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My guest for Episode #331 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Andy Regal, a longtime media executive whose career spans major news and entertainment brands, including The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, Consumer Reports, Court TV, and CBS College Sports. Andy is also the author of the forthcoming book Surviving Bully Culture: A Career Spent Navigating Workplace Bullying and a Guide for Healing.
In our conversation, Andy shares the on-air mistake he made while producing a four-hour NBC News broadcast with Lester Holt—an error that could have ended badly, but instead revealed what supportive leadership looks like under pressure. That experience stands in sharp contrast to the bullying, intimidation, and toxic behaviors that shaped other parts of his career and ultimately led him to write his book.
We explore why workplace bullying is so common, why high performers are often targets, and how power dynamics allow toxic behavior to flourish unchecked. Andy also discusses the psychological and physical toll bullying can take, including the way it follows people home and affects families, relationships, and confidence. His insights are grounded both in personal experience and in years of research into the patterns, behaviors, and systemic conditions that enable bully bosses.
At the same time, Andy speaks to recovery—how people can reclaim their sense of self, rebuild confidence, and avoid letting a bully boss define their worth or their future. He offers practical guidance for coping, healing, and maintaining perspective, even when you can’t immediately change your environment or your manager.
Questions and Topics:
- What is your favorite mistake, and how did it shape your approach to leadership?
- What were the circumstances around the Lester Holt teleprompter incident, and what did you learn from how he handled it?
- How often do extenuating circumstances play a role when people make mistakes at work?
- What distinguishes a tough boss from a bully boss?
- Why does workplace bullying have such a chilling effect on learning, improvement, and psychological safety?
- What are the different forms bullying can take—sarcasm, incivility, ostracism—and which cause the most damage?
- Why are high performers often the primary targets of bullying?
- What makes it so difficult for victims to speak up or leave?
- How does workplace bullying follow people home and affect health, sleep, relationships, and self-esteem?
- Why don’t bully bosses typically seek help or change their behavior?
- How do power dynamics and organizational silence allow bullying to continue?
- How can companies distinguish between “holding people accountable” and abusive behavior?
- Are there ways for employees to assess culture or spot potential bully bosses during the hiring process?
- How can someone begin recovering from workplace bullying and rebuilding their confidence?
- What advice would you give to leaders who truly want to create a psychologically safe workplace?
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Automated Transcript (May Contain Mistakes)
Mark Graban: Hi, welcome to My Favorite Mistake. I'm your host, Mark Graban. Our guest today is Andy Regal, a longtime media executive with an extraordinary career in television and digital journalism. Andy has held leadership roles at major news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal, where he served as Global Head of Video. Andy, I've seen a lot of those videos as a subscriber. Thank you. Prior to that, in the more traditional world of television and cable, he was at MSNBC, where he produced news and talk programs. He also led video strategy at Consumer Reports and earlier in his career, developed original programming at Court TV and CBS College Sports. Before I tell you a little more about Andy, anything else from the bio, particular shows or things that are worth calling out?
Andy Regal: No, I've spent my career mostly as an executive producer, vice president of original programming, and I'm very pleased to be with you, Mark, because I made lots of mistakes in my career. I'll just make mention 'cause people may be noticing this is not my favorite mistake, but a mistake nevertheless. I was out running on a path near my house a couple days ago and fell. The mistake was I wasn't picking up my feet. I fell, tripped on a root, and that's why I have a bruise on the top of my head. I didn't want to be distracting to your audience, so I thought I'd just put it out there as a mistake and then we can move on.
Mark Graban: All right. I'm glad that probably could have been, I'm glad it wasn't worse. It probably could have been worse. To quote Monty Python, a flesh wound, merely a scratch.
Andy Regal: Correct. And I got up and kept running, so I'm fine.
Mark Graban: Okay. Well, I'm glad to hear that. We're gonna hear Andy's favorite mistake story, and we're also going to be talking about his upcoming book. It's titled Surviving Bully Culture, A Career Spent Navigating Workplace Bullying, and a Guide for Healing. Welcome to the show, Andy.
Andy Regal: Thank you. Glad to be with you, Mark.
Mark Graban: There's a lot I would love to talk about related to the book. Early in my career, in particular, I was subject to or witnessed some workplace bullying, hearing about it secondhand in healthcare. It's an important, troubling subject. But before we get into that, and maybe this is related to your favorite mistake story: What would you say is your favorite mistake, Andy?
Andy Regal: Yes. My favorite mistake was a circumstance in which I was an executive producer for famed anchor Lester Holt at NBC News, who just retired over the summer. By the way, he's not a bully boss, in fact. Okay, good.
