Thank you for your interest. I am a high school principal, leading and managing a comprehensive high school on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia.

 As a young teacher, I was aspirational and driven to succeed. Subsequently, I have held positions moving from department head to deputy principal and principal in several schools in two different states of Australia. I haveworked a broad range of schools, including large suburban high schools, very small remote schools, schools of distanceeducation and schools that run from Kindergarten (Prep) through to upper secondary, with special education facilities and disabilities units attached. I have been a corporate based adviser to school staff, principals and directors of schools with regard to equity funding, effective teaching and learning methodology and the theory and practice of school management and leadership.

In short, I have worked in a broad range of educational settings.In all places and cases, I have witnessed and experienced workplace bullying in all three of its manifestations: downward, horizontal and upward. Of these three types of negative adult behaviours, I have found upward bullying to be the least understood and, in my opinion, the most damaging, simply because when leaders are undermined, the adverse effect on the entire school community is disproportionately destructive. A damaged leader gives rise to a dysfunctional workplace.

 

The more I recognised, understood and dealt with upward bullying, the better I became at managing it. Over time, I gained a reputation for my ability to minimise the impact of adult bullies in schools. Principal and executive colleagues sought my guidance and acted on my advice, gaining confidence and, most importantly for me, passing on what they learned from the process to others. Over time, informed by my own experiences and those of my colleagues, I developed a suite of strategies that work in managing a range of upward bullying scenarios.

 

While my personal experiences of people who indulge in upward bullying have been primarily in the educational sector,  I have spent a number of years as a middle manager in the service industry and I’ve seen the harm upward bullies can cause to small businesses. In completing my M.Ed. with a focus on upward bullying, my research  afforded me insights into how far reaching the habit of bullying the boss is in workplaces around the world.