Morgan Friedman: Hello, hello, everyone. Very excited to have with me Carlos Davidovich today. Did I pronounce your last name correctly?

Carlos Davidovich: Absolutely, yes.

Morgan Friedman: Well, Carlos, I loved our intro call a few weeks ago, and I’m very excited — sitting at the edge of my seat — to hear about your most exciting client breakdown and how you dealt with it. I have my drink in hand. Let’s go.

Carlos Davidovich: Okay, let’s go there, straightforward. So, the point is — I changed my job many times, and this time I started doing what I’m doing today, which is coaching people in organizations. I was aiming, ofcourse, at executive coaching, working with top people. I was not in my own country; I was in another country, so it was a different scenario altogether.

I was working with top people in international organizations, and I was facing a situation where, to be honest, the big fight and struggle was inside of me. What to do? What position to take? Because many times we have wrong assumptions. The situation unfolded like this: I was hired by a company to coach one of their top C-suite members.

Morgan Friedman: Okay.

Carlos Davidovich: That person was, let’s say, intense — but the real definition was a bully. A complete bully.

Morgan Friedman: A bully?

Carlos Davidovich: A bully. Exactly. A complete bully. And very effective, as bullies are. He was very skilled. He knew his job very well, and he was one of the —

Morgan Friedman: Carlos, I’m going to interrupt with a fun interruption for ten seconds. I know you’re from Argentina, where I’ve lived. Just out of curiosity, is there a Spanish word for “bully”? Because as you say it, it’s such a great word — it’s an important and powerful concept — but I’ve never heard it said in Spanish. How do you say it?

Carlos Davidovich: It doesn’t exist.

Morgan Friedman: That’s funny.

Carlos Davidovich: There are kind of similar words, but even when we talk in Spanish, we say “bully.” We can say acosador, or… it’s not easy. There is no single word that captures it. 

Morgan Friedman: So in conclusion, “bully” in Spanish is “bully.” That’s what I’ve learned today.

Carlos Davidovich: To understand the spirit of the word, yes. Because there are some Spanish words, but they don’t transmit the feeling or the impact that the English word carries.

Morgan Friedman: That’s actually a really powerful point — having a word for a concept matters. Because if there’s no word for something, it’s harder to understand it and think about it clearly.

Carlos Davidovich: There are some words that are truly international. Another one that comes to my mind is “feedback.” Feedback is an English word, and if you try to say it in Spanish, it doesn’t make any sense. Retroalimentación.

Morgan Friedman: Getting food again. It doesn’t make sense at all. 

Carlos Davidovich: Or devolución. None of them really work. Feedback is feedback, period.

Morgan Friedman: Great. Okay, let’s go back to the story.

Carlos Davidovich: Back to the story. So he was a bully, a complete bully — very, very successful throughout his entire career. He had been in this organization for a few years already, and he was managing an international team. The organization was in the pharma sector, and he was responsible for top products at an international level. The problem was that the team started having a hard time, and they started complaining.

And let’s be honest — companies play two games at once. On one side, they like bullies because bullies get things done. On the other side, if the situation gets complicated — like a team member wanting to sue the company — they will immediately say, “No, no, no, this is not correct.” This double message is something we see in many places.

The key insight is this: this guy was very, very good at what he did. But one thing I have learned coaching bullies is that they have a blind spot. That blind spot is the gap between the intention and the impact. They don’t understand the way they impact people — the way they deal with people and the way people receive them.

Morgan Friedman: Wow. I want to interrupt just to say — I love this insight. It’s a great piece of learning. I’ve noticed the same pattern, but I never thought about it so clearly or directly until you framed it this way. I’ll repeat it for the audience: with bullies, there’s a gap between the intention and the impact.

The way I would put your same point in my own language: a lot of bully types I’ve known believe that by being clear, strong, and direct, people will do what they say and results will happen. And in my experience, that is sometimes true in the short term — but once you get past the short term, everyone hates that person, and it becomes difficult to form teams and work together. It creates greater problems. So the impact they are having is not the impact they think they’re having.

Carlos Davidovich: Exactly. And the second important concept to understand this dynamic is clearly differentiating content from context. What I mean is: bullies will always tell you, “But what I told them is true,” or, “What I told them is the right way to do things.” And 99% of the time they are right. But the way they say it is the problem. It’s not the content — it’s the context. It’s how they deliver the information that is so painful and impacts so negatively, and that’s what they don’t see. They say, “No, no, I’m very direct. I’m honest.”

I always have the same anecdote. When I ask this kind of personality how they define the way they communicate with people, the answer is always — and I say always — the same: “I’m passionate. I’m a very passionate person.” And that’s the moment I stop them and say, “You’re an aggressive person. This is not passion.” They don’t see the difference, and they don’t see the impact. Passionate is the intention. Aggression is the impact. And that’s what shows up in the team.

