 Leaders should care about bullying on their teams and within their companies. If leaders and managers turn a blind eye or don't actively look for bullying within their company and take effective action when they find it, bullying will be portrayed as acceptable within their company and spread. Bullying and harassment at work is still a significant issue, including one in ten reporting cyberbullying. The data shows that more than half of bullying within a workplace is undertaken by managers. Leaders should care about bullying by their own managers even more than bullying by staff members because managers have more influence and impact a greater number of staff members. Five reasons leaders should care about bullying are firstly, bullying kills trust. Secondly, bullying damages team performance. Third, reputation matters in talent attraction. Fourth, a legal risk that impacts everyone. And fifth, preventing bullying costs a fraction of the cost of bullying in the workplace. In section five, I suggest seven ways to prevent bullying and limit the impact of bullying when it does happen. Leaders and managers through their behaviors, actions and decisions set the expectations and behaviors of the company. In what reputation do you want to cultivate with your team? My name is Jess Coles and if you're new here in HeartStalk Training Shares, people management expertise, resources and courses teaching you how to build higher performing teams. I've included links to additional videos and resources in the description below, as well as the video timestamps so do take a look at these. And if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. A key reason why managers should care about bullying is bullying kills trust. Bullying rarely happens without team members noticing. Chances are when the manager finds out about bullying within the team or being suffered by a team member, the rest of the team already know about it. At this point trust is maintained if the manager takes sensible action immediately or seriously damaged if nothing is visibly done. If the manager doesn't show that they care or if they think that it is the employee's problem, the rest of the team members will be thinking, what happens when it's my turn? If suddenly those calls from recruiters offering them jobs become more appealing, motivation drops, respect for the manager drops, output drops. And this can easily happen across all team members and suddenly there's a real performance problem in the team. Without trust, I don't believe you have a team, just a collection of individuals. A team outperforms groups of individuals day in, day out. As trust increases, so does the team's potential to perform. Your high levels of trust between team members and with the manager is an essential ingredient for high performing teams. Very important reasons why managers should care about bullying. To create a high levels of trust, the team manager should communicate that bullying, aggressive behaviour, put downs, social slights and all other undermining behaviour is not acceptable. For this expectation to be effective, the manager needs to live these expectations each day and take action if team members behave poorly. Another impact of bullying in the workplace, bullying damages team performance. Think about how bullying impacts team performance. Now when you are being bullied, a lot of your energy and thinking time is spent on how to deal with a bullying. This diverts energy and thinking time, which means your personal performance is likely to drop. This is the direct impact of bullying on teams. Much more concerning is the indirect impact of bullying on teams. As mentioned, if no action is taken, the team members trust in the manager is going to drop. Voicing opinions is done more cautiously, so the communication of ideas drops, the solutions created weaken as less people get involved and healthy challenging of ideas and solutions drop. The team starts operating as a group of individuals which results in a drop in team performance. This is a very real cost of bullying to companies. And bullying, if left unchecked, often gets worse and more blatant. This encourages others who kept their bullying tendencies in check to start bullying. An even bigger impact of bullying on teams. If managers bully staff members, then the culture of the organisation can start changing for the worst. The companies best people leave first as they can find jobs elsewhere easily. Then the cost of staffing the business goes up and the performance goes down. Another cost of bullying in the workplace. Think how bullying impacts the manager bonus and staff bonuses if team performance drops. The people are the business. If people make the decisions, choose actions and decide which activities and projects to do. Give your people a safe and enjoyable environment to work in to encourage the best from your people. Next, reputation matters in talent attraction, which can be another cost of bullying to companies. It is easy to find out about what it's like to work in a company before joining. You search Glassdoor on the internet or any other review company and you have a wealth of feedback available from current and past employees. Employees spend so much time at work, who wants to work at a company with a reputation for putting up with widespread bullying in the workplace? Talented employees usually get multiple job offers, so can choose to where they work. Companies with a poor reputation either get left with the B players or worse, or they pay a lot more to attract better staff. On top of that, if you have groups of individuals in your company rather than teams, you won't be making the best use of the talent of your employees. Another hidden and significant cost of bullying in the workplace. Another reason leaders should care about bullying is creating a legal risk that impacts everyone. If bullying in the workplace happens and no action is taken to address bullying, or particularly if managers are bullying staff, the company runs the risk of lawsuits for unfair or constructive dismissal, not undertaking a duty of care towards employees if failing to provide protection from harassment. There are provisions in at least eight separate pieces of UK legislation that might cover bullying. Legal action results in a cost of employing lawyers and potentially paying damages. The hidden cost is the management time and HR time involved in defending or dealing with legal action. In addition, the company risks additional reputational damage if the legal action becomes widely known. If you were the manager of a person that took legal action against the company because bullying was not addressed, think about how that would impact your career at the company. Another reason that leaders should care about bullying is that preventing bullying costs a fraction of the cost of bullying in the workplace. The impact of bullying on the team, performance and company culture creates a significant cost to the business. Making your workplace a very hard place for bullies to operate takes a bit of effort and some thought. In my view, the cost of this effort is tiny compared to the cost of bullying in the workplace and the cost of allowing bullying to damage team and business performance. Here are seven suggestions to prevent bullying in the workplace. Firstly, create and communicate written policies that prohibit bullying, harassment, cyberbullying and all forms of putting down other staff members for personal reasons. The written policies should give plenty of examples of unacceptable behaviour and actions and bullying should be a disciplinary offence. Second, train managers to look out for signs of bullying and require them to investigate and take action as soon as they become aware of bullying. Be clear about what action should be undertaken by the managers. Third, the business leaders should actively and visibly check on their managers and their teams to ensure that the managers themselves are not bullying, undermining or harassing their own team members. Fourth, leaders should use across the company anonymous 360 degree feedback processes which include questions about bullying, harassment and undermining to help identify undetected bullying. Fifth, set up processes to make it easy for staff to make complaints confidentially and have a clear and fair process for how to investigate these complaints. Communicate this process to employees. Sixth, recruitment of managers and promotion to the management ranks should focus on their values and attitudes and their people management skills to reduce management bullying and increase the fairness with which issues are dealt with. And then seventh, business leaders must visibly commit to not tolerating bullying and visibly demonstrate that they are not going to tolerate bullying in the management ranks nor with staff members. This includes ensuring they don't undertake any actions or behaviour that might be taken as bullying themselves. I hope you take seriously the cost of bullying in the workplace and do your best to make it hard for bullying to happen in your team. So in summary, five reasons leaders should care about bullying we have discussed has hopefully highlighted the real costs of bullying to companies and the impact of bullying on teams. Please do all you can to prevent bullying in your team and company. Being tough on bullying creates a lot of trust and appreciation from team members and I think it is essential to take action on any negative behaviours if you want to build high performing teams. To recap, we've been through five reasons leaders should care about bullying. First, bullying kills trust. Secondly, bullying damages team performance. Third, reputation matters in talent attraction and fourth, a legal risk that impacts everyone. And fifth, preventing bullying costs a fraction of the cost of bullying in the workplace. Please put into practice the seven ways we have suggested to prevent bullying in the workplace. If you have any questions on the five reasons leaders should care about bullying please leave them in the comment section below and I'll get back to you. Thank you very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.