Nobody likes a bully. But let’s not get too namby-pamby about this.

Well there’s only one thing to talk about this week, isn’t there? I don’t know about you, but this bullying stuff prompted some serious navel-gazing chez SD this week. Every time I saw someone in the office who’s previously felt the sharp end of my wrath, I actually felt a few pangs of guilt. Which is very unlike me. But although only an idiot would dispute the basic principle – that Bullying Is A Bad Thing – I just hope that all this stuff isn’t going to accelerate our decline into a nation of shrinking violets. As far as I’m concerned, instilling a bit of fear in your staff is no bad thing.

So I’ve given this some serious thought. Have I ever got angry in the office? Yes. Have I ever made someone cry? Yes. Have I ever been accused of treating someone unfairly? Yes. And when I asked myself why, I ended up coming up with lots of the same excuses that have been emanating from Downing Street this week: I’m passionate about my business; I’m very driven to succeed; I have very high standards, and so on. (As it happens I’m not convinced that Gordon, like most politicians, is passionate about anything other than self-promotion and self-preservation. But that’s a separate issue.)

In fact, I’d be amazed if any entrepreneur running their own business hasn’t done all this stuff. If you’re desperate to win all the time, you tend to be a bad loser. If you’re willing to tell people stuff they don’t want to hear – for example that they’ve done a bad job, or they don’t have a future in the company – they’re quite likely to get upset about it. And you need to do stuff like that if your business is going to be successful.

Now before anyone goes all moral majority on me, I just want to add two important caveats: you can’t make it personal, and you can’t lose your temper with people. That’s when you get into bullying territory. And more importantly, it means you’re not thinking rationally, which is usually why you make bad decisions.

But that aside, I think it’s good for your staff to be (at least a little bit) scared of you. It’s good for them to know that the stakes are high, that your standards are high, and that there’s a certain level of expectation. So I quite like giving the odd b*ll**king now and then. I think of it as my nuclear deterrent; people need to know you have it in your locker, and then you’ll probably have less need to use it. In my eyes, managing people is mostly about carrot, but there has to be at least the threat of stick.

One more thing. In my experience, under-performers almost always feel like they’re being persecuted. Equally, there will always be some sensitive souls who get offended at the slightest thing. And while it’s probably good that the bullying issue has been brought to a wider audience, I just hope it doesn’t mean these people start complaining that they’re being bullied every time their feelings are hurt. I’m afraid I haven’t got the patience for that, particularly at the moment. 

So many people have no manners these days. Have you noticed that? I blame the internet.

At risk of sounding like my Gran (again), whatever happened to common courtesy? I'm sure people were (marginally) politer ten years ago – when it took you ten minutes to load a single webpage via the dial-up, you needed a bit more patience. These days we have wi-fi and people have no patience at all, which just makes them ruder. Imagine how bad things will be if we ever actually get super-fast broadband?

If you're wondering what sparked this sub-Daily Mail rant, it was an email exchange I had with one of our suppliers this week. I reckon this person may have got 'Seven Habits of Highly Influential People' or something for Christmas, because they've suddenly become unbelievably pushy - continually trying to push me into decisions and next steps that I don't really want to take. But much more annoying than that, she's started signing off her emails with ‘Rgds’. Of all the sign-offs in the world, there is nothing more irritating than 'Rgds'. 'Regards' is anodyne, dismissive and thoughtless even in full - abbreviating it suggests you can't even be bothered to be dismissive. That hurts.

Perhaps she'll argue that it saves her valuable time. Perhaps she's done the sums and calculated that skipping those three letters is actually saving her an extra ten minutes a week, which translates to an extra 5% on profits over the course of the year. But if she has, I'm here to tell her that she's dead wrong. Every time someone uses 'Rgds' in an email to me it degrades my opinion of them by 16.4%, according to a statistic I've just invented now. So rather than boost her bottom line, she may be causing it irreparable long-term damage. (If only with me.)

In fact, I was so annoyed by this that I took the unusual step - for me, anyway - of sending an email around the entire office imposing a blanket ban on the 'Rgds' sign-off, and making it grounds for immediate dismissal on the grounds of gross misconduct. I'm not convinced a tribunal would buy this, but at least it sets the tone.

I realise there’s one big problem here, i.e. what do you use instead? Lucy Kellaway did a thing about this in the FT a while back, and all she could come up with was to use ‘Best wishes’ for people outside the company and just her name for people inside. Now I know that none of the options are ideal – so you could argue that if you take that to its logical extreme, the name-only option makes the most sense. But I think this a) adds nothing (people already know who it’s from) and b) looks cold and unfriendly (although maybe that’s the impression Lucy wants to give). It’s like a tax on bankers – it only works if everyone else does the same, or you suffer in comparison. Even people who put something awful have at least made some kind of effort. Putting nothing just looks contemptuously lazy.

Personally, I start with ‘Best’ and then push on to initials, to kisses, to nothing at all as we go up the familiarity scale. But that’s not really the point; I don’t really mind what people do, just as long as it looks like they’re making some kind of effort. Because if people can’t even be bothered to make an effort with me – which is basically what good manners are all about – then I’m not going to buy from them. Simple as that.

The only problem might be that if things go on like this, before too long people will have no manners at all. Then I’m not going to be able to buy anything - which will make running a business a little tricky.

If that Macquarie guy worked for me, you wouldn’t have been able to see him for dust.