Mark Graban: I'd be worried 'cause he seems very nice.
Andy Regal: Yes. So I was his executive producer, and this was the first time I had ever worked with him. I had worked on a talk show for MSNBC that got canceled—actually, the host got sick and passed away—and so they reassigned me to do war coverage for the Iraq war. And they just kind of threw me into it. I was scheduled, but I didn't really get trained. And being a talk show producer or executive producer and being the executive producer of a four-hour newscast are very different skill sets. So I sat in the control room and tried to watch people doing it. I tried to train myself essentially. The way I describe it is if I sat in the cockpit of an airplane, and then a week later they said, “Okay, it's time to fly the plane.” Probably not a great idea. Right.
Amidst all of that, they only had a couple control rooms, so the team that was there for four hours before us would finish their shift. They would literally run out, and my team of 10 or 12 people—director, assistant director, technical director, teleprompter operator—we'd rush in. We literally have the time of one commercial break to get everything ready for the next four hours. And for war coverage, Mark, as you can appreciate, that means we had reporters all over the world that we had to check in, make sure their audio and video worked. We had videotapes, ready scripts. It was chaotic, to say the least. And we had two minutes and 30 seconds to get in our seats, get prepared, get the tapes ready, get the reporters ready, all of that.
Mark Graban: And at that time, you mean literally tapes? This is 2000, right? This was before digital.
Andy Regal: Right. So we had tapes ready, correct. So this was a while ago. And so we rush in. We do all that. And again, I've never done this before, and in front of me is like a cockpit of switches and buttons and things to talk to the various people in the control room and around the world. They're not listed. You somehow had to intuit where the buttons were. So I'm sitting there as the executive producer, and frankly, I don't know what I'm doing. I really don't. But I'm the executive producer. It's my job to make sure things are ready. I'm responsible. I'm the executive producer, and I took on that responsibility and accepted it.
We sit down. The director calls us up, ready to go, counts us down: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Go Lester. And Lester Holt, the esteemed NBC anchor, who was esteemed at that time and had an unbelievable career at NBC, starts reading the prompter. Well, as I mentioned to you, Mark, I had sat in the week before for a few days trying to figure out how everything worked, or how anything worked, for that matter. So Lester starts reading the teleprompter, and he's doing fine. The story sounds eerily similar or familiar to a story that I heard last week. Of course, stories have legs, and things happen where there are still stories a week later, but this one didn't seem that way. He keeps reading, keeps reading. Goes on to the next story, and the next story I remember also, and there doesn't seem to be an update of any kind. And now the director's also starting to notice something odd. He turns, and the executive producer's in the third row of the control room, or in this case, the out-of-control room. He looks over, he goes, “Is this the right copy?” And probably not in as nice a tone as that.
Mark Graban: Right. Might have been a little cursing.
Andy Regal: Oh, yes, that happened in television, and we'll talk about that. And all of a sudden, over my left shoulder, I hear a young man—he was probably 23 years old. I look over, and he puts his head in his hands. And he said, “I loaded the wrong teleprompter copy. That's last week's.”
Mark Graban: Yeah.
Andy Regal: Script. And Lester Holt is now reading last week's script.
Mark Graban: He's still going.
Andy Regal: He's still going. And there's nothing you can do. You can't get in his ear. You can't get in the ear of an anchor while they're talking.
Mark Graban: You can do it. You think though, there's that earpiece, right?
Andy Regal: We called it an IFB. But you can't, because if they're talking, they can't listen. It's just human. You can't, so you can't get in his ear. All you can do is say, “Go to break.” Which we did. But you can't explain to him what's happening or anything. So the yell, “Go to break,” like a real abrupt, out of nowhere in the middle of a sentence. And he, with a plum, he says, “We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back.” It's a mess. And of course, I don't know what to do. All I can think of is, “This is my fault. This is my mistake,” and it was—I was responsible.
Now, there were extenuating circumstances, which there usually are when people make mistakes, and I hope we'll have a chance to talk about that, Mark, as we continue. For four hours now—or three hours and 57 minutes—I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to say to Lester Holt, who I've never met. This was my first time working with him, and he just went into the studio. I didn't even get a chance to shake his hand because we're frantically putting scripts together. At the end of the four hours, the rest of it went fine. I go to the back door as he's coming out of the studio, and I'm going to apologize for my mistake.
Mark Graban: Now, before that though, during the commercial break, somebody was talking in his ear and saying, “Hey Lester, wrong script. We're gonna regroup.”
