It is not always screaming, open humiliation, or one dramatic incident that everyone can point to and condemn.

Very often, it is more covert than that. It is passive aggression dressed up as professionalism, social exclusion disguised as “team dynamics”, reputational damage done indirectly, through implication, silence, and group loyalty.
And sometimes, it begins for a reason that is especially hard to name without sounding arrogant: you are visible, capable, opinionated, and hard to control.

I know this because I have lived it.

A lot of times in my life, I was bullied at work for being “too much”: too loud, too opinionated, too direct, too noticeable, too competent, too unwilling to play political games. I do not say that with pride. I say it with sadness, because it took me years to understand that in some workplaces, competence does not protect you. It can actually make you more vulnerable, especially when the environment is insecure, poorly led, and structurally dishonest.

And education, unfortunately, is not immune to this. In fact, research suggests that bullying, harassment, ostracism, and aggression are serious problems across educational settings, including schools and universities. A 2024 scoping review concluded that workplace bullying and harassment in higher education remain significant concerns, while earlier systematic work also found the problem to be prevalent across higher education institutions.

In school settings, the picture is also deeply concerning. One study cited in PubMed found a workplace bullying prevalence rate of 4.4% among education employees using a stricter operational definition, while other education-focused research has documented broader patterns of victimization, including isolation, threats to professional status, and aggression from multiple directions inside school systems.

That lower percentage matters less than people think, because bullying research depends heavily on definitions and measurement. When researchers use stricter criteria, prevalence looks smaller; when they include repeated harassment, ostracism, humiliation, and other negative acts, the problem looks much larger. That is one reason so many people say, “This happened to me, but I’m not sure I can prove it.”

Years ago, when I was working as a teacher, I ended up in a situation I am still not proud of, even though I know it was not created by me.

One of the department heads was deeply unprofessional in the way she taught, managed colleagues, and communicated. The tone was constantly passive-aggressive: formally polite on the surface, but full of hostility underneath. Anyone around her could feel it.

At one point, our department had a serious piece of work to do. The academic director asked me to take over a programme that, under normal circumstances, should have been managed by the head. I explicitly refused to do anything behind my superior’s back. I said, clearly, that I would only take it on if she knew, if she agreed, and if the situation was transparent. I did not want tension. I did not want politics. I wanted to do good work without stepping on anyone’s dignity, including my own.

I was told that would be handled. It was not.

What followed was not open professional disagreement. It was workplace punishment. I was isolated. Colleagues stopped talking to me. No one helped me. I was framed as the person who had “stolen” someone else’s role, even though I had explicitly tried to avoid exactly that scenario. The silent treatment lasted for months. The hostility spread socially, not just professionally. And what made it even worse was that the original leadership failure was never named honestly. Instead of a manager taking responsibility for creating a messy, avoidable, structurally unsafe situation, the consequences were pushed downward and absorbed by the person with the least institutional power.

I did the work. I delivered the programme. Then I left.

That experience changed something in me permanently. It made me understand that I am willing to work hard, take responsibility, build systems, solve problems, and help organisations grow, but not at the expense of my dignity or mental health. And it made me even more certain that management is not just about strategy or vision. It is about whether the human environment around the work is safe enough for decent people to do their jobs without being socially destroyed. That was one of the reasons why later I decided to study Management in Education.

Schools usually have anti-bullying policies for students. They speak the language of safety, belonging, and respect. But adult bullying inside educational institutions is still often minimized, psychologized, or treated as interpersonal drama rather than an organisational failure. Education Support in the UK explicitly notes this gap, pointing out that school staff may work in environments with pupil bullying policies while not being equally protected themselves.

The damage is not small. Research links workplace bullying in teachers to psychological distress, fatigue, burnout, and reduced wellbeing. A 2017 study on teachers found clear associations between workplace bullying and mental health problems, and a 2023 study linked workplace bullying among schoolteachers to fatigue. A 2025 article on teachers and burnout also reported significant correlations between workplace bullying and burnout dimensions.

There is also broader evidence that educators face high levels of aggression and humiliation at work. APA and NEA materials drawing on national survey data reported that one-third of surveyed teachers experienced at least one incident of verbal or threatening violence from students during COVID-era conditions, and 29% reported at least one such incident from a parent. Those figures are not identical to colleague-on-colleague bullying, but they show something important: education is already a profession exposed to high interpersonal strain. When that strain is amplified by internal toxicity, the damage compounds fast.

One of the most misleading myths about workplace bullying is that it only happens to passive, insecure, or obviously vulnerable people.