Morgan Friedman: That’s interesting. I feel like every situation can be viewed from very different sides, even when the words are the same. With those same words, the bully can say, “I was very clear, honest, and correct.” But if the person on the other side is a sensitive person, they will hear those same words and their soul could be crushed because they are sensitive.

Carlos Davidovich: Absolutely. But that’s not in the bully’s radar. Also — they label whoever doesn’t receive their communication the way they want as being “too emotional.” They say things like, “They react to everything I say.” And here’s another blind spot: they don’t understand that they themselves are the most emotional people ever.

Morgan Friedman: Interesting.

Carlos Davidovich: They are convinced they are very rational human beings. They’re not. And thinking in terms of how the brain works — which is my area of expertise — these people are always operating in what we can call reptilian brain mode. The reptilian brain is the survival brain. It’s fight, flight, or freeze.

These people communicate from a place of constant attack. At some point in their lives, they learned that they could maintain power and feel safe by doing this — and it worked. People don’t fight back, because most people don’t want conflict.

Morgan Friedman: By the way I have so much to say as I find the story fascinating because of a few things. First, I’ve had about a hundred episodes so far, and none of them have dealt with this bully personality. There’s a lot of learning here, and I have personally dealt with a whole bunch of bullies, so as you speak, I’m mapping specific people to everything you’re saying.

What I particularly love about your insight is your last point — every bully type I’ve ever known labels anyone who disagrees with them as “too emotional,” while the bully themselves have enormous emotional highs and lows. They’re either crazy excited and obsessed with something, or they’re depressed, checked out, and disappearing. There’s no moderate ground.

Carlos Davidovich: Absolutely. Totally right. And I was the coach of this person. My goal was to try to make him understand the impact. That was the whole goal of the entire engagement.

But the organization was really pressing — not me, but him. When I say “the organization,” I mean HR, and this person’s boss. Everybody was telling me, in one way or another, “Please change him.” And that’s just not going to happen. If he could understand something, maybe he could change his behavior.

At one point, I found myself at a kind of crossroad. On one side, I had to build trust so that this person would trust me — without that, nothing works. I’m not saying I had to be like him, but I had to genuinely empathize with him. On the other side, I had to be firm and determined enough that he would actually listen to me and absorb what I was saying. And that could have created a situation where the guy would have said, “I don’t like Carlos. I don’t want to work with him anymore. This is over.”

So I was caught in the middle — either lose a very good contract, or play nice in a way that I knew would be a mistake. And then I was also thinking about the impact on the whole organization.

Of course, the organization really wanted to keep this person because he was so effective. But people were leaving the team like crazy. Internationally located team members didn’t even want to speak to him by phone because he was so aggressive. Eventually, the business itself was compromised — under threat — and the organization asked, “What are you going to do?”

It was very hard to replace this person, because — again — most of these people are highly skilled technically at what they do. That’s the paradox: do you retain the value because of the skill, or do you say, “This kind of behavior is not what we want in this organization”?

And here’s another component — the culture of the organization. It’s funny, Morgan, because throughout my working life, so many companies talk constantly about culture. But they never actually talk about the real culture. They talk about what they once defined as culture — and normally it’s written down and hanging on the wall in a corridor.

The real culture of any organization is what actually happens every single day, in the office or now in the home office. That is the culture. And this bully existed in that organization because the culture was accepting that kind of personality.

Morgan Friedman: I like the way I would define the culture of an organization: what people are rewarded for doing. Because often companies will have signs in the hallway saying, “Our culture is being nice.” But if the people who get promotions and raises are the ones who are bullies, then it’s just a slogan on the wall. It’s not the real culture.

Carlos Davidovich: Exactly. The culture is what happens every day. When companies hire me specifically to work on organizational culture, the first thing I do is ask them, “Okay, what is culture for you?” And then I tell them, “Let me shadow your people for a few days in the office. I want to see how they deal with each other, how they talk to each other — and then I will tell you what the culture actually is.” And it almost always matches what you just described. Most of the time, what they say and what they do don’t match.

If you are promoted, rewarded, and given a bonus because you are a tough guy, that is the culture. Full stop.

Morgan Friedman: And I have an instinct — based on experience — that it’s not just that the stated culture doesn’t match the real one. It’s often the precise opposite. Because it’s a culture that rewards bullies, the company, sensing how unhappy people are, feels the need to say, “We are nice.” So often, the fact that they say it is a way of overcompensating for the fact that the reality is the opposite.

