When we were growing up, many of us experienced bullying, but we didn’t have a name for it. With the
advent of #social_media, some of these concepts like #professionalbullying, #cyberbullying, and mental health came into play. The interesting thing about these two concepts is that they are almost opposite of themselves. How? Professional Bullying is mostly from superiors to subordinates, while Cyber Bullying is mostly seen from lower people to the highly placed.

What is common among the two is that anyone can be bullied. But cry out like I did a few days ago. There is a professional WhatsApp Platform I belong to supposed HR professionals. All members there are chartered from Associate to Fellow. I made a job post and someone replied tagging the post “Dis is a joke or a scam”. I found this derogatory and insulting, so I replied to the person, “I assume you are a professional, you should know how to communicate as such because if I respond to you like you just
spoke, it wouldn’t be nice.”

As professionals, where we are not clear, the least we should do is seek clarity by asking questions in an edifying and respectful manner. So another “professional” came to my DM and began to say how he shared the same sentiment with the man which for me isn’t out of place. What was out of place for me was when he said my response wasn’t cool and that, that group has #directors, deputy directors, and all of those. In my big head, he was insinuating that the man could be one, and plus the people there don’t deserve such a response. He went further to emphasize that it will take at least 15 years to get to the director level.

I refused to be bullied so I replied to him saying, “If it were a Perm Sec that posted what I did, would that man have replied in that manner? Secondly, I told him I was not moved by position but by contents. I have interacted with some of these directors in the public sector, and many of them just got there due to the longevity of service, #automatic promotion, and lobbying not because they have good performance. Many of them would be sacked within the first six months should it be in the private sector due to underperformance.”

He didn’t see anything wrong in someone questioning my integrity in that manner or someone not
seeking clarity but jumped to a conclusion. That’s the kind of society we find ourselves. This is a clear
case of both professional and cyberbullying at work as I perceive they are both senior to me in the
professional world.

To end this, the man who made the derogatory statement to the post I had posted, retracted his words
and apologized to me. Yeaaaa, I felt good. He also earned my respect for accepting his mistakes. Bosses should learn from this too.

OgaHR

By

Dr. Ikenna M. Okafor,

(OgaHR)

Human Resource Professional and a Management Consultant