Andy Regal: Yes. I think that I was so appalled and upset and certain I was going to get fired. But I don't recall any particular histrionics. I think they said, “Wrong script.” They got the script up, and they went back. There was no yelling and screaming, at least not by Lester. I think in the control room there was some of that.
Mark Graban: He rolled with it. I mean, it probably wasn't the first time it had happened.
Andy Regal: Probably not. But for me, I had never worked with somebody like Lester Holt. He was the preeminent anchor at NBC News, and here I had humiliated him on the air. So I go back around, and I'm just like, I know he's going to scream and yell, probably fire me or have me fired. I went up to him, and I introduced myself. I said, “This is our first time working together, and I'm new at this, and I'm just so terribly sorry about what happened.” And he looked at me, we shook hands, and he said, “Andy, this kind of thing does happen. Use your more experienced colleagues who have done this hundreds of times. You'll get there, you'll learn it. It happens. Don't worry about it. Work to get better. I'm sure we'll work together at some point, and we'll do just fine. I have every confidence in you.”
That's great. And with that, we shook hands. We did work together again, and it was fine. And I've never forgotten it, because he could have easily said, “Let me have your name. You're done here.” All you had to do is walk down the hall or send an email or a phone call, and I would have been fired. Even though—and this is kind of the conversation I want to have with you—usually when people make mistakes, there are extenuating circumstances, there are reasons, there are explanations.
And in the case of workplace bullying, in my experience in television and through my research, this is not about television. There is high intensity and high pressure in every job. I don't care what it is. You can be pushing a broom, and there's pressure to do well, do it right. And there can be all kinds of people that are going to make you miserable. The one thing—and we can talk more about this—is: Listen, don't judge. That's something I learned at The Wall Street Journal from an executive coach. Then you can make your judgments if the person says, “Well, I really didn't care. I came to work late, and I didn't care about the assignment.” You can make your determinations. In my case, I hadn't been trained, I didn't know what I was doing, and I tried my best to prepare and all this stuff. So that's my favorite mistake, because, yes, it was my responsibility. It was my mistake because I could have checked with the prompter operator to make sure that he had loaded the right prompter. There's a monitor up on the wall that shows it. I could have caught it, but with everything going on, I was just sitting there kind of frozen. My bad. But I remembered how Lester Holt handled it the rest of my life. This is 20 many years ago, and I also remember, which is why I wrote the book, the myriad of times where I made a mistake or not, and I got punished for it. The bosses had no interest in listening or understanding. They were just interested in dictating, and in some cases, punishing.
Mark Graban: Well, I'm glad the story about Lester Holt was a positive one. When I first heard his name, I thought, “Oh no.” He seems such a professional, dignified person with gravitas and a sense of calm. I'm glad he reacted in a way that wasn't focused on punishment, let alone bullying. I mean, it seems punishment could coexist with the bullying or not. There could be a very calm firing. I'm such an advocate. Here on the show, we talk about learning from mistakes. Punishing somebody for human error or a systemic problem, where, to your point, you got thrown into this. “Why weren't you trained better? What were the circumstances?” There's a little more to unpack there, but I think listening and learning leads to improvement and trying to prevent the same thing from happening again.
Andy Regal: What it also does is bullying, workplace incivility—and it's along the spectrum, Mark. There are different kinds. There's sarcasm. Sarcasm can be a form of bullying. There can be incivility, microaggressions—it's all along the way. Yelling and screaming is one form. Ostracizing, in my view, is probably the worst. All of these things have impact. What I would say is: The reason that I got into this work and wrote the book is because—and there's data on this, which we can talk about—it has a chilling effect. I was loyal to Lester Holt. I would have done anything for him. Even now, I love telling this story because I like people to know that what you think about him is actually true. So that's my payback to him for that—to know that he had impact. I'm not out for revenge. The people I talk about in my book, the Bully Bosses, hired me. They kept me as their employee, and I often got promoted. But what I'm talking about is good, loyal, devoted, productive, popular employees who are often targeted. And what happens is you lose loyalty. You lose devotion. You lose productivity in a toxic workplace.
Mark Graban: I think it hurts quality if people are afraid to speak up about a mistake they think is about to happen.
Andy Regal: You don't want to and you can't go to the boss and have a conversation—or if you made a mistake, or if you're not sure of yourself—because you don't want to take the chance of getting castigated for it. And the opposite is true, too. The good bosses, the helpful bosses—I'm not talking about having to be nice all the time. In fact, I was an executive producer for 25 years. I had staffs of 50. When I was at The Wall Street Journal, I had a team in Hong Kong, London, San Francisco, DC, New York. I did lose my temper. I hope not too much. I interrupted people. I banged on a few tables in my career. But I always felt bad about it, especially if it was capricious. Usually there was a reason, and part of the reason was probably I was having a bad day. It's on me, and I apologized and I repaired the relationship.
