When Sara Fung was hired as a clinical nurse specialist at a hospital near Toronto, she thought she was starting her dream job. Six months in, she was miserable. Every day felt like an episode of Survivor. “I had to find the right alliances,” she says, “or I was going to sink.”
A manager Fung worked with was a bully, and the environment was generally hostile. During daily huddles with staff, the manager would reject most of her suggestions and discourage her from asking questions, and would sometimes call meetings intentionally excluding her. Fung recalls meetings in which physicians yelled at one another across the table, to the point that the administrative assistant didn’t know what to record in the minutes. The doctors rarely gave Fung a chance to speak and disregarded her expertise. It happened to others too. “A lot of high-performing individuals got stepped on,” says Fung. “They either stayed and kept their heads down, or left.”
