Dr David Lillis: Sorry - but “nga Mihi” isn’t good enough!

 

The Bullying has to Stop

Earlier this year I wrote an article for BreakingViews on workplace bullying (Lillis, 2022). I composed that article on the basis of interviews with over sixty people who had experienced or observed bullying and, at the time, I felt that I had said all that I needed to say on the matter. Unfortunately, since then I have spoken to several additional people who have informed me of negative workplace experiences, especially in the Public Service, so that there is more to be said. The Public Service Association states that bullying is common within the Health and Education sectors in particular, and interviewees within the nursing profession assure me that it is very pernicious there too. Apparently, it is available in many places across all sectors.

It is clear to me and many others that, despite media exposure over more than twenty years, we still have a significant workplace bullying problem in New Zealand. Apart from reading published research and many media articles, and watching television and radio panel discussions on bullying, I have seen it done to others several times across different organizations.

As I stated in my original article, bullying does not constitute an issue on the scale of social inequality, racism or child poverty, but it is nevertheless a nasty and unnecessary problem that does not need to happen. I believe that it is something that we bring on ourselves though poor leadership but it is an issue that we can tackle successfully if we adopt the right strategies.

What Sort of Public Service do we have in New Zealand?

Exactly what sort of Public Service do we have in New Zealand? Actually, after twenty years in the Public Service, my own view is generally positive in the sense that our departments and ministries in fact work towards genuine incremental improvements for the people, economy and environment of New Zealand. I met many excellent people in the Public Service, working hard in the true spirit of service to the community and wanting to achieve public good. It is my opinion that, as a result of the constructive work of experts and effective managers and leaders, indeed we have achieved genuine improvement to health and wellbeing, education and our economy, and better policies and measures for protection of our environment. It is my opinion that in general we appoint the most appropriate, best-qualified people from the available pool, and that many managers and leaders are effective in overseeing staff who enjoy their work and who achieve to their best.

Always we should look for the good in people and there is plenty of good in our Public Service; and in my view it is mostly good. However, neither should we remain naïve to attitudes and behaviours that are not so desirable. We also have bullies prospering and moving to very high salaries, very rapidly. We have excessively young and inexperienced, or even completely unqualified, people appointed to manage much more senior and accomplished staff and also earning higher salaries than their senior staff. In my own fields of statistics and quantitative research I encountered a team leader who never finished high school, now lording it over his highly-qualified staff and pushing them around. I observed several such people, who have no background, talent or interest in research, clearly enjoying their power and their superior salaries, eagerly anticipating further promotions and even bigger money. We have highly-paid Human Resources staff whose only function, apparently, is to support managers and who appear not to care about staff whatsoever. Public Service salaries are modest-to-good for most staff, but become quite generous when you enter the management stream. Consequently, there is an inbuilt incentive for people to aim for management rather than for other work, and the inter-personal competition can become very heated indeed.

One Public Service manager, a personal friend, has admitted that in his Ministry quite a few staff take courses and other instruction on how to present themselves as ‘high-octane’ and ‘in-charge’, with a view to getting noticed and attaining promotions.

Who is Your Manager?

Admittedly, no expert on employment matters or human resources, nevertheless I feel that something is not quite right with the current system of recruitment and promotion of staff in many organizations. In my twenty years as a researcher and statistician in the Public Service, hardly ever was I managed by a person with research or statistics experience. Several of my managers and team leaders treated their staff with astonishing arrogance and, often, downright contempt, especially those managers and leaders who held marginal qualifications, or even no tertiary qualifications whatsoever, and had no subject matter expertise (nearly all of them!). I have witnessed numerous episodes of abuse of my colleagues across several places of work, sometimes a prelude to managing-out. However, my colleagues were fully aware that answer back and you can lose your job the same day. Nobody will stand up for you - least of all the human resources staff who, evidently, are paid to support management but take little or no interest in the welfare of staff.