It reminds me of Margaret Thatcher’s line: being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to say you are, you aren’t.

And if you are a culture of actually nice people, you don’t need signs saying, “We’re nice.” That energy radiates in every little decision, every little thing you observe. But when you’re not, you need the signs.

Carlos Davidovich: Absolutely right. That is real life. And it’s important to acknowledge because there are a lot of myths around these things.

So then came a moment where there was a business about to absolutely fall apart internationally because of this person. There was a catch-22 situation, and I had to decide what game I was going to play myself. The catch-22 was: if we fire this guy, we have a problem. If we don’t fire this guy, we have a problem. If we let him go, the organization told me, the business will collapse. If we don’t let him go, the team will collapse — and therefore, the business will collapse anyway.

So what to do? And that’s when they called me, and I thought: “Oh my God, this is complicated.” I was just starting my career as a coach after having experience in completely different work. I was new to this, and like anyone new to something, of course you want to be accepted, you want to be loved, and you want to be paid.

In the end, I had only two real choices. I could keep playing nicely with the guy and with the organization — which would produce no solution — or I could play the way bullies actually respond to: open, direct confrontation. That’s what they respect because that’s how they behave with others. It’s the only way they understand that someone is being honest with them.

It’s funny — when I coach them, they say, “My people never propose anything. They never say no to what I say.” And I say, “Wait. Who wrote those rules in the team? Who established them?” And the guy starts laughing and says, “Yeah, me.” “Okay, then stop complaining. You decided that they can only do what you say — my way or the highway. And then you wonder why they don’t propose anything? They don’t want to propose because they know you’ll decide whatever you want anyway.”

Another paradox: they say they want people who will argue with them, who will push back and discuss. But their people will never do it because the dynamic they’ve created makes it impossible.

Morgan Friedman: I have to say — I love the mental model you’re building of the bully. I’ve never quite thought about it this clearly before, but all the bullies I know say exactly that all the time. They say, “No one ever proposes anything.” And you’re exactly right — people know that the other person will either yell at them, or will take their idea and claim it as their own.

Carlos Davidovich: Absolutely. Or they will always go with their own proposal because they always think they are right. And I want to say this clearly: I’m not talking about mean people. I’m not talking about psychopaths. We need to draw a line here.

When I’m called to coach a bully, I do a certain assessment to differentiate functional bullies from psychopaths. If I identify anything that tells me the person is a psychopath, I never take that assignment.

Morgan Friedman: Actually, I’m curious to hear what are the leading indicators or clues that someone is likely a psychopath rather than a bully?

Carlos Davidovich: Oh my God. Okay — in the next four hours, I will explain you. The longest podcast ever. In short, it’s experience, but I can tell you the technique I’ve developed. One thing I use is an assessment called Success Finder, which gives me a lot of data about personality types — and from that I can learn a great deal about the specific bully. But the other thing is the first meeting.

In that first meeting, the person already knows they’re being sent to meet someone who wants to change them, so they begin in attacking mode. Not defensive mode — attacking mode. These people don’t understand defensive mode. Their way of defending themselves is attacking. That’s what they learned from a very young age, and it always worked, so why not to keep using the same technique? If I attack, I’m protected. So when the company sends me someone to “change him”. 

So the guy will start playing tough. What’s my approach? I’ve developed it through failing many times. I start playing tougher than them. The very first thing I say is: “Listen — we’re supposed to have a coaching relationship, but I will not coach you unless you give me a good reason to. You are very successful. You’ve been like this your whole life, and you’ve made it to C-level. If you want to have this coaching relationship, you need to convince me why are you going to change. If you don’t give me a good enough argument, I’m not taking this engagement. Period.”

And you should see their faces. They don’t expect that. They think I’m going to be nice. And I am polite — but I’m also saying: convince me. Give me a good argument for why you’re going to change. Because I tell them honestly: if I were in your position and had been successful being exactly like this my whole career, why would I change? I’d just move to another company that would love me. I did it many times. 

So at that moment, I kept silent. And I say, “You need to tell me why you’re going to change. And if it’s convincing enough, then let’s work together.”

Let me give you two examples from my life.

The first: a man who had been leading his company for 30 years. The headquarters was in the United States, and he was in Canada. His boss sent him a coach because he was a bully. His reaction was, “I’ve been in this organization for 30 years, and now they’re telling me I’m a bully?” The reason, of course, was that one of the employees wanted to sue the company — the first time that had ever happened — and the organization needed to be seen doing something.

I said, “Listen. I understand your situation. You don’t understand why I’m here, and honestly, I don’t entirely understand why they sent me either — you’ve been here 30 years. So tell me: why would you work with me to make a change? Why?”