That's not a bully boss. A bully boss I have had bully bosses that I write about that never showed weakness, never admitted a mistake, and certainly never apologized. These are the distinctions we need to make in terms of talking about this overall issue. The other thing I want to mention real quick, Mark, if I may.
Mark Graban: Yeah, please.
Andy Regal: Again, this is not about television. My career was in television, but what I write about is that this happens in every industry. You mentioned healthcare, education, construction, hospitality. Where there are people at work, there are bullies at work. Exactly. That's just a fact of life. So I want to bring attention and dialogue to this because it's legal. There are no laws against it, no matter how much harm is done, unless you're in a protected class, right? There are civil rights codes against somebody saying, “Hey, old man, get out of here. We don't need your old ideas.” You can have a civil rights claim, but people are smarter. They don't do that. It's much more subtle.
Mark Graban: So, you're saying there's a difference between bullying and something that would become a hostile workplace, or something that becomes harassment or legally actionable. It's not illegal to be a jerk, I guess, right?
Andy Regal: Correct. And there is a term in this work called a brilliant jerk. Many of them are not bullies or jerks all the time. Of course not. No one is. They may even be very good at their jobs. The problem is these guys that have either all the power or proximity to power, they abuse that power. They identify people that they don't like, for whatever reason, and I don't spend a lot of time trying to diagnose them because I think that's probably a waste of time. I work with people trying to help them deal with it. But it's important to understand that one person—he might be good at sales, he might look great in a suit, he might be great in a meeting. And those are all positive qualities, but they ruin so many other people. The damage is more than the benefit. We call those brilliant jerks because they may indeed be brilliant, but they cause a lot of harm and a lot of damage and hurt productivity. And the data is overwhelming about the billions of dollars lost because I've counseled people, Mark, that cry on the way to work. People that can't make it to work, people that have to see psychiatrists, they end up in the hospital literally, and in the worst circumstances, they can end up suicidal by this. Again, that's an extreme example, but it happens, and more than it should. Nobody wants to be bullied at work. I don't care who they are.
Mark Graban: Right. I mean, there are differences. I appreciate these distinctions you're drawing, and I know the book expands on this. The difference between losing your temper and feeling bad and apologizing and trying to have higher emotional intelligence in the future. Learn what upsets you. Learn not to get upset. There are times I get upset and frustrated, and that's kind of part of my own journey to try to prevent mistakes. But I've been under bully bosses where that seemed to just be their MO—the constant yelling, belittling, blaming, not taking responsibility. So I want to go back to your story, though, because I heard you tell—correct me if I'm recapping this incorrectly—but you were the senior person in the room.
Andy Regal: Exactly. In the control room on the Lester Holt story.
Mark Graban: Yeah. So you're the boss.
Andy Regal: Yes.
Mark Graban: And your responsibility. I heard you taking responsibility for that team's output, even though the fact of the matter in a non-blaming way would be that the 23-year-old loaded the wrong copy. But then we could unpack this in my engineer brain and we'd say, “Hey Andy, why is that even possible? Or what are the processes to make sure old scripts get put somewhere where they can't be reloaded again?” I heard you taking responsibility even though it wasn't directly your action. I admire that.
Andy Regal: I appreciate that. And yes, that's how you get better. That's how you get loyalty. When people feel comfortable that they can make mistakes, not be vilified for it. When they make mistakes and they know the boss makes mistakes and he acknowledges it. I'll give you an anecdote. I worked at a cable network, and we weren't on the air yet. We had a dress rehearsal to orchestrate how it felt to be live, because we were going to be a live cable network, and I was one of the development people that developed this network. We went to a studio that we had never worked at before, but we were supposed to, come hell or high water, be live at 10:00 AM. But remember, we weren't. But it was a dress rehearsal. So we were going to be live at 10, and we were going to be live all day, and we were going to simulate a live day. We had never even been to HBO before, where we did this test. So, we got there at 7:30. It took us a half hour to find the bathrooms. We went around, and they're plugging things in—lights and stuff. And at about 9:45, it was clear we weren't going to make it. And the head boss, the CEO, comes storming in beet red, and he says, “Who?” And again, there was an expletive, but he's like, “Who's in charge here?” furious that we're not. And I was brand new. I had only been there a couple weeks, so at least this time it was my fault. And I thought to myself, “Well, aren't you in charge?”
I had another bully boss who, when anything ever went wrong, Mark, he would fire off an email: “How did this happen?”