Several of my interviewees spoke of brutal and highly abusive performance management out of their jobs and two of them cried in my presence as they described their experiences. Again, re-stating a paragraph from my original article - recent initiatives from the Public Service Commission and the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment that may provide a degree of protection for staff who wish to raise issues relating to their work environments are a good start, but are not enough. Again, I re-state something that I said originally - that surely, we can achieve progress by making it clear to Chief Executives and Boards that they are to be held accountable, not only for delivering outcomes for the people, economy and environment of New Zealand, but also for leading harmonious and productive workplaces.

As your bullying manager I win my power games with you very easily. If, for example, you write at my request a two-page report then I find it much too concise and does not provide critical detail. I demand a re-write and document your failure. If, instead, you furnish a ten-page report then, why, it is much too lengthy, hard to read and does not convey a clear message. I request a re-write, document your failure and drag it up later on at your performance review. Meanwhile, every such failure is relayed to the Senior Management Team and eventually your cumulative shortcomings are escalated to the top executives and Human Resources. Unfortunately, you are finished and nothing will save you! Meanwhile, everyone seems to have forgotten that you are the subject-matter expert while I am not.

Of course, bullying is not confined to our Public Sector. It is available in the private sector too and I saw equally reprehensible bullying at a Non-Government Organization some years ago. Staff were treated abominably there; this time by a new administration that may have wanted to bring in new staff and clear away existing staff. This objective was achieved by framing existing staff with accusations of bad behaviour and poor performance and giving them the choice of resigning or being fired. Quite a few staff were forced out using variations on that theme. I estimate that more than a dozen were relieved of their jobs over a period of perhaps three months. The true figure could be a lot higher and I know a few who remain deeply unhappy about their treatment to this day. I have vivid memories of a conversation with one young woman, a very good colleague, an excellent employee and trained to the level of the Ph.D in the bio-medical sciences. During that conversation it became apparent to me that she was in a state of shock at having to resign that very morning on the basis of duress; in other words, false allegations of underperformance and improper behaviour. This is no way to treat fellow human beings. Not good enough! - especially from very highly-paid executives who are in no danger of losing their own jobs.

The international literature provides much published research on workplace bullying, including documentation of bullying and sexual harassment within diverse organizations. Some of the available literature describes attempts to characterise prevalence and severity of bullying using statistical methods. I have had minor involvement with relevant statistical approaches but in New Zealand the leading researchers include Professor Michael O’ Driscoll of the University of Waikato and Dr. Geoff Plimmer of Victoria University. In particular, Dr. Plimmer has conducted research into bullying across our Public Service.

Documented Bullying: Account One

I have received written accounts of bullying from several people and in other cases I have documented their verbal accounts. Here is an anonymised and slightly-edited version of one particular account of bullying here in New Zealand which I have permission to publish:

Some years ago when I was employed at the Ministry of X, a very young man (about 20 years my junior) came in as the manager of our unit. His treatment of staff was appalling, involving ongoing abuse while playing favourites with selected people. He threatened certain staff frequently, scored off them in public and demeaned them on a daily basis. He even sabotaged a major report of mine by inserting numerous typographic errors and errors of fact. Soon, he brought in a Team Leader, a young woman (also about 20 years my junior) and the two of them attacked staff as a duet on an ongoing basis. She held the minimum degree in an unrelated area, whereas I held much higher degrees in relevant subjects and had many achievements to my credit. At the time I did not mind her lack of expertise in our field but, in retrospect, her background and level of experience were hardly appropriate for leadership of our work. However, her behaviour was every bit as bad as the young man's. She, too, abused me and the other staff and scored off us all the time, but we knew that the consequences of standing up to them would be severe, probably including performance management out of our jobs or, worse, being fired.

