4.2 The Advocacy Stand - Disarming adversaries

If you find yourself dealing with a bully, the first question is: What kind of bully is he?

A professional bully doesn’t just want to control you, he wants to destroy you, your reputation, your standing in the community, your future, your self-esteem, your happiness…

He wants to take you down.

And take you down so hard, you can’t get up again. He’s “going for the kill.”

We get to see plenty of examples of professional bullies in our national politics. And many of those bullies have sociopathic and narcissistic tendencies. And there are plenty of them who are out-and-out narcissistic sociopaths. They are people who should never be in charge of anything or anybody, let alone being top decision makers for a nation.

Amateur bullies, by contrast, are less competent in their bullying and less extreme. They have limits on how much they are willing to hurt you. Make no mistake, though, they can still hurt you badly and do serious damage.

However, they’re much easier to oppose than professional bullies. And this is where the advocacy stand comes into play.

Amateur bullies puff themselves up and make themselves look scarier than they are. But they have vulnerabilities. And if you take a minute to discover those vulnerabilities, you can be very effective at shutting them down.

In the years I’ve coached nonprofit leaders, I’ve had many people call me complaining about a bully they were scared of. Then we’d take some time and work on the advocacy stand, and when the confrontation went down, these leaders were surprised and relieved at how the bullies folded.

One of the things I love about the advocacy stand is how…

It breaks the spell of fear that amateur bullies can cast over us.

And when you get good at advocacy, you can start to have fun dealing with amateur bullies, because you know you can beat them, and on occasion you get them to open to you and engage in a conversation with you about changing their behavior. And when that happens it’s a thrill.

But the important thing is that you’re always operating from within your advocacy ballpark. You never let the bully drag you into his attack-counterattack game.

As I said before, this means that you’ve got the element of surprise on your side. A bully is counting on you to respond to his attack by either submitting or at worst, defaulting to counterattack. And he knows how to respond to counterattack by intensifying his attack.

But if you refuse to play his game, that throws him off balance, and now something new can happen.

At the very least he’s not able to control you, and he knows it. Which makes him scramble to find his footing. But the advocacy stand keeps him off balance.

So amateur bullies can only have control over you if you play their game. Isn’t that neat? If you just avoid doing that one thing, you’ll have the upper hand.

A bully is always looking for a victim. So if you refuse to be a victim, if you are solid and strong within yourself, the bully won’t know what to do with you. And he won’t know what to do with himself. He’ll likely run off to try to find someone easier to control.

So, please, when you engage a bully with the advocacy approach…

Please don’t ever take half a stand.

Make it total. Make it 100%. You want to get the message across to him that…

Your stand is you.

You want him to know that you will not compromise or relent, not for any reason. You want him to be slammed by that realization.

If you’re half-hearted, the bully will read that in your mood and behavior, no matter what your words are, and he will call your bluff. When bullies smell weakness, it triggers their bad behavior, just like when a shark smells blood in the water.

You can’t convince bullies to back off or change with well-reasoned pleadings. You can’t nice them out of their bullying. The nice-guy stuff just won’t work. I know, I tried it about a zillion times before I wised up. That kind of thing can’t touch the deeper motive forces which drive a bully.

And one more thing. You never compromise your stand, not just for your sake, but for the bully’s sake, too. Because…

Bullying is not good for a person’s soul.

So when I am stopping a bully, I’m being his advocate—whether he sees it that way or not. Whether he likes it or not.

Now let’s consider professional bullies. The genuine tough guys.

If you’re up against one of these, then it’s time to make a serious, coordinated plan. Taking on a professional bully is not something to do lightly, or on the fly, or off the cuff, because…

Taking on a professional bully is professional level work.

Because the most important fact is that…

Professional bullies are dangerous.

I’ve helped people fight such guys, and there are a range of options.

You might want to meet with the bully in person to assess him.

But you might not. You probably will want to fly under his radar until you are ready to make your move. You’ll probably want to design your action so you’ve got the element of surprise on your side.

And you never want to have to go up against a professional one on one if you can help it. All of the situations where I’ve helped a leader deal with professional bullies, we’ve designed an organizing response.

And we’ve outworked them, we’ve out-organized them, we’ve outsmarted them, we’ve out-flanked them. That’s when we’ve been successful.

However, if you go up against a bully who has a lot of power, you might not win, at least not the first time, or for many times. So you also want to know ahead of time how you’re going to respond if you lose this particular engagement.

You can see there’s a lot to this. So in the days when I was helping clients take on a professional bully, I made sure they understood what they were getting into. I wanted them to get it that there are no easy steps here. It takes serious hard work. And if they’re not ready for that, they shouldn’t attempt to confront the bully.

And sometimes, a person has good reason to bail out. I once worked with an ED who had a cluster of bigoted bullies on her Board. Really mean people. They kept her on such a short leash it was choking her.