Mark Graban: Well, what was the tone of that question? It could be inquisitive, or it could be an inquisition.
Andy Regal: It wasn't particularly inquisitive because there was never a follow-up. We didn't, like you said, have a meeting and say, “We, this happened, that happened, this went wrong, that went wrong. What can we do to solve?” That's a good environment. That's a productive environment. That's an environment that has well-being. When people fire off “Who did this? Why? What?” without any kind of coming together in problem-solving, that's when you hurt. Let's even assume you don't care about your employees. You get mad at them, like you said this guy that you worked for—it's counterproductive if you don't. You don't have to care about the people. Let's even assume you don't, but you might care about your business. Billions and billions of dollars in lost productivity. People leave, and then it costs more to hire people. So retention—all these things lead to billions of dollars in the United States of lost revenue and costs because of how people are treated. Again, we're not talking about putting your arm around people and being nice all the time. We're talking about caring and making your employees feel like they matter. That's a big deal. If you feel like you're just there to be a punching bag. Again, we're not talking—there's no assault here. Nobody ever, even though it looks like it, nobody ever threw a stapler at my head. That's assault. What we're talking about here is where you make your employees feel like they don't matter and they're only there to be scorned, yelled at, belittled, and ostracized, and then fired.
Mark Graban: Yeah. There's the difference between asking—it's trending in some circles where we're going to lead by asking questions. Like there's a difference between “What went wrong?” and “What's wrong with you?” That question's not equally helpful because it puts people on the defensive. It's blaming. It teaches people to hide and cover up mistakes. Now, you're talking about that dry run of the live day. The reason for doing the dry run was to figure out the things that could go wrong, maybe in part, right? Not to be perfect. If you were going to be perfect in the dry run, you didn't need it, I would say.
Andy Regal: Again, these were directors and studio personnel and technicians that we had never worked with before. That was a mistake. We probably should have gone over and had a tech rehearsal and met the director and all this kind of thing. In fact, I will tell you that I learned from that situation. I was a producer at that point, quite early in my career. I was in my early thirties, and every time I created a show—and I created quite a few—I made sure that we had all kinds of rehearsal time so that when we went live, it was just like another day. It was a great lesson.
Mark Graban: So, I've got to ask. Here's my point. I was going to shoehorn this example in, because I think it's a pop culture meme. It's not just an insider news story. When you talk about going live: the famous tape that was leaked—I'm sure by somebody—of Bill O'Reilly getting all upset, like the opposite of a Lester Holt moment, where he was doing a recorded read that was going to be edited into the end of an episode of Inside Edition. He didn't like the way it was written. I've heard that the phrasing confused him, and instead of asking for clarification, he just gets increasingly upset. The famous moment you can find on YouTube is, “We'll do it live! [Bleep] it!”
Mark Graban: And I'm guessing that was leaked because somebody was like, “Oh, we finally got one on tape!” I'm guessing that wasn't just his worst day ever.
Andy Regal: No, that's not a one-off. And yes, somebody leaked that. I'm glad you brought that up, Mark, because the reason this happens is because it's an abuse of power. Those of us that it happens to don't really have recourse. I've been asked a number of times, “Well, why didn't you just leave?” First of all, most of us need a paycheck. But even above and beyond that, for me, I had worked my butt off for years to become an executive producer, to create a syndicated show that aired across the country on NBC, and to become a vice president of original programming. And I didn't want to let the bully win.
Mark Graban: Yeah.
Andy Regal: For all those reasons, many of us stay. It's not easy to find a new job. It's not easy to walk out and wonder, “How am I going to pay for everything?” So we stick it out for all those reasons. I actually created a TV show with a sheriff, almost out of central casting in North Carolina, a southern sheriff. He went by the moniker of “The Toughest Sheriff in America.” It was a great show, but what it made me think about was how much power a boss has over all of us. A sheriff has a ton of power because people have lost their freedom. I'm not suggesting that this sheriff abused that power necessarily at all, but I'm just saying you have a lot of authority over somebody in jail. A boss has so much power over us: about our popularity, our standing, our ability to pay our bills, our ability to grow our careers, our self-worth, and our self-esteem.
Then I'll make one other point which I haven't made yet, which is: A boss—a bully boss—also affects our home life, right? You don't just leave it at work. That bully boss is on your shoulder, renting space in your head. These are dramatic and traumatic effects. So one of the things I'm doing, and most of my work is for bully victims, but if any bosses are out there, you really need to understand the effect that your words, your actions, and your behavior have on your employees.
