Do horrible people at work ever get karma ?

[londonlass48]

Hi

In a situation at work where had to line manage someone who I suspect is a narcissist or anyway poor behaviour, selfish, made clear from the start wanted my role etc

Anyway this person has now made a formal complaint against me (I have bucket loads of counter evidence and in the end it will look purely vindictive) - but it's causing me huge stress, made me ill and is damaging my reputation by not being able to work due to stress

Do people like this ever pay for these types of behaviours. Manipulation, vindictive allegations, etc.

AIBU - shitty colleagues generally 'win' and people are scared of them
IANBU - malicious colleagues usually get some kind of karma

Any good stories. Feel so low. TIA

My manager (who managed to bully me out of my job and several others) had to re-apply for her job (there were 4, and only 3 were needed so there was an exam) and she failed. She's been jobless since.

A manager in my department relentlessly bullied her team and support staff, sometimes reducing them to tears. She was also prone to taking tasks off them if she thought it was an opportunity to show off to clients, but not bothering to do the graft or find out the facts, so often this went horrendously wrong and she'd then blame the team member. One Christmas party she told her team they had to stay on her table and not mix with anyone else. They were all so terrified of her temper and nastiness they obeyed her! The worst of it stayed under wraps for a long time because she was nice as pie, sweet and charming to anyone above her, clients too. I was a grade above and she was lovely to me and I'm ashamed to say for a long time I thought she was nice.

I think eventually the equity partners started to rumble what was going on (though not the full extent of it) and when she applied for a promotion they turned down her application because her management style was letting her down. Apparently they offered her support and training but she went ballistic and stormed out, later resigning without having worked her notice. She applied to the employment tribunal claiming she had been constructively dismissed for race reasons but her solicitors quickly dumped her when they couldn't find any evidence of this. She also made contact with some of her former team members and tried to cajole them into being witnesses in support but unsurprisingly they said NO. She carried on representing herself but dropped her claim just before it was due to be heard. I think she was angling for a pay off but the firm called her bluff.

On the grapevine she has not worked since apart from a temporary placement at another firm which didn't go well. It's now been 3 years. Her Linked In claims she still works at our firm. I now manage her team and I was so shocked by all the horror stories that came out! It was all so unnecessary, I don't understand it.

In my experience they thrive and proceed. They don't get what we would call 'karma'

No in my experience if they are let go it’s with a big payoff and a glowing reference and go onto a better paid job.

I'm senior in work and I can say there is a 50/50 split between decent people who have worked hard , manage well and care and utter arseholes who believe management is akin to slave ownership!
I have taken to calling people out quietly and politely it's amazing how many use being rude to get their way.

Lots of the arseholes live their 'job title' and talk corporate crap and genuinely feel that this title means they are a higher form of human. I've done my job for a longtime and always feel that hiding this way actually shows how fearful they are.

2 guys at work always caused drama, they would wind people up then step away to watch the fire work show, they even caused an actual fight before. When redundancies came round last year due to covid, those 2 were bounced out the door quicker than you could say 'bye'

Once I saw it happen.

In my second job, out of uni, I was badly bullied by the boss of the organisation. I got my union involved, and left, with a large cash settlement, but the boss effectively got away with it.

2 or 3 years later, I found out she'd been fired for gross financial mis-management. She was escorted from the premises.

I google her name every few years, but nothing new ever comes up. She certainly never got another job in that sector, and unless she changed her name, never got another job anywhere else either.
She'd be approaching retirement age now though, so I don't expect to hear anything more from her again.

I had a boss who made my life hell. Literally. Around the time I left some very questionable goings on happened which eventually got tracked back to her.

Anyway, the day the judgement from the professional standards board came through was the happiest day in my life. She'd tried to pin the questionable goings on onto anyone but her but it was discovered that she had done it all herself. She's been banned from the profession for life and as the story goes if she didn't accept the ban she would have been arrested for fraud. I stick her name into Google every now and then and she's been unemployed since.

You reap what you sow

No. Unfortunately gunning for all colleagues tends to get people advanced by spineless managers who are just out of their depth.

Yes. My first line manager when I returned to work. It’s a long story but she was vile to me. She was ‘let go’ from my company (performance related, not because of this) and I was eventually given her job, but she popped up at a close industry contact so I have been forced to deal with her. I was honestly shaking the first time I saw her at an industry event.

She has badmouthed me to everyone. More people than I would like have clearly believed her and she has done her best to make my life hell. My boss, who is fully aware of this as our industry is very insular, is pragmatic and says to ignore and rise above. He says that it’s the work and the results that count and they speak for themselves. Luckily it seems that a good number of people do respect my work.