That is not what the research suggests.

Bullying and ostracism can also be directed at people who are visible, competent, innovative, trusted, or seen as having leadership potential. Studies in organisational psychology show that employees who are perceived as high in leadership potential can trigger jealousy and ostracism from leaders, and that workplace envy can help explain why capable or visible employees become relational targets. Other research has linked perceived trust from leaders to coworker envy and ostracism, and described innovation or standout performance as a possible trigger for negative social reactions at work.

This does not mean every successful person is bullied, or that every bullying case is caused by envy. That would be too simple. But it does mean your experience is not irrational if you have ever felt that being competent, articulate, or noticeable made you socially threatening to someone else. Research on academic mobbing and workplace envy has long described envy, threatened status, and professional rivalry as real ingredients in harassment dynamics.

And in practice, this often looks familiar:

• the person who speaks clearly is called “too much”
• the person who succeeds is framed as arrogant
• the person with ideas is treated as dangerous
• the person trusted by leadership becomes a target for sideways punishment
• the person who refuses manipulation gets isolated for being “difficult”

That pattern is not imaginary. It is one of the ways insecure systems defend themselves.

Educational institutions often imagine themselves as morally serious spaces. That self-image can make adult bullying even harder to confront.

In toxic school cultures, people do not always attack directly. They use respectability. They use silence. They use alliances. They use performative professionalism. They use the fact that everyone wants to look “educational,” “ethical,” and “child-centred,” even while adults are being undermined behind the scenes.

Schools are also unusually vulnerable to blurred boundaries between leadership, loyalty, emotion, identity, and institutional politics. When managers avoid conflict, protect favourites, delegate without clarity, or leave structural ambiguity unresolved, they create the perfect conditions for scapegoating. And once a social narrative forms around one person, especially in tightly knit departments, isolation can become self-reinforcing very quickly. Research on higher education bullying has repeatedly emphasized organisational culture, power, and managerial response as central, not peripheral, issues.

This is why I no longer see bullying at work as just a “personality clash.” Sometimes it is. But often it is an ecosystem failure.

It is what happens when leadership is cowardly, conflict is mismanaged, boundaries are weak, and the institution prefers surface calm over truth.

If someone on your team is being isolated, spoken about indirectly, excluded from cooperation, or turned into the symbolic problem, you do not have a “communication issue.”

You may have a bullying dynamic.

If a competent employee suddenly becomes socially radioactive after being trusted with visible work, you do not just have “tension.”

You may have an envy-and-power problem.

If a team stops talking to one person for months and leadership allows it to continue, that is not neutrality. That is permission.

The most painful part of workplace bullying is not only what the bully does. It is what the system allows. In higher education research, bullying is often described as particularly damaging because of its continuity and the explicit or implicit complicity of others.

That was true in my experience too. The cruelty did not only come from the person who behaved aggressively. It also came from the people who knew something was wrong and chose the comfort of silence.

1. I learned that being good at your job is not enough if the culture is rotten.
2. I learned that professionalism without courage is useless.
3. I learned that passive-aggression can destroy a workplace just as efficiently as open hostility.
4. I learned that “healthy communication” only works when other people are also committed to it.
5. And I learned that there are moments when leaving is not weakness. It is the last remaining act of self-respect.

That matters to me now in all the work I do. When I talk about team culture, leadership, curriculum implementation, teacher training, or organisational systems, I am not talking only about pedagogy. I am also talking about the human conditions that make decent work possible. Because no programme, no curriculum, and no school vision can be strong if adults inside the system are being quietly punished for competence, honesty, or visibility.

Schools and educational organisations need to stop treating adult bullying as a side issue.

It is not separate from quality. It is not separate from retention. It is not separate from leadership. It is not separate from culture.

If people are afraid to speak, afraid to shine, afraid to be visible, afraid to be trusted, or afraid that competence will make them a target, the organisation is already paying for it, whether leadership admits it or not. Teacher wellbeing data from the UK and educator mental health resources in the US both point to a workforce under serious strain; bullying and aggression are part of that picture, not a footnote to it. 

So yes, this is personal for me. But it is not only personal. It is structural, cultural and professional. And it is one of the reasons I care so much about healthy management, strong systems, and the kind of educational leadership that does not hide behind nice words while people are being quietly broken.

If you are in education and you have lived something like this too, I want to say this clearly: being targeted does not automatically mean you were wrong. Sometimes it means you were standing in a system that could not tolerate clarity, competence, or truth.

And that says far more about the system than it says about you.