Mark Graban: So how often is there some sort of wake-up call to a bully boss? Because even if they got feedback, they're probably going to blame the person for being weak. I mean, does somebody really have to hit rock bottom career-wise to say, “Hey, I've got to rehabilitate myself?”
Andy Regal: I have a guy whose name is Dr. Gary Namie, who founded the Workplace Bullying Institute, who's been doing this work for 30 years. He's a psychologist.
Mark Graban: It's more of an anti-bullying institute, I guess.
Andy Regal: Yes, it is indeed, but it's called the Workplace Bullying Institute. But yes, we're all in the anti-workplace bullying work. And he said, “Andy, I've counseled thousands upon thousands of bully victims. I've never had a bully boss come to me asking for help.” Now, there are times where a company identifies a problem and may hire somebody to work with a bully, but most of the bullies are not in the mail room. They're in the corner office. They're in the office next to the corner office. Not always, but they're in some position of authority. And again, it goes back to diagnosing. I can't tell you, Mark, why they do it. Are they sadists? Are they masochists? Are they ego Are they sadists? Are they masochists? Are they egoists? I have a guy, his name is Dr. Gary Namie, who founded the Workplace Bullying Institute, and he's been doing this work for 30 years. He's a psychologist.
Mark Graban: It's more of an anti-bullying institute, I guess.
Andy Regal: Yes, it is indeed, but it's called the Workplace Bullying Institute. We're all in the anti-workplace bullying work. And he said, “Andy, I've counseled thousands upon thousands of bully victims. I've never had a bully boss come to me asking for help.” Now, there are times where a company identifies a problem and may hire somebody to work with a bully, but most of the bullies are not in the mail room. They're in the corner office. They're in the office next to the corner office. Not always, but they're in some position of authority. And again, it goes back to diagnosing. I can't tell you, Mark, why they do it.
Mark Graban: Were they abused at some point? Verbally?
Andy Regal: They may have a very difficult upbringing or their previous boss.
Mark Graban: I've seen, in a lot of cycles, people seem to pay it forward. There's a cycle of bullying.
Andy Regal: Yeah. And so, I'm not out to get any bullies with this work. I hope that bosses—in fact, I spoke to a group in Baltimore not too long ago, a group of small business CEOs, and at the end of my talk they were like, “Oh…” Now, I don't think any of them necessarily were yellers and screamers. They might have been, but we want to create dialogue. We want to create awareness. This is—and again, I hesitate to say it's like the Me Too movement—but in the spectrum of things, and again, being sexually harassed, we don't need to be in an argument which is worse. It shouldn't be. People have been working for decades to try to get legislation passed. What I'm here to say is, tomorrow, anybody who runs an organization, is a supervisor, manager, boss, who's listening and watching this podcast, you can create bylaws, codes of conduct at your place of business tomorrow. Just like they do with sexual harassment. You have to watch a video, you have to sign off that you get it, that you watched it, you understand it, you won't do it. You could do the same for inappropriate behavior or bullying behavior where you set the standard.
Mark Graban: Can you define it that closely? I mean, being in corporate environments, you go through the anti-sexual harassment training, and there are all these cut-and-dry scenarios. With bullying, is it more a gray area, or can it be defined? Like, “No, that is objectively bullying.”
Andy Regal: Great question. And let me see if I can define it for you. There are a number of good definitions. The simplest one that I like to point to is it's targeted harm, targeted behavior with harm that has absolutely no benefit to the employee or the business.
Mark Graban: Now, I know leaders that might debate. Back to this question about dealing with mistakes, I know there are people out there that say things like, “Look, if I don't yell and scream at somebody, they're never going to learn.”
Andy Regal: I think I mentioned you the famous coach Bobby Knight. He was a very famous basketball coach and maybe the most famous bully in all of sports for 20 years or more. The key here is the employee must know that the boss, supervisor, or manager that's doing the yelling and screaming and the misbehavior, that that person has their back. And what happens is we don't know that, and we have no confidence. It's one thing if they're encouraging most of the time, and once in a while they get down on you and they raise their voice. But they're like, “Andy, I know you can do better. You usually do great work. No problem.” That's not what I'm here to talk about.
Mark Graban: That doesn't sound like bullying.
Andy Regal: And that's why I said in my definition, it has no benefit. If you're yelling at me because you want me to be better, and you trust me, and you want me to be a future part of the team, there's benefit to me. I want to get better too. And if you feel the necessity to raise your voice on occasion or be short-tempered, I can live with that if I know you have my back. But in almost all cases, there's no benefit to me. Other than I lose my psychological safety and I become fearful.