The company she went to was recently taken over by a small, extremely well respected team. She was honestly like the cat that got the cream. I have never retaliated as I wouldn’t stoop to that level but I can’t pretend it didn’t sting.

I have just heard that she had again been ‘let go’. Her latest boss is not as discreet as mine and the reasons are already common knowledge. It seems she hadn’t changed and her work hasn’t improved. I usually wouldn’t wish that on anyone but I am genuinely relieved to not have to see her again. She was just so unkind.

Yes. Through the correct channels he got fired and I won a tribunal case and got a payout.

Most stressful thing I have ever done.

Nobody, nobody who makes others feel like shit is a happy person. They hate themselves or are very insecure within themselves. And that is ultimately their karma.

This is what I repeat to myself all the time. I work in a small team which is part of a much bigger department and it used to be a really happy one. Then a key person left and was replaced by someone who appears to the world as a lovely, friendly woman. Except she's actually backstabbing and nasty. All sweetness and light to your face but vile behind your back. I thought she was my friend at first, we became quite close. And then she did something which could have had huge implications for my job and my eyes were opened. I've caught her out lots more times since then and challenged her on it but she's very good at gaslighting. The team is now pretty bitchy, three more people left and have been replaced by new members who are now in her clique. There's a real feeling that a few of them love to see others fail, particularly if it is me. I'm very good at my job so this doesn't happen - I'm often praised by the department bosses, which is always greeted by these people with bored disdain (zoom meetings are incredible for this eh? You get a fast snapshot of your work colleague's faces...) And while I'm fairly ok with keeping my head down and getting on with my work it still hurts that there's a real effort to keep me on the edge of the team and make me feel unwanted. Funnily enough this has been noticed by people in the larger department but not by the bosses so nothing will change. I've been in the company a long time and have really good friends outside of the team so that keeps me going too.

I'd love to think karma will catch up with her at work but I suspect it won't. So every time she is vile I remind myself that this job is all she has - she's always moaning about how lonely her life is... Her insecurity will eat away at her forever so I guess that's a kind of karma.

Kind of. One bully in our place absolutely nothing happened to her but she could never keep a team and her line manager kept moving her around to get rid of her. She has an appalling reputation and yet keeps her job.

Another one had to leave because it turned out she was being bullied. She went quietly into an "associate" role somewhere so not even a full time, permanent job.

Another was made to retire which doesn't seem like karma but it would be to her because she needed to work as despite earning a fortune she was in so much debt she couldn't afford a boiler!

I think it just a long time for things to turn around.

The thing with these kind of shit people is that they always find themselves a new victim and more and more people start to see them for what they really are. Eventually they are going to get a nasty reputation that will follow them throughout their career.
I know someone like the person you described and many people in our business know what she’s like and she has gotten herself a reputation of a nasty ruthless climber and people gossip, so I guess it won’t be long before she’s no longer hired for any project. She’s mid thirties.

YANBU.

My old line manager was absolutely vile. She wasn't particularly nice to a lot of people, but she specifically bullied me and everyone knew that she hated me, as she was so indiscreet with her comments. She tried to put me through numerous disciplinary procedures in an effort to get rid of me but her efforts always fell flat as there wasn't any substance to her allegations.

After 6 years she ended up having a mental breakdown. I genuinely believe she brought this on herself. She was a control freak and had upset so many people; she ended up a paranoid mess and thought everyone was out to get her. She had the breakdown, went off sick for 6 months and then never returned. I always disliked my job until she left but I love it now and have been here for 13 years in total.

'Twas a very good day when we found out she wasn't coming back.

It depends on the company. I worked in one place where the more shitty your behaviour, the more you succeeded and got push up the management ladder . The whole company got in a right mess though as everyone behaved terribly. Eventually I left and a few years later it went broke and was taken over and all the old management was sacked. Haha. I felt good about that.

Sorry to hear that @lemonswan

I think some of the people I know who've behaved badly have got some level of comeuppance. I had a boss about 20 years ago who was a bully - looking back I see where he was coming from with what he wanted to do but he went about it in completely the wrong way and alienated everyone in his team. The company was taken over and he was sacked that same day - amazingly I outlasted him. He probably got a generous pay-off and has been in good jobs since, but he had the stress of losing his job.

Another woman wasn't a bully as such but used me as a cheap maternity cover. She also lost her job eventually but started her own business and has a rich husband anyway so no financial issues.

The final one was a nightmare to work for, for four years. Eventually I Ieft with a pay-off. That was in 2012. The company was also taken over, with a big HR team, (there was just one HR person when I was there) but she is still there. It is quite astonishing, unless her line management skills have improved massively!