As part of my New Year charm offensive, I've decided to start taking a couple of my staff out for lunch every week. Nothing too posh, you understand (hey, there's a recession on), but somewhere that doesn't have nailed-down seats. The theory is that I can hang out with some of the people in the business that I don't normally see much and get a sense of how they're doing, while they get to ask me anything they like about what's going on in the business - and, naturally, receive a timely reminder of my lustrous brilliance and all-round good-egg-ness. I figure that if I do a couple of people a week, I basically get to see everyone once a quarter.

For this week's lunch, on Tuesday, I'd taken two of my more junior people to a posh burger place round the corner. Having exhausted all the formalities - how's work doing, how's your boyfriend/ girlfriend/ hamster doing, what are your worries, blah blah blah - we were just making idle chit-chat, and the conversation turned to that guy at Macquarie in Australia who got busted perving at pictures of Miranda Kerr in the background of a TV interview. What did I think, they wanted to know.

Now I like to think I'm a fairly laid-back kind of boss. I'm not particularly bothered about stuff like dress codes, or clock-watching, or general office ribaldry, as long as people don't take the mickey, don't offend anyone (much), and deliver what they're supposed to deliver. But I tell you what (and I told my two as much in no uncertain terms): if that Dave guy worked for me, he'd have been out of the door and loading his stuff into a cab before the end of the news bulletin.

The general feeling seems to be that it would have been an over-reaction to sack him. OK, so he made a mistake - but it's only a bit of harmless fun, right? It doesn't affect his ability to do his job - in fact maybe this kind of 'downtime' actually improves it? Besides, what if he was stitched up by someone else in the office? And let's face it, everyone does it anyway. 'There but for the grace of God', seems to be the argument put forward by this 'Save Dave' internet campaign.

Well, sorry, but I don't buy any of that. I understand that men like looking at pictures of impossibly attractive women with very few clothes on. And on balance, that's probably a good thing as far as the future of the human race is concerned. So if they choose to do so in their living rooms, or on the tube, or in internet cafes, that's fine by me. I might think it's a bit tawdry, but it's really none of my business. On the other hand, if they think they're going to do it on my time, in my office, they've seriously got another think coming.

I usually try and avoid making management decisions that people will think I’m only making because I’m a girl (it just encourages the knuckle-draggers to moan that hormonal women shouldn’t be in positions of authority). But in this case, I don’t care. That kind of thing isn’t appropriate in an office at any time – but especially not when you’re on TV. What kind of message does it send about the office culture to any women who want to work at Macquarie? In my eyes, he brought the company into disrepute, and he should have been out on his ear. (Regardless of what Miranda Kerr thinks – after all, she does have rather a vested interest in men leering at pictures on the internet…)

I get the point of stakeholder management. But it still pains me to have to do it.

Entrepreneurs are generally not very good at owning up to their biggest weaknesses, in my experience. Perhaps that’s because we spend so much of our time pretending that we know exactly what we’re doing (when in fact we’re actually making it up as we go along) that we end up losing track. But I’m going to make an exception. This week’s big job – to put together a job spec for the possible new COO role – has reminded me of my greatest failing: stakeholder management.

Yuck. Even typing out the words sends nasty shivers up my spine. Instinctively, I just can’t help seeing it as justifying decisions I’ve already made to people whose input isn’t really necessary. I mean, this isn’t a democracy. The reason I’m running a business is because I want to be in control, and if people come to work for me, it feels like they’ve accepted this state of affairs. So consultation processes aren’t really my thing. However, the bigger the company has got, the more time I seem to spend making sure that the right people are on board with my decisions before I implement them. And try as I might, I can’t help but feel that this is rather an imposition. After all, this is my business, so shouldn’t it be my decision?

On the other hand, I do recognise the benefits. If you spend time getting people on board in advance, it makes life a lot easier later: your senior people feel like their opinion is valued, and they’re much more likely to champion it to the junior staff. So every time I have a big change to make, I force myself to ‘cultivate key influencers’ (even more yuck) before I tell everyone else. But I hate doing it, and I slightly hate myself for doing it.

The trouble is that everyone has an axe to grind. I started with my HR/ office manager (bonkers as she is, she’s a good gauge of how the rest of the company would react). The first problem was that she immediately assumed, as I knew she would, that this person was being hired entirely to render her job unnecessary. I swear to God she was already rehearsing her constructive dismissal argument by the time I convinced her otherwise. The other issue was that this person would obviously oversee the HR function, so a) she’d get a new boss and b) that person would be a potential block on her future progress. On the other hand, I could also see that the prospect of reporting to someone who takes a rather more sympathetic approach to HR issues than I do was probably quite tempting…

Then there’s Mammon, my senior sales guy, and Ace, the guy who’s running my new business (I saw them separately, of course – divide and conquer). Both of them quite like the idea insofar as it will allow me to commit more time and energy to them – but at the same time, the potential arrival of another senior person is a threat to their future pre-eminence. Same goes for the girl who oversees my delivery function: she’s not as obsessed by the size of her pay cheque as Mammon, but she’s still fairly ambitious.

So I’ve spent most of this week trying to sell the idea to them. The good news is that I’m giving them a forum to share their concerns. The bad news is that I’m quite unlikely to listen to them, unless they agree with me (‘Compromise is being someone else’s doormat’, as my Grandma used to say). Told you my stakeholder management skills leave a lot to be desired.