This post was originally published on this site
I worked with an executive recently who repeatedly described being “bulldozed” at work. I didn’t know what they meant, but the term haunted me. It seemed like something more than just typical corporate power plays and politics, and implied more pernicious mistreatment. This situation was also puzzling because this client was not the type of person who I’d expect to be the target of mistreatment. They were high-performing, stress-resilient and assertive. In other words, they were not a doormat.
What is bulldozing?
After some discussion with my client, I realized bulldozing involved several characteristics:
Interruption and shushing: Someone in a more powerful position would interrupt my client in a meeting, raise a hand and gesture them to stop talking (i.e., the “shush”) and state that they were “wrong” about the issue at hand. Outnumbering: A coalition of people from another function who outnumbered my client would attend a meeting and work together to refute my client’s points. They would also suggest (in a way that seemed pre-arranged and insincere) that they were “starting to coalesce” around a position my client opposed. Pre-deciding: Here, the functional coalition would arrive at the meeting declaring they had already decided about an issue,
