Some leaders should never have been given people to manage. Not because they're bad at the technical parts of the job, but because somewhere along the way, managing people stopped being about the team and started being about control.
If that's the situation you're in, you'll know the toll it takes. It's rarely one big incident you can point to. It's a comment that lands just wrong enough to sting, dressed up as a joke so you can't quite call it out. It's a different tone behind closed doors than the one everyone else gets. It's undertones in a meeting that you can feel but nobody else seems to notice. And after enough of that, you start wondering if you're just being too sensitive about it.
You're not, and I want to say that plainly before anything else in this piece.
The Fear That Keeps People Quiet
More often than almost anything else I see in this work, someone finally works up the courage to say something out loud, and the thing they're most afraid of isn't the behaviour continuing. It's what happens to them if they speak up about it.
That fear is legitimate. When the person making your life difficult also has some say over your role, your reputation, or your future in the business, raising it genuinely feels risky, because it is. So the first conversation is often not really about solutions at all. It's simply someone saying the words out loud to another person for the first time, and that on its own can take everything someone has.
When that happens, I don't tend to jump straight to escalation. What I usually suggest is starting to document things properly, what happened, when, who else was in the room, and trying to raise it directly with the person if that feels safe enough to attempt. From there, we go one step at a time, at whatever pace feels manageable.
When the Paper Trail Becomes the Proof
Often, people need time. Time to see whether anything actually changes, whether the manager pulls back once they know they've been noticed. And often, when someone does come back, it's because they've reached the end of their tether. They're on the brink of leaving, but they don't want to walk out feeling like they were pushed.
When that happens, it isn't a description from memory anymore, it's pages of it. Specific dates, specific times, named witnesses, laid out in a way that's genuinely hard to argue with.
Reading through something like that properly is confronting. Any one incident on its own might look explainable. But seeing them lined up together, month after month, tells a different story: not a bad day here or there, but a consistent way of operating that was never going to correct itself.
For the person who's lived through it, seeing it all laid out tends to bring an odd kind of relief. Not because the situation is fixed, but because it confirms something they'd started to doubt. It was real. It wasn't an overreaction. It wasn't something they'd imagined or exaggerated to make sense of a hard situation.
That relief matters more than people expect, because being made to question your own memory and judgement is one of the most corrosive parts of going through this.
What Actually Counts as Bullying
Part of what keeps people stuck is genuinely not knowing whether what they're going through meets the bar. So it's worth being clear about what that bar actually is.
In New Zealand, WorkSafe describes workplace bullying as repeated, unreasonable behaviour directed at a worker, or a group of workers, that can lead to physical or psychological harm. Two words in that definition carry most of the weight: repeated and unreasonable. A single sharp comment on a bad day, however unpleasant, generally isn't bullying by itself. A pattern that keeps happening, one that a reasonable person looking at it from the outside would say goes beyond acceptable conduct, is a different matter.
It doesn't need to be shouting or overt aggression to count. It can be a colleague being spoken to warmly in front of the team and coldly the moment the door closes. It can be feedback that's really just a personal dig, delivered as though it's professional. It can be quietly left off meeting invites or decisions that affect your own role, or held to standards that keep shifting just out of reach no matter what you achieve. Public put-downs in front of colleagues or clients count. So do threats about your job or your reputation, whether they're said outright or just implied.
Employment Relations Authority decisions have also looked closely at whether the person affected felt genuine fear or distress, or whether the behaviour was intended to cause it. That's often what turns "difficult manager" into something that meets the actual legal threshold, and it's exactly why documenting how something felt at the time, not just what was literally said, carries so much weight later.
What This Isn't
It's just as important to be honest about what this isn't. A manager who gives you blunt feedback, pushes you to lift your performance, or has an off day and is short with you once, isn't bullying you. Managers are people too, and coaching that's hard to hear is not the same thing as harassment. The distinction that matters is the one in the definition itself: repeated and unreasonable. One tough conversation about a missed deadline is feedback. The same sharp tone, aimed at you specifically, regardless of your performance and regardless of what you do to try to fix it, week after week, is something else entirely. If you're not sure which side of that line you're on, that uncertainty is worth talking through with someone too, rather than assuming either way.
Why You Shouldn't Do This Part Alone
Here's the thing I'd really press on. You can document everything yourself. You can be thorough, organised, accurate. But having someone alongside you while you're going through this changes the experience in a way that documentation on its own can't.
An advocate isn't there to make the decision for you. They're there because they have no stake in protecting the manager, no history in the relationship that makes them want to smooth it over, and no reason to talk you out of what you're feeling. They can look at what you've gathered with a clear, informed, outside eye and tell you honestly whether it stacks up, what your actual options are, and what each of those options would realistically involve. That kind of objectivity is very hard to have about your own situation when you're the one living inside it.
It also means you're not carrying this entirely on your own while you're already stretched thin trying to hold everything else together. Having someone in your corner, someone who believes you and is willing to say so clearly, tends to be the difference between staying stuck and finding a way through.
Who you choose to talk to matters here too. Word getting back to a manager that you've been discussing them behind closed doors can make an already hard situation worse, and can put you at risk before you've even decided what you want to do. Find someone you genuinely trust to keep it confidential, someone who won't take a single step without you knowing about it first. That trust is what makes it safe to be honest in the first place.
Taking the Control Back
Having documentation, and having someone to help you make sense of it, doesn't make the decision about what to do next easy. But it does change its shape. Options that felt impossible before, raising things formally, or escalating past someone who's already brushed off a quieter attempt, become genuinely available, because there's substance behind them now rather than just one person's word against another's.
The choice about what happens next belongs to you. Whether that's a formal complaint, a quieter resolution, or simply the confidence to keep documenting until you feel ready for more, the point is that you get to decide, with someone informed standing next to you while you do.
And if you're reading this from the other side, because you've been named as the one accused of this behaviour, you deserve proper advice too, and it's worth getting it early. That's a bigger conversation than fits here, but the short version is: don't try to talk your way out of it on the spot, and don't wait for a formal process to get support.
If This Is Where You Are
If you're currently working out whether what you're going through counts as something worth raising, it almost certainly does. You don't need to have decided what you want to happen before you start keeping a proper record of what's actually going on.
So start there. Write down what happens, as it happens. And don't do it on your own, talk to someone who can look at it with a clear head and help you work out what's next. Some leaders will never change how they operate unless they're made to. You shouldn't have to be the one carrying that on your own while you wait and see.
