The Target's Field Guide

A Personal Note

Our livelihood is critical. When our integrity, professionalism, and work ethic is threatened we can go into panic and shock mode. Everything we worked for and dedicated ourselves to can suddenly hang in the balance.

Professionals with goals must be aware of the ways they can survive a toxic workplace, navigate around those toxic co-workers, and keep their eye on the professional goals they have. This guide is intended to ensure success, to identify and minimize toxicity, and to ensure we achieve our goals with support, authentically.

I've worked in offices and institutions for over 20 years. Most colleagues and co-workers are wonderful: supportive, humorous, kind, excellent professionals. But there are some who can stay with you, who can ruin a day, say one comment that is unclear in its mean intent. There are some whose behavior can undermine your success on micro and macro levels, passively, harshly, behind your back, to your face. Privately. Publicly. And let's be honest, often a woman is bullied by a woman.

This guide focuses on the behavior, so that you can identify it, separate yourself from it, respond in professional and powerful ways, and achieve your professional goals while staying true to your higher self.

This guide is borne of my experience and pulls together the understanding that helped me keep toxic behavior at a distance. Its contents come from decades of observations, thinking over their motivation and my next move, and pulls in the good advice I received and witnessed from allies in the workplace. It also brings together the conversations I've had with countless intelligent, sensitive, professional, productive women who have also endured toxic workplace bullying. Together, we vented, recovered, laughed, and found success in spite of the toxicity.

The more information you have, the better you can move through and past the toxic bump in the road, to achieve your goals with your whole self intact.