Mark Graban: Right, and that hurts the organization. But you said on the playground…
Andy Regal: On the playground, in the eighties, in elementary school. But now, if it happens in many school districts, they do something about it. In workplaces, they don't have any such things. That's why I'm arguing for bylaws. Schools have bylaws and codes of conduct now that everybody has to follow. And that's what I'm asking for in workplaces where there are repercussions. Going back to that issue, there are repercussions if you don't follow it, just like if you sexually harass somebody, there are repercussions.
Mark Graban: Now, back to the high performers though. Is the boss threatened by the high performer?
Andy Regal: Maybe. We don't know for sure. It goes back to this idea that we don't really know, but the research is overwhelming, because those of us that get targeted—and again, I was a model target because I grew up in a family where I did all the right things. I was that kid. I wasn't successful at everything I did, but I played sports, I played the trumpet. I worked really hard to get good grades, and I was never a problem for my parents. And I got a lot of adulation, a lot of love back. And so I naively went into the workforce thinking, “Well, that's the approach I'm going to take to the workplace.” And I try to get away from self-blame, but [bullies] can tell the people they can bully. I tell this story: I worked with a great producer who was from South Philly, and I'm not sure those two things, but he was a tough guy. I was not, and wimpy people shouldn't be bullied either, but I never got bullied as a kid, and nobody should be bullied, ever. But it's different in the workplace. The people that get bullied are the people that perform; they want to stomp them down. It makes the bully supervisor—maybe they're threatened, maybe they don't have the capacity to be friendly and nice and warm and so forth. They have the mean-spirited thing, which often helps you rise up because you're tough. And that's why the best people often are the ones that get bullied.
Mark Graban: You know, it's often said, sometimes you have to punch back at a bully, but there's a difference between a playground—I'm not advising kids to punch a bully—but in the workplace, because of the power differential, you can't really punch back.
Andy Regal: You can't. And you can't go in and tell them what's what, or have an intervention.
Mark Graban: That doesn't work.
Andy Regal: Because they're not those kinds of people. They're unreasonable. Everything you have is at stake. Can that work? In the history of work, has that ever happened where somebody just went in and told them off? This friend of mine who was from South Philly, he wouldn't take anything from anybody. He didn't care who it was, and he would have stormed off, told them off, and he would have left 'cause he was tough and he didn't care, and that helped him in his career. So there are people, and there are also people that don't care about their jobs. If somebody bullies them, they don't care 'cause they're going to go home and not care. Those of us that care have a very hard time stepping up and saying something to the bully. As somebody that coaches bully victims, I'm not about to say, “Well, here's what you do. Here's the formula.” There isn't one.
Mark Graban: It's more of a recovery formula.
Andy Regal: Yes. The formula is not to let the bully overtake your life and take over all your joy. And I talk about people sharing their light. Don't let the bully boss darken your light completely, and then you lose your self-esteem.
Mark Graban: You really can't punch back because they have so much power over you.
Andy Regal: You can't, unless you have a lawyer, or you have another job. But the whole reason this happens is because they have so much power over you.
Mark Graban: I just remember the one dusty pop culture reference. I'm not that old, but I'm old enough to have watched Leave It To Beaver reruns as a kid. And there is an episode of Leave It to Beaver where he was being bullied by Lumpy. I had to do a quick little side Google. I might have to go back and watch that. But it's a longstanding issue, do you try to ignore a bully? Do you remove yourself from the situation? And again, at…
Mark Graban: …who understands or believes anything that happens under your watch is your responsibility. And not everybody believes that.
Andy Regal: No, and they don't think about it. Managers and bosses aren't taught that. I was fortunate enough to get some good training at The Wall Street Journal. I thought I was a really good, if not great manager, and I realized I had a ways to go. We touched on this earlier, Mark, and you just made the point again, which is we're giving our lives to the workplace. Some of us are more devoted, but no matter how you look at it, you're giving a third of your life every day to the workplace. And for those of us that do care—and I believe most workers do want to do a good job—you bring it home with you. One of the worst jobs I ever had was I was working for a kind of Dr. Phil show, and it was a toxic work environment. I came home, I had a newborn, I had a two-and-a-half-year-old and a newborn. And I was not a good father. I was brittle when I got home. I was working 14-hour days. I was brittle. I was not a good father and I was not a good partner to my wife. I couldn't sleep. I had recurring nightmares, and then I got up in the morning and I was miserable to be around.
Mark Graban: …hurting anybody. There's not an index in the back of the book…
Andy Regal: No, I've changed most of the names because I don't blame these people. I'm beyond it, but I care about the issue and about what they did and why they did it, and I want to try to see if I can mitigate the harm for future employees. Certainly not just in television. As I said, you experience it in tech. Oh my god, tech is a bad one.