I know the bullies concerned and observed them in action first-hand. Of course, Wellington is a small place and I have friends and colleagues across several agencies. So, over the years I have followed with great interest the careers of those two anecdotally, and it seems that they behaved similarly at other places of work, even many years later. She rapidly became a Deputy Chief Executive while still quite young. Associates of mine who work at the same agency inform me that her treatment of people was not nice at all. The same applies to the subsequent career of the then young man - very nasty treatment of staff and even staff leaving because of him. Indeed, I have spoken to people who say that they left the relevant organization solely because of his abuse. Recently, I interviewed people who are managed by the same man today and I am confident that the above account is completely true.

So, in the case of the young woman, a bullying person with very little relevant background and minimal qualifications rises very rapidly to a very high level of remuneration and influence, ahead of many more appropriately-qualified and more experienced people. Where is the logic in this situation? Looking at the qualifications of the other senior executives in that organization, we see that several of them are not subject matter experts either. Perhaps few of them in fact empathise with the technical work of that agency or else believe that comfort with wielding power, willingness to dominate others and push other people out of their jobs are more desirable attributes than mere technical or subject-matter expertise. Maybe the logic is that people like that young woman are viewed as strong leaders, willing to make tough decisions and manage others out. But what if they manage out good people?

Another Anonymised Account

My colleagues informed me several times that my manager, Ms. X, had admitted publicly to a personal hatred of me. My view is that none of us is obliged to like everyone with whom we work, but Ms. X's admissions, and the fact that she was never challenged over them, tells us everything we need to know about the environment while I was employed there. Similarly, during my last year, my colleagues would confide that I was being destroyed behind my back. Staff were told not to speak to me and I was systematically excluded from meetings, shouted down whenever I attempted to speak, admonished repeatedly in public, falsely accused in public of errors on numerous occasions and my work steadily taken off me. I attempted to communicate my commitment to my job to Human Resources staff but was treated with rudeness and contempt by them too. Several of my colleagues also attempted to call out the bullying but were warned not to proceed with complaints or lose their jobs. Evidently, in the Public Service bullying managers and senior executives enjoy, not only high levels of remuneration, but also the protection of their employers. I wish that I had had access to equal levels of remuneration to Ms. X and had also enjoyed the protection of my employer.

Last year I attempted to communicate with Ministry Y about very abusive treatment of several people from Ms. X, who moved to that Ministry a few years after bullying others at the previous place of employment - the location of the bullying described above. Of course, Ms. X did not respond in person. Instead, a Human Resources Manager responded on her behalf, stating that Ministry Y (her current place of employment) does not engage in bullying and could not comment on bullying allegedly committed at other workplaces. Fair enough! After that, Ministry Y refused to communicate with me and did not reply to further messages from me. In fact, staff who work today at Ministry Y inform me that Ms. X has not changed her behaviours very much though, fortunately, she may not have managed anyone out for quite some time!

My reason for contacting employers are honourable - to expose bullying, with a view to getting them to curtail it. And so, last month I spoke to a very senior person at Ministry Y by telephone to discuss the behaviours of Ms. X. The senior person listened politely for three or four minutes and then terminated the conversation abruptly. She, too, subsequently declined to respond to emailed messages from myself.

Staff of Ministry Y inform me that several women in positions of authority there are known within the organization as “The Mean Girls”. We can only wonder why. I do know that the female bullies who I have encountered over the years were every bit as vicious as the white males, and that gay and minority bullies were equally vindictive.

It is curious that Ministry Y is one of those agencies that are prominent in promoting the use of Māori language, and is working actively towards mātauranga Māori (Māori traditional knowledge) becoming valued (in my opinion, long overdue!) but possibly being taught within our curricula as equal to “western science”. Respect for all minorities and their world views is most desirable and strictly necessary, in my view, but elevating any traditional knowledge to the level of science within education is not sensible in the twenty-first century, especially when our educational performance appears to be dropping relative to that of other nations. That email response from the Human Resources manager (to communications from myself to Ministry Y in relation to disaffected people who have reported bullying from Ms. X) ended with the words Ngā mihi. It is always lovely to hear and read those words and I have to assume that they are meant with positive intent. Unfortunately, sometimes these words are articulated by organizations that treat unwanted staff like dirt.