So we talked through her options. And she decided that being at that organization was taking too big a toll on her, and that she had no leverage against the bullies, and it would take many months to organize the kind of leverage she’d need. Meanwhile she was a single mom with two lively daughters, and she didn’t want to come home every night distressed and bitter.

Once she decided to look for a job, because she was a stellar leader, she found one right away. It was at a place in the same community, with a Board that adored her. So she left her old organization behind, and then her new organization left them in the dust.

If you’re dealing with an amateur bully, you can make a direct appeal to him to change. You can narrate yourself. You can be transparent. You can even tell the bully what you’re doing with him, to help him understand the love that’s in the advocacy stand.

That’s what Nell was doing with Ross at the top of this page.

With a professional bully, you probably won’t want to be vulnerable in that way. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a strengthening dialogue with him—virtually.

You can play it out in your imagination. And the value of doing it is that it helps protect you because it helps you take charge of the relationship you’re going to have with him—a relationship with serious boundaries and conditions. Very serious.

What would such a dialogue sound like? First, you’d do most of the talking because, really, this is a dialogue with yourself. Second, you’re getting very clear that you are standing in an advocacy relationship with this bully, even though he’s a professional bully. And just because he is scary, doesn’t mean you’re going to compromise on your core moral values.

Quite the opposite. You’ll need to stand by them more firmly than ever.

Here’s an example of an imagined inner dialogue based on advocacy.

“Hey, do you get it that me and my community are opposing you with everything we’ve got?”

“Hell, yes, you idiot, I’m not stupid.”

“Maybe not, but you sure are mean. You’re attacking us personally, you’re lying about us, you’re demonizing us nonstop.”

“That’s just how these things go. Stop being snowflakes. Get with the program.”

“That’s what we’re not going to do. Get with your program. We’ve got our own program. And so we’re going to make you a promise. We’re not going to lie about you and we’re not going to demonize you.”

“Hooray, that will give me a big advantage.”

“No. Not hooray. You should be worried. Very worried. Because instead of lying about you we’re going to tell the truth about you. Relentlessly. We don’t need to make up lies because the truth about you is so bad. And we’re going to tell it all over the place. Throughout our community. With anyone and everyone who will listen.”

“You guys should just shut up.”

“That’s not going to happen. We believe in telling the truth. First, because that’s our most effective organizing strategy. But more importantly. Because this is who we are. We have a personal moral commitment to telling the truth. And in telling the truth, we’re doing you a favor.”

“Favor? I didn’t ask you for a favor.”

“But aren’t you proud of yourself? Don’t you want everyone to see you for who you are? You run the company that is the #1 exploiter in our community. Are you ashamed to be an exploiter? Do you want to keep it secret?”

“I’m the one who gets to decide what people hear about me.”

“Not anymore. We’re making you visible like never before. We’re going to be your PR agency.”

“You’d better not make me mad.”

“Quite the contrary, we’re being the best friends you ever had. We’re confronting you about how you use and abuse people. We’re saying we believe that, if you choose to, you can become a much better person. If you decided to do right by us, you could have us for friends instead of enemies.”

“To hell with that and to hell with you.”

“You’re not surprising us.”

“I don’t care, because I don’t care about you.”

“We know. But we’re giving you a standing invitation to care about us. And we know there’s only an infinitesimal chance that you’d ever take us up on that invite.”

“You got that right. You can take your invitation and shove it.”

“Nope. We’re holding it out to you from now on until forever. Get used to it.”

“I won’t.”

“See, the thing is that we believe in the deepest place in our hearts that being an exploiter is bad for a person’s soul. And we’re scared for you, that you’re not only hurting people in this community, and making yourself well and truly hated, but that you are also hurting yourself.”

“I’m a success. I live a life like you can only imagine.”

“No, the kind of life you’re leading has nothing to do with success. You have wealth and power, and what are you doing with it. You’re hurting people in our community instead of using it to organize other people with power and wealth to save the earth and save our species. You’re one of the people leading us into a final failure.”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“You could know, if you decided you wanted to know.”

“Which I’m not going to do. I’m happy as I am.”

“And that’s why our community is opposing you with everything we’ve got. And we feel so good about doing it. It gives deep meaning to our lives. And we are finding great camaraderie in our work together.”

“You should just shut up and stop what you’re doing.”

“The more you hate what we’re doing, the more motivated we are to do it.”

“You’re such negative people.”

“We’re positive that we’re not.”

“Arrrrghhh!”

Again, this is an interior dialogue. Although there actually are occasions with certain bullies where it would be strategic to say such things directly to them.

If you want more on dealing with adversaries you can check out the chapter called Enemies in my first book.

But now what’s next? Something a whole lot more fun than dealing with bullies.