Dealing with bullies in the workplace is one of those management topics that never seems to grow old, mainly because bullying behavior is probably as old as the workplace itself.

Bullying is also one of those workplace problems that never, ever really goes away, as you can see from this Dear Workforce question from earlier this year on how to restrain a bullying senior manager. It’s also a problem that pops up sometimes in the most unexpected places—such as among the Beefeater guards at the Tower of London.

The headline on this Associated Press story from the New Orleans Times-Picayune (“Tower of London Beefeaters suspended on suspicion of bullying one of their own”) doesn’t really capture the key element of this story—that the person who was bullied was “the first woman selected to join the all-male ranks of the Tower’s yeoman warders, popularly known as ‘Beefeaters.’ ”

According to the AP, “Moira Cameron—a veteran of long military service—was named a warder at the Tower two years ago. Hers was supposed to be a happy story about how a bastion of male supremacy could become a place where women, too, could serve queen and country. [But] on Monday, embarrassed Tower officials conceded that Cameron had apparently been subjected to a campaign of bullying and harassment conducted by some of her resentful male colleagues. They said two male warders have been suspended and a third is under investigation for suspected harassment of Cameron.”

What constitutes bullying in the ranks of the British Beefeaters? Britain’s Sun newspaper reported that “Cameron’s uniform had been defaced and … nasty notes had been left in her locker.” In addition, the newspaper said that Cameron’s entry in the online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia had been defaced as part of the campaign against her.

I’m sure that it was tough being the first woman to join an all-male group like the Beefeaters, but Moira Cameron seemed to be a great choice to break the gender barrier given that she had served in the British military for more than 20 years, with stints in both Cyprus and Northern Ireland, and, because she doesn’t seem willing to take too much crap from anyone.

“I’ve had some comments,” she said early in her tenure as a Beefeater. “ I had one chap at the gate one day who said he was completely and utterly against me doing the job … I said to him, ‘I would like to thank you for dismissing my 22 years’ service in her majesty’s armed forces.’ ”

It will be interesting to see how the British deal with this incident—who handles HR issues for the Beefeaters, anyhow?—especially since the decision to bring women into what had long been an all-male bastion like the Beefeaters must have been made at a very high level by people who knew the potential for something like this to happen.

Dealing with bullies is always tricky, as we noted here at Workforce.com in this article on “Tips for HR: Dealing With Workplace Bullies,” mainly because “the HR professional must be able to distinguish a bully from an earnest but perhaps difficult or even troubled supervisor.”

It’s hard to imagine anyone being earnest about the abuse being directed toward Beefeater Moira Cameron, but I suppose that’s possible. What is clear, however, is that every manager must be prepped and ready to handle bullies in the workplace because it is a problem that is never, ever really going away.

Bullying, unfortunately, seems to be one of those quirks of human nature that you can’t stamp out. And no matter how much you do to solve the problem in your own workplace, I guarantee that it will pop up again when you least expect it—even at the Tower of London.

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Close readers of this blog know that I have a low threshold for “news” or “trends” that seem to be generated by the clueless and brain-dead practitioners of America’s public relations profession solely to promote the latest book or expertise of some windbag “expert” they have as a client.

Don’t know what I’m ranting about? It’s the flood of pitches about the problems with office gambling pools around the NCAA college basketball tournament, aka March Madness, every spring. Or, office romance issues around Valentine’s Day. And, I even had one last year that was concocted around the ridiculous notion of workers going overboard and watching the Summer Olympics instead of doing their jobs.

These are all urban workplace legends created out of whole cloth by PR people to hype and pitch their clients.

They are not a problem for 99 percent of the working world and simply are a case of creating a bogus workplace issue that—surprise!—there just happens to be some expert who can help solve.

This would all be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that there are equally brain-dead media types, primarily engaged in the broadcasting profession, who play into this hype and regurgitate the nonsense that these PR handlers and their “experts” are spewing. They help to perpetuate this cycle that focuses on silliness rather than really honest-to-goodness workplace issues.

And that gets me to my latest rant about something called National Boss Day. It’s apparently coming up Friday, October 16, although as Wikipedia rightly says (and readers note, I’ll probably never put that in a sentence again), “The holiday has been the source of some controversy and criticism in the United States, where it is often mocked as a Hallmark Holiday.”