Performance Management

Performance management should constitute a process of ensuring that employee activities and outputs meet the organization's goals in an effective and efficient manner. We can find many definitions of Performance Management, such as the following:

Performance Management is a continuous and systematic approach that ensures the achievement of organizational business goals by streamlining employee performance and efforts to match the set goals efficiently. Performance Management builds a communication system between a manager and an employee that occurs throughout the year, in support of accomplishing the strategic objectives of the organization (HRHelpBoard, 2022).

Ideally, performance management is deployed in order to create a work environment in which staff are motivated to provide their best performance and deliver high-quality work. Unfortunately, in practice it often means using alleged underperformance (by which I mean false allegations!) to justify managing a person out of the organization. That person may or may not be competent at his or her job but my observation is that many capable people are managed out, often by non-subject matter experts and others of minimal qualifications. Naturally, claiming to an organization that a person is an underperformer, is incompetent and does not possess the required skills, is a very effective way of managing out while appearing completely above board and remaining relatively safe from a legal perspective. Nobody will perform due diligence to confirm that there really is solid justification for managing-out, and the organization then forms a scrum involving the current manager, other managers, Human Resources, senior executives and legal staff, to push the isolated person backwards.

By now the person is scared out of his or her wits about possible long-term career damage; not only about losing his or her current job. On the other hand, the manager can even earn praise for displaying the courage to get rid of a problematic member of staff. Many of the people I have interviewed attest to how truly horrible it is for a highly-qualified and hard-working person to experience such treatment, especially from an unqualified individual, and that it brings both great humiliation and lasting professional, reputational and financial damage. In New Zealand we may even have had one or more suicides as a result of workplace bullying, and I give relevant detail in the Appendix to this article.

Top-Down or from Your Manager?

Of course, we want progress with mitigating bullying but inevitably it is more challenging where the bullying is top-down; that is, sponsored by the top executives. Sometimes bullying appears to be the action of middle-managers but, in some organizations where I have worked, it appeared to come from the top people. We saw them very clearly, systematically picking off their personal or political enemies or otherwise disliked people through performance management, firing or through restructuring. I recall one period of restructuring which I survived but in which several fine colleagues lost their jobs. When I asked the change managers why my colleagues were being moved on I was told that several of them were ‘well-poisoners’. This was a most astounding assertion from people who did not know my colleagues. I confirm that there was indeed nastiness in that environment, but it came from the Deputy Chief Executive who oversaw the restructuring, rather than from my colleagues.

In my previous article, I listed various bullying techniques. One nasty bullying tactic that I did not mention there is the enforced take-over of a person’s work. To illustrate, I give an example from my own fields of work – quantitative research and statistics. Let’s say that an expert has created resources for conducting some kind of analysis - a set of reporting tools or templates maybe, or perhaps a set of linked Excel spreadsheets embodying complicated formulae, or else software developed for highly-complex statistical reporting. The new manager wants to deliver the work into the future without acquiring the necessary knowledge or expending any effort and so declares the existing work to be inadequate and the relevant person to be an underperformer. The expert is then marginalised or managed out and the manager creates a new team that delivers the work, subsequently taking the credit and polishing his or her curriculum vitae along the way. How does the manager deliver the work? Of course! - using those very same resources that the manager had claimed to be inadequate! But nobody apart from the manager spots the paradox here and nobody will care much even if the paradox is seen for what it is. I have seen that tactic more than once and find it astonishing that organizations allow it to happen, even lauding the manager and his or her team in subsequent years for outstanding delivery.