So not much in the way of karma.

there's a real feeling that a few of them love to see others fail

the third example I gave above was like that - everything you did, you knew she was looking to find mistakes with it. She was intellectually very capable so you knew if there was a mistake to find, she'd find it. Incredibly stressful - everyone makes mistakes on occasion even if it's just a typo!

I don’t think it’s karma, more that their behaviour disguised their own limitations and it is that basic lack of competence that catches them out. I’ve dealt with two relentless bullies. They were both very similar in that their vile behaviour stemmed from their own inadequacies and it should have been stopped.

The first was promoted to a CEO equivalent role and proceeded to force out and pay off everyone at a senior level who challenged her and surround herself with yes (mostly) men. There were a few good years, largely the run off from the people she’d fired, but then it fell apart because she was left with nothing but her own inadequate leadership. The upshot was that she was forced to sell a multigenerational family business for a fraction of its worth when she took over and then told to resign and leave by the new owners. She hasn’t been left skint but she has been absolutely humiliated in public and is now considered an irrelevant failure in a very high profile industry plus she has blown her family relationships to pieces.

The other was promoted to CEO 6 months ago and there is every indication of a similar pattern. He is definitely failing to deliver in the way that he believed he would and I suspect a public fall from grace is heading his way.

Not in my experience. I spent 13 years being routinely bullied by my colleagues. I was accused of being a habitual liar on the smallest thing. If I was 5 seconds late, I'd be pulled for it, while members of the bullying clique could waltz in 5 minutes late without a word said. It got to the point where I'd phone up if I even thought I might be late to say I'd be late in.
I was accused of having offensive BO, to the point that the manager sent me to OH for an assessment. OH couldn't find an issue, they contacted my GP who also had never noticed a BO problem in the 20+ years I'd been a patient. More than once I was sent home to have a shower, despite having had a shower that morning and to "put some clean clothes on" because the clean clothes I'd put on that morning obviously weren't actually clean in the manager's eyes.
I was showering every night and morning, wearing the strongest deodorant I could buy, wearing fresh clothes each day. I was doing everything they said I wasn't and it still wasn't good enough. I got the union involved due to the bullying. The bullies thought it all a huge joke, but stopped their bullying for 2 weeks before picking back up where they left off.
I said hello to one of the bullies one morning and was told "Don't speak to me". Then it was framed to the supervisor that I was being horrid to them.
When I was engaged to my ex, one of them said I was only marrying for money and would probably shove my ex down the stairs.
In a way, I was relieved when I was sacked for excessive sickness (due to stress THEY had caused!). Strangely, nowhere else I worked from that point on had any issue with BO.
Thankfully not all my colleagues were like the bullies, but 13 years made it difficult for me to trust anyone being friendly to me.
Interestingly, one of the bullies who accused me of having bad BO often came in reeking of stale beer, yet was never pulled up for it.
None of the bullies ever got pulled up on their behaviour or punished for what they did.

@Sparklingbrook

Horrible people often get promoted.

This 100%

I worked in an office where a new boss took over. Head was a bully and tyrant and bullying cow, she got her hubbie a job there. He soon got accused of sexual harassment and the investigation was put back to her which she threw out. The accuser then put it over her head and she and the husband left very soon after over it all, don't know the details but the bitch deserved it.

No but in my experience, you can get your own revenge by excelling at your job.

These people exist (I have worked with and been the victim of two of them) and it is horrible.

Being the subject of a false accusation was one of the worst periods in my employment history and although it was proven to be malicious, it damaged my self esteem and home life to the point that I couldn't sleep and didn't trust anything I did was right. I also started drinking heavily.

I'm sorry you're going through this.

I’m currently off sick because of my vile boss. They’re challenged by me, because I can do my job way better than they can, and they have provided me with not a jot of support in the last year. The last 1:1 I had with them was in February 2020.
Unfortunately I’ve had more and more additional work piled on me,’which has led me to worn until 2/3am on the regular, and I am utterly exhausted. I know there’s no point in complaining to their line manager (who is the director), as they’re best pals, who have worked together for 25 years.
I usually love my job, but right now, I just want to stay at home in bed and cry. This boss may well force me to quit my job. So no, sadly, I can’t see them ever getting their comeuppance. 😢

@LibertyMole

No, horrible people generally move up.

One reason is that when there is conflict in a workplace they tend to remain calm and continue performing while others get distressed and upset , go off sick etc.

The person who caused the conflict carries on performing, thus looking reliable during workplace ‘drama.’

So true.