I’ve had a couple of press releases today touting either workplace surveys pegged to National Boss Day or some manner of workplace expertise about how to deal with a boss that spins off the event.

Here’s my take: National Boss Day is a put-on, a fraud, a silly and senseless “event” that one would expect to find in a Monty Python sketch, an episode of The Office or a Dilbert cartoon. And in all cases, the mention of such an event should simply be to mock the pretentiousness of such BS.

Why do we need National Boss Day anyway? As a longtime boss, the last thing I want is for anyone working for me to engage in such nonsense because it seems to elevate being a boss for no other reason than because a boss has power and authority.

In my world, great bosses are honored for the good they do and the respect and loyalty they generate among those who work with them, not because someone concocted some fake day that people are expected to remember. 

So, just remember this when you read or hear some dumb “news” story on Friday about National Boss Day. When you do, smile for a second and perhaps take a moment to wonder, “What kind of real news am I missing because some idiot editor fell prey to this PR crap about National Boss Day?”

When that happens, think of me and remember, I warned you here first.

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It’s been a great month if you’re a fan of boorish behavior.

From Serena Williams at the U.S. Open tennis championships (“If I could, I would take this [bleeping] ball and shove it down your [bleeping] throat and kill you!”) to Rep. Joe Wilson during a speech by President Barack Obama to a joint session of Congress (“You lie!”) to Kanye West on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards (“I’m really happy for you, I’ll let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time”), rude, out-of-line behavior is rapidly moving from the occasional exception to more of a commonplace rule.

I’m not sure what’s driving all of this very public incivility, but now it even seems to be moving into workplace speech.

Here’s what I’m talking about: In Barcelona, Spain, a judge has ruled that “insulting your boss with one particularly foul obscenity is not grounds for dismissal,” according to an Associated Press story in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The obscenity in question “translates as ‘son of a bitch’ and was used by a worker against his boss during a January 2008 money dispute in the northeastern city of Gerona. The worker, who also called his boss ‘crazy,’ was promptly fired,” the AP report says.

The worker lost his first court challenge but later won on appeal with the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia. “Without a doubt, both expressions (either calling the boss ‘crazy’ or an ‘SOB’) are insulting,” Judge Sara Maria Pose Vidal said in the ruling, a copy of which was obtained by the AP.

But she noted that when the man called his boss crazy, he had been on his way out of the office and the boss did not hear it. She also wrote that the “son of a bitch” remark “should be viewed in linguistic context.”

Here’s the part of the judge’s ruling that I love: “The social degradation of language has caused the expressions used by the plaintiff to become commonly used in certain settings, especially in arguments,” Pose Vidal wrote, calling the dismissal a disproportionate punishment.

In other words, the Spanish court said that the term “SOB” is common—so common (at least in Spain) that it has passed the point of being considered something that someone should get fired for.

The AP story didn’t say this, but it seems clear that calling your boss a “son of a bitch” is now considered protected workplace speech in Spain. How long before that ruling makes it across the pond and takes root here in America’s workplaces?

My guess, given the rise in so much boorish behavior, is that we’ll see it sooner than anyone cares to imagine.

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Words are the tools we use here at Workforce Management and www.workforce.com, but sometimes, even the best tools can get used improperly, incorrectly or far too frequently.

All of us here at the Workforce Management world headquarters know that avoiding overused business clichés—the stuff that all too many brain-dead consultants and too-much-time-on-their-hands CEOs love to spout—is just one of the occupational hazards we deal with every day.

In fact, cartoonist Scott Adams has built a career out of lampooning pretentious business jargon (as well as silly business fads and practices) in his daily comic strip Dilbert. And if you Google the term “business jargon” you’ll find all sorts of fun stuff, from a Web economy bullshit generator to an MBA jargon watch that touts itself as “A tongue-in-cheek guide to business jargon and management buzzwords since 2002.”

That’s why I was amused by a recent survey of the most overused business terms that was developed by Accountemps, the world’s first and largest staffing services firm specializing in accounting and finance. The survey was conducted by an independent research firm and is based on telephone interviews with 150 senior executives from the nation’s 1,000 largest companies.

The executives were asked this simple question: “What is the most annoying or overused phrase or buzzword in the workplace today?” Their responses included:

• Leverage: As in, “We intend to leverage our investment in IT infrastructure across multiple business units to drive profits.”