Another form of bullying is to deny excellent people a promotion, year-after-year. The manager always finds reasons as to why a senior and highly accomplished person does not yet deserve a small increase in remuneration and a modest enhancement in status - and never will. I have seen this behaviour and discussed it with several senior people and can attest to the frustration that it causes to committed professionals. A close personal friend and one of the very brightest people known to me (the top graduate across all disciplines at his New Zealand University; a brilliant first-class honours degree in pure mathematics, a Master’s degree with high distinction in pure mathematics, numerous scholarships, including the offer of a Prince of Wales Commonwealth Scholarship to Cambridge University) has informed me of his deflation at repeatedly being denied a minor promotion after many years us outstanding effort. I am familiar with some of his work and can confirm that it is quite superb. My feeling is that New Zealand owes him a debt of gratitude but his employer doesn’t seem to know it and, I believe, doesn’t care all that much.

Another problem concerns the rise of very inexperienced people to leadership and management; in my view, usually on the basis of favouritism. Some of them perform well but the young manager of modest accomplishment, who has been told to manage out or fire anyone who annoys him or her, can cause utter carnage! I have seen that one first-hand too, and have had it reported to me by several interviewees.

And, frankly, what are we to make of the category of work we refer to as Human Resources? What is creative, intelligent or value-adding about collecting a nice taxpayer-funded salary from rubber-stamping others out of work? I hope that most of us would not stoop to carving out a highly-paid career out of hurting other people. I certainly would not and I could not live with my conscience in a job like that. But I know people who sit near the top of the Public Service after a track record of smashing others when they headed Human Resources.

Public Service Executive Salaries

It is my personal opinion that the salaries paid to our top public servants are grossly inflated and possibly encourage others to aim for the top rather than to aim for Public Service careers that benefit the nation. Indeed, one might ask why a Public Service Chief Executive deserves a much higher salary than a Prime Minister.

Perhaps a few of the very top, and also some second-tier executives, think of themselves as existing beyond accountability from the tax-paying public. As I said in the same article from earlier this year, the very high salaries of our senior public servants are met by the New Zealand taxpayer, as are pay-outs in relation to non-disclosure agreements that are drawn up to shut down any public expression of discontent when staff are bullied out. Accordingly, the tax-paying public has a right to expect that the public sector learns to treat staff as human beings and that even performance management of genuinely underperforming staff can be undertaken in a fair and respectful manner.

In 2016 Stuff published an article on Public Service executive salaries (Sachdeva, 2016). It gives an idea of the salaries earned by the top executives that year, though their salaries most probably have increased since then. Those salaries are very generous indeed and are met by us – the New Zealand taxpayer. Let’s hope that these people are worth it!

Peter Hughes is Public Service Commissioner and Head of Service | Te Tumu Whakarae mō Te Kawa Mataaho. The Commission’s website states that, as the Head of Service, Mr. Hughes is a visible system leader for all public servants. He leads the Public Service chief executives, who form the Public Service Leadership Team, to steward New Zealand’s public management system. Mr Hughes’ salary was not documented in the 2016 Stuff article but his predecessor, Iain Rennie, received between $760,000 and $769,999 (though that package included an entitlement pay-out of $93,000). In total, during 2015/2016 some thirteen public sector bosses earned over $600,000, compared with eleven for the previous financial year. State sector bosses made 5.5 times the average salary of their employees; the ratio, apparently, remaining relatively stable in recent years (Sachdeva, 2016).

About two years ago I used the Official Information Act to request information on salary bands for Deputy Commissioners at the Public Service Commission. I confirm that Deputy Commissioners were then in receipt of salaries in the region of $274,890 - $371,910. Possibly, those salaries are even higher now. A salary like that is more than three times the salary of, say, a University Senior Lecturer, despite the possibility of the lecturer holding the very highest qualifications and having international-class academic achievement. Equivalently, we could employ up to five senior secondary teachers or six nurses on that public money.

