Say the word "bully," and most people imagine a childhood playground and stolen lunch money. As traumatic as childhood bullying can be, workplace bullying can have an even more significant impact on the psychological and physical health of the victim. It also adversely affects other employees, the organization as a whole, and that all-important bottom line.

The Impact and Cost of Bullying

Lower Productivity -

How it costs the victim. When bullied at work, it's difficult to stay on-task and do one's best work. Bullied individuals likely feel distracted, disheartened, and disempowered. The stress of the situation also may be having physical effects, such as difficulty sleeping, fatigue, digestive problems, headaches, or muscle pain.

For many of us, our work performance closely connects to our self-esteem. We want recognition of our work. If instead, we are ridiculed or bullied, our self-esteem and confidence decline.

Company Costs -

When employees are not working to their full...

Move from Ideas to Action - Harness Non-Conscious Brain Power

With our constant stream of emails, voicemails, meetings, conference calls, and so on, it is a minor miracle that any of us can accomplish anything. With our smartphones surgically implanted into our hands, our time is sliced so thinly that we never have the focused time to develop the big-picture perspective required for an action plan, let alone the time to execute it.

"Daily routines, superficial behaviors, poorly prioritized or unfocused tasks leech our capacities—making unproductive busyness perhaps the most critical behavioral problem” in business today, contend Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal in their book A Bias for Action.

For so many of us—whether CEOs for major corporations, small business owners or solo-entrepreneurs—there is a fundamental disconnection between knowing what needs to be done and doing it. Calling this disconnection the “knowing-doing gap,” Stanford University...