• Reach out: As in, “Remember to reach out to customers impacted by the change.”

• It is what it is: As in, “The server is down today, and clients are irate. It is what it is.”

• Viral: As in, “Our video has gone viral.”

• Game changer: As in, “Transitioning from products to solutions was a game changer for our company.”

• Disconnect: As in, “There is a disconnect between what the consumer wants and what the product provides.”

• Value-add: As in, “We have to evaluate the value-add of this activity before we spend more on it.”

• Circle back: As in, “I’m heading out of the office now, but I will circle back with you later.”

• Socialize: As in, “We need to socialize this concept with our key stakeholders.”

• Interface: As in, “My job requires me to interface with all levels of the organization.”

• Cutting edge: As in, “Our cutting-edge technology gives us a competitive advantage.”

This made me wonder: How would my staff here at Workforce Management answer this same question, especially since we are flooded with pitches, press releases and business news from dawn to dusk just about every day of the year? Here’s some of the stuff that drives us crazy:

• Monetize

• Incentivize, and its ghastly cousin, incent

• Nimble, and its evil twin, robust

• Solution: As in, “We have a nimble and robust editing solution that we are trying to monetize.”

• Value proposition (a big favorite of many here at Workforce Management)

So this makes me also wonder, what do you think is the silliest business jargon you hear in you day-to-day work life? Send your favorites along to me, either with a post to this blog or via e-mail at jhollon@workforce.com, and I’ll publish the “best” ones here. I have a feeling that we have only scratched the surface here, and maybe we can give Scott Adams and Dilbert a run for their money.

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Remember the old New Yorker cartoon from the early 1990s (you can see it here) that poked fun at the notion that so many people lie or fib about themselves on the Internet? Everyone got a big laugh out of it because it was not only funny but also dead-on accurate. Yes, lots of people DO lie about themselves on the Internet for all sorts of selfish reasons.

Fast-forward that thought to 2009, when Twitter is the rage and just about anyone can sign up and claim that they are just about anyone. Basketball great Shaquille O’Neal found this out the hard way when he tried to sign up for a Twitter account and found out that there were upwards of 30 other Twitter users claiming they were Shaq. He ended up signing up for a Twitter handle as The Real Shaq so he wouldn’t be confused with all those fake Shaqs who were Twittering up a storm.

That pretty much sums up the problem with Twitter and the Internet in general: Users can be totally anonymous, hide out and say whatever they want no matter how inflammatory, libelous or wrong.

I’ve always felt that the anonymous nature of the Internet was one of its great shortcomings, mainly because so many people hide behind the cloak of anonymity and write all sorts of vile things that they would probably never say to a person if they were forced to publicly stand behind them.

Well, leave it to Twitter to take a very small but meaningful step toward greater civility on the Internet. It’s going to “crack down on celebrity impersonators who post messages on the service as if they were the real thing, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, by introducing “a verification system to ensure that famous people are who they say they are.”

“Twitter has long been a playground for people pretending to be Hollywood stars or high-profile political figures,” the Chronicle noted. “It left other users confused about whether they were actually following updates by their favorite artists and athletes or just some 12-year-old with too much time on his hands.”

But Twitter got broadsided when St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa filed suit against the company last month in San Francisco Superior Court “for allowing an impostor to create an account in his name. (The account was subsequently deleted.)” the Chronicle reports. “Musician Kanye West has also complained. An account in the name of the Dalai Lama was suspended earlier this year.”

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a blog post “that the company will start testing a verification service this summer for public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes and other well-known individuals at risk of impersonation. Their accounts will get a verification seal so users will be able to see that they are legitimate.”

Although this isn’t a big move by Twitter, it’s certainly a step in the right direction and it may be the beginning of reasonable standards that help clamp down on the Wild West nature of the Internet.

Plus—and here’s the workforce management component—it’s critically needed if Twitter is really going to be taken seriously as a recruiting and talent management tool. It is also a step toward eliminating one of the potential legal issues that make the use of Twitter something that can be dangerous if allowed to be used unchecked by workers on the job.

I said this back in February and it is as true now as it was then: No matter how cool the social networking tool, the rapid growth of technology brings along and equally rapid growth of technology-related legal issues. It’s a good idea for all managers to get out in front of them before they have a chance to overrun you.

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