For money like that we have every right to expect our Public Service Commissioner and Deputy Commissioners to show genuine leadership in setting positive, inclusive and safe workplace environments in our Ministries and Departments.

Peter Hughes on Speaking Up

Recently, Mr. Hughes published a Public Service Commission web page on speaking up within the public sector (Hughes, 2022). Here, Mr. Hughes states that all New Zealand workers, including public servants, must be able to raise concerns without fear of punishment or reprisal. And so they should!

Mr. Hughes says that good policies and processes that encourage staff to speak up about possible wrongdoing are vital for maintaining the integrity of our Public Service. Again, we agree.

Mr. Hughes states that he is proud that New Zealand is held in high regard for the standards of honesty, openness, transparency and integrity in the Public Service and, further, that our reputation is bolstered by our ability to build and maintain a culture that promotes speaking up about wrongdoing. Unfortunately, I know plenty of disaffected current or former Public Service staff who do not agree with the optimistic assessment of Mr. Hughes. If in the future our Public Service is to deserve high regard for honesty, openness, transparency and integrity, and for a culture that is responsive when staff speak up, then all ministries and departments must live by the new Speaking Up protocols.

Apparently, the Speaking Up standards were first issued in 2017 (under the State Sector Act 1988) and were further updated in 2019. The standards have now been updated by Te Kawa Mataaho | Public Service Commission, in line with the Public Service Act 2020. They also reflect the new Protected Disclosures (Protection of Whistleblowers) Act 2022, which came into effect on 1 July, aiming to make New Zealand whistleblowing protection easier to access, understand and use.

According to Mr. Hughes, these new standards outline his minimum expectations, as Public Service Commissioner, for organizations to support staff on speaking up in relation to wrongdoing concerns that could damage the integrity of the Public Service. He says that these standards comprise all of the key elements for promoting a ‘speak up’ culture, operating good processes (including timely investigations) and keeping people safe from reprisals or other detrimental impacts.

Surely, this initiative is a positive step. Unfortunately, in practice an organization may nevertheless punish employees for raising sensitive issues, especially about bullying. Punishment can be exacted on the basis of other criteria - performance, for example. In some places, one cardinal sin is for an employee to source advice from external bodies such as the Public Service Association when he or she feels that bullying is causing problems. Like others, I have figured out that doing so makes a person a prime target for further bullying and managing-out.

Accountability for the Top Executives?

The Public Service cannot proceed in the same way as before. Too many people have been hurt by bullying and it is now too well-known within the community for us to turn a blind eye to it. Several organizations and certain senior individuals are perceived as bullies by their own staff. In recent years a few of them finished their terms as senior executives and subsequently were awarded prestigious accolades, lucrative positions on boards, directorships and, most probably, highly-generous, public-funded golden handshakes.

Knowing those senior individuals as I do, I agree with their staff unreservedly. It is a great pity that these individuals are so highly remunerated, should be well pleased with their professional and financial successes, and yet show no humanity. One Deputy Chief Executive of an organization where I worked some years ago went on to become a Chief Executive and eventually was awarded a very prestigious accolade after completing his term. However, the outlook was very bleak indeed for anyone who annoyed him. His behaviour towards certain employees was quite vindictive and he was nasty to many staff in one-on-one conversation. Several of my colleagues lost their jobs under his authority. These were people who needed their incomes to provide for their families and pay their mortgages. Conversely, he had no family to provide for and could never possibly imagine how hard it was for those people on a small fraction of his own salary or, indeed, what it is like for a parent to have to get up in the night to attend to a sick child.

After I left that organization I attempted to speak to him about bullying there but he solved the problem very efficiently by hanging up his telephone! One is almost reminded of an excerpt from the well-known book on the life of Joseph Stalin, written by the British historian, Robert Service. When Stalin’s thugs were brutalising the villagers and peasants, they would exclaim that if only Comrade Stalin knew what was going on, he would soon put a stop to it all.