Mark Graban: And the media often glorifies bully bosses.
Andy Regal: Oh, great point. I mean, all the time. It's the kind of thing they do.
Mark Graban: The way forward is to make your employees matter.
Mark Graban: And even Jack Welch, who has, I think in hindsight, a very mixed reputation, in his retirement, when he was writing and speaking, and before he passed, was really emphasizing basically, “No, companies can't tolerate the brilliant jerks.” The salesperson that brings in a ton of business, the law partner, the surgeon who brings a lot of reputation and patients in. And he talked about a two-by-two matrix—low results, high results, right behaviors, wrong behaviors. He said you have to make that tough call. And occasionally you hear stories of a hospital system who makes that tough call about the surgeon who's getting the right business results, but has the wrong behavior. So, “No, we're not going to tolerate that anymore.”
Andy Regal: And they shouldn't. As we talked about, it does happen everywhere, at every level. And the bullies are all shades of everything. Being a target, Mark, is also very interesting to me. There is some data that suggests that people who are people of color and/or neurodivergent, LGBTQI, may be bullied at a little higher level. But, and that's one of the reasons I came out. I first thought, “Who's going to care listening to me?” because I was well paid and I did get promoted, so why would anybody care about what I have to say? Well, the reason is not because I was in television, but because I was promoted. I did care.
Andy Regal: …I write about at least hired me. There were hundreds of resumes I sent out to people that had no interest in hiring me. So, I'm not suggesting these are bad people. I am suggesting that in these cases they were bad managers and didn't understand what they were doing to people for whatever reason, or didn't care. And that may define them as bad people. I'll let people decide that. But that's what I want to change.
Mark Graban: I appreciate you doing that. Andy Regal has been our guest. The book again is Surviving Bully Culture, A Career Spent Navigating Workplace.
Andy Regal: I left out a word. It's navigating workplace bullying, and that's my fault.
Mark Graban: Navigating workplace bullying. Okay. We all make mistakes. There we go. Surviving Bully Culture: A Career Spent Navigating Workplace Bullying and a Guide for Healing. I should have called that out and questioned it the first time. That's okay. I had made a mistake.
Andy Regal: I'll take credit for that one too, Mark.
Mark Graban: I read the original title was, “I thought it would be different,” because every new job that I got after a bully job, and I was able to escape somehow, or I lost my job, I got a new one. Every time I took a new job, I thought, “This time it'll be different.” There's always going to be difficult people. There may even be bully bosses. The thing that I want to communicate to your audiences is not self-blame, but we can be different about how we respond and react and cope and heal to the abuse of the bully boss. So that's why I called it, I Thought It Would Be Different, and we can make ourselves different and cope.
Mark Graban: I was going to ask, so I'm making this the final question. We hope it would be different, but as somebody goes through this recovery and, as you were saying, repair their self-esteem and try to take a chance in a workplace, is there a way to try to gauge upfront, asking questions as the job applicant, to try to suss out if it's a bully culture or if your boss is a bully?
Andy Regal: The bullies found me every time, it seemed to me. I don't think there's a way. You can look at Glassdoor, which is a website, so you can do that kind of stuff. But, if you get to…
Andy Regal: …things going on at the places I worked. I was creating shows, I was overseeing staff. What I work with my clients on, and what I want everyone to think about here is: it's not all bad. Yes, it's tough when a bully boss, but there are nice people at work that you can confide in, colleagues, other senior managers. Celebrate your small wins. Allow yourself to breathe. Take a few minutes to breathe and relax. It's not all about the bully boss. Know that there are good things both in work and outside of work that can allow you to still find joy and shed your light on others. So that's the main thing. I let the bully boss overtake me 'cause I so much wanted their validation. I so much wanted that and needed it, and that was the wrong approach.
Mark Graban: Andy, thank you so much for your interest in helping others and writing the book. Again, that is Surviving Bully Culture. Thank you for sharing your story and your reflections and really highlighting a very important issue. So, when the book is actually available and released—sometimes I do a short follow-up with a guest whose book is out—it'd be hard to keep it a short conversation, but there's a lot we can talk about.
Andy Regal: It's been wonderful to meet you, talk with you, Mark. And I will say the book doesn't come out and it won't be available until April, but it is available, for fear of sounding like a salesman or being one—you have to—it is available for pre-order on andyregal.com, A-N-D-Y-R-E-G-A-L dot com, and you'll be able to get the book in the next few months.
Mark Graban: As an author, you have to do this, Andy. It's all right.
Andy Regal: I'm spending a lot of money on this, Mark. I need to…