple women telling HR that he was s*xually harassing them. One felt the need to dress like a man to not get inappropriate comments from him. Nobody doubted that due to his history of cheating on his wife — how do we knew this? Oh well, you might know by now… He told us this too almost bragging about it as always. Everyone in that meeting was mentioning also the fact that nobody thinks he is capable of doing his job and nobody feels safe around him.
Well, only 2 days later we've heard he was fired. I never saw the whole team together so happy at the same time. It was a great day and it felt like a huge rock off of our backs.
A few lessons I took from this:
Always speak up, even when you think nobody will hear
Be prepared for confrontations
Gather people and share your experience with them and see if it's matching with yours.
Don't get used to being bullied! Do something about it!