It is not especially pleasant to have someone hang up when you are trying to speak about important issues but nor was that the only time that a senior person has hung up on me when I attempted to discuss work environments. A relatively young and modestly-qualified Deputy Chief Executive and head of Human Resources at another Government entity did exactly the same a few years later. She, too, went on to become even more senior and highly-paid at an even more prominent Government organization, enjoying the benefits of life on taxpayer-funded remuneration within a very generous salary band quoted earlier in this article.

The Beginnings of a Solution?

Many people who I have interviewed about bullying are deeply unhappy about what they have been through, and all are very fearful of the consequences of speaking out, raising personal grievances or, indeed, being known to have spoken to myself. Thus, it is critical that I never reveal the identities of my interviewees. This situation is reminiscent of a totalitarian police state, rather than the progressive first-world nation that New Zealand imagines itself to be.

I want to conclude this article by ratifying what I said towards the beginning - that my overall perspective on the Public Service is positive, that it achieves considerable outcomes for the nation and that it is, for the most part, well-run and strongly-led. Thus, the intent of this article is not to admonish or proportion blame but to improve matters for employees through exposure of the negative side - bullying. And only public exposure will achieve the gains that we hope to make. So, let’s take a positive approach and applaud the Public Service Commission’s initiatives that are aimed at making New Zealand workplace better and more productive for everyone. We can only hope that these measures will be taken seriously within the Public Service and that our working environments become the positive places that we want them to be.

Appendix

The following article is instructive. Here it is claimed that in New Zealand a person committed suicide after experiencing workplace bullying:
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12040773

In particular, we should note the following text from the above article.

Concerned colleagues . . . . . say they fear the death will be "swept under the carpet".

"I was there when he died, and that's when I decided to leave too. I didn't want to become a statistic," a former co-worker said. "They knew he was unwell. And they should have referred it to WorkSafe to be investigated."

Five people gave accounts of the months before the man's death, saying his decline from a bubbly, confident team member began when a new manager was appointed in late 2016.

The co-workers said within three months of the manager being appointed, there were significant changes in the man's appearance and demeanour. "He looked terrible," one colleague said. "He'd lost a lot of weight, he looked ill. And there was other stuff, he wasn't sleeping, he was totally flat when you talked to him. There was nothing there."

Three co-workers said the man told them he was unhappy with his manager. The manager spoke over him or ignored him, and shouted at him, they said.

One colleague said the man also met with Human Resources to seek support and guidance."[They told him] it appeared that this was just what was expected of managers and he more or less just had to suck it up."

"The current leadership of the group shows no empathy for the wellbeing of the team and has unrealistic expectations of performance and provides only negative feedback, fails to communicate appropriately, and is not openly approachable or open to free dialogue."

Following that, another employee claimed she also raised the alleged bullying with the chief executive. He has since denied that disclosure occurred.

Other articles on suicides that have resulted from workplace bullying:
https://oem.bmj.com/content/74/1/72

and:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/world/81585443/i-miss-daddy-familys-anguish-after-father-bullied-into-suicide

References

HRHelpBoard (2022). What is Performance Management? https://www.hrhelpboard.com/performance-management.htm

Hughes, Peter (2022). Speaking up in the Public Service made easier.
https://www.publicservice.govt.nz/spirit-of-service/speaking-up-in-the-public-service-made-easier/

Lillis, David (2022). Workplace Bullying in New Zealand. BreakingViews.
https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2022/01/david-lillis-workplace-bullying-in-new.html

Sachdeva, Sam. Stuff (2016). State sector chief executives' pay details released - who makes the most?
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/money/87511583/state-sector-chief-executives-pay-details-released--who-makes-the-most

Dr David Lillis trained in physics and mathematics at Victoria University and Curtin University in Perth, working as a teacher, researcher, statistician and lecturer for most of his career. He has published many articles and scientific papers, as well as a book on graphing and statistics.