Workplace bullying is a real thing. In nursing, we call it “nurses eating their young.” However, what I find interesting is the lack of information/studies, when staff bully leadership.

Now before everyone starts getting annoyed by what I am saying, allow me the opportunity to explain.

I have had the opportunity to be in various nurse leadership roles throughout my career. As a leader, I have been bullied by my staff on more than one occasion. Yes, it happens more than you think.

When a nurse leader is brought in and staff refuse to follow the rules, not only impacting patient care, but also making the workplace toxic, they blame these things on the new nurse leader, when in fact, this behavior has been ongoing long before the nurse leader arrived.

For the sake of anonymity, I will share things I have done to support staff and make the environment less toxic, but I will not provide any examples that will lead to the identification of where this took place.

As the new manager, I invited staff to meet me when it was convenient for them, by coming to my office where I had ordered individually wrapped cookies for each one of my over 100 direct reports.

Not only did no one come to talk to me, I also gained a lot of weight eating those cookies.

Next, I tried hosting town halls where I would set time every week to talk to the staff to hear what concerns they had and listen to what they though could fix the issues. Again, no one came.

I attended every shift change and did not take over the charge nurse providing report but rather asked for time to share some updates on the department and areas that needed improvement. Staff left after report and never returned to talk to me.

In an attempt to make it as anonymous as possible, I provided poster boards in the breakrooms and asked for suggestions on what staff could “wish for” to improve the department.

FINALLY, I got a comment! Someone wrote, “a better manager.” Initially I thought, what else can I do to better the department, engage staff, and get them to trust me. Maybe everything I was doing wasn’t enough.

I should probably say that this place had gone through 4 managers in 5 years. The department was rated the lowest for safety, cleanliness and in health outcomes.

I put on some scrubs and walked around all the shifts. I would go home and wake up at 0200 to support the 0300 shift nurses and engage with them 1:1.

Finally, I decided that I am putting forth too much effort and time and money to engage a department that doesn’t want to change. They have “beaten dog syndrome,” and it didn’t matter what I did, they were never going to respond to me because I wasn’t like them.

How do I know I wasn’t like them, you ask? Well, they took it upon themselves to create a list of all the issues in the department and write MANY anonymous letters to leadership and send it to our sister hospitals about how unengaged I was and how I had no clue what was happening.

My hands were tied. Leadership wasn’t willing to do a nursing overhaul, and I valued my reputation and my sanity too much to have to deal with this childish behavior.

In the end, I moved on to another organization, but not without critically trying to understand what I could have done differently.

Ultimately, as the saying goes, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” I could bring out everything in my toolkit, but staff engagement, none of it was good enough.

This does not make me less of a leader, but rather a person who knows her limits.

Since leaving years ago, I have had staff members reach out to me to tell me how they wish I never left because the new leadership was awful, and they ran the department like a dictatorship.

I share this to highlight to you all that nurse leaders can be bullied as well. We just don’t talk about it enough.

So my call to action for you all is to think before you blame the manager or leadership. Things aren’t always what the rumormill is spreading.

#adventureswithnursejamla