And he said, “I’m three years away from retirement. Three years. I don’t need the money — it’s not a financial issue. But I cannot be fired after this career, three years before I retire. My heart cannot take it.” And I thought: wow. So I said, “That’s a good reason. You want to keep your job for three more years and not do anything stupid so close to your retirement. That’s valid.” He added, “I wouldn’t know what to say to my family.” So it wasn’t about money at all. It was about pride. About a deeply emotional thing — a very powerful one. And the guy said, “I don’t want to be fired”. Never. I was always excellent. That was one case.

The second case was interesting in a completely different way. This person was also a major bully — and in my mind, you’re not a bully only at work. You’re a bully at home too. That’s just the way you are. And what I found out was that this man didn’t actually care that much about work anymore. He was experienced, he knew how to manage. But he had an issue at home: his daughter had stopped contacting him because of his personality.

Morgan Friedman: Wow.

Carlos Davidovich: So the real purpose of the coaching became about rebuilding the relationship with his daughter. But to do that, he had to do internal work on himself — and that work would also end up affecting how he showed up with his team. I coached him on how to write a letter to his daughter, trying to explain his personality and take responsibility for his behavior. That was a fantastic process.

In the end, he made changes because he understood — through that deeply personal work — the impact he was having. Very, very powerful.

Morgan Friedman: Very powerful. So back to the bully in today’s main story —

Carlos Davidovich: Right. The bully in the story was a really tough character, and when I asked him, “Tell me why you’re going to change,” he knew that he had gotten into serious problems in the organization before. And in this case, like the others, he also didn’t want to be fired. And that was reason enough.

So at one point, I told him, “Listen, I can do whatever I know how to do — but in the end, it’s up to you.” For me it was a tough situation because I was starting my career as an executive coach after experience in other fields. And normally, I play nice. I try to be empathetic. But at that moment, I understood that playing nice was not going to work.

Inside, I had a huge internal fight. Part of me said, “Be yourself, let this guy understand what to do on his own.” But I knew that wasn’t going to produce a result. So I started thinking about the impact of his behavior on the organization, and I did an internal exercise where I tried to put on the hat of the CEO. What would the CEO want from this person? What would it take to keep this person in place, maintain the business, and stop the hemorrhage of people leaving the team?

I said, “Okay, let’s try to get to the core of this.” I conducted a personal 360 — speaking to the boss, to peers, to everyone — to find the key to working with this person. What I found was that the team had a complicated double relationship with him. On one side, they respected him enormously. On the other side, they were scared to death of him.

So what I did was go to the HR department and the boss and say, “Let me work on two levels. I’ll work with him — not to change him 180 degrees, that’s not realistic — but I’ll also work with the team on how to deal with him, and how to genuinely understand that his behavior isn’t personal. It’s his issue. It’s not theirs.”

This process took almost a year. I was really approaching all the components of this dynamic, building bridges slowly. The team didn’t believe, initially, that anything would change. But he started to understand the impact he was having. That was the most powerful shift in his perception — not that he became the nicest person in the world, because he didn’t. But at least he understood the impact.

During this time, I was in the middle of the fire — they were fighting each other — and I had to decide: do I continue with this, or do I walk away? I don’t like giving up easily, so I kept going. And then I did something that turned out to be key: I introduced a lot of humor. 

Morgan Friedman: Interesting.

Carlos Davidovich: Because this kind of personality is very repetitive. They always say the same things. And once you see the pattern clearly, it becomes easier not to take them so seriously — not in a dismissive way, but in a liberating way. And it’s important to say: this wasn’t about firing people. The team was leaving on their own because they didn’t want to deal with him. He wasn’t actively firing anyone. That meant there was more room to work.

So I started training the team to see things from a completely different perspective — coaching the team without the boss present, and coaching the boss separately. And then slowly we started establishing a real connection.

Morgan Friedman: I’m fascinated by the use of humor here. To make sure I understand correctly — are you saying that you trained everyone else to take what he says less seriously, interpret it,and to basically laugh at it?

Carlos Davidovich: Even more than that — and this was the riskiest part — I encouraged them to make jokes with him. Not of him, but with him. Not sarcasm, but something more like: “Man, you’ve told me this so many times. Come on, you’re so repetitive — I get it.” Said in a nice way. These people are not stupid, and they can take it. And they start laughing together. But the team will never initiate that on their own. Somebody else has to do it first to prove that it’s safe — that it can be done. Remember: humor is a very powerful tool, when you know how to use it.

Morgan Friedman: I completely agree. And too often, sarcasm is people being aggressive while pretending it’s humor. Sarcasm, by my definition, is aggression dressed as a joke.

Carlos Davidovich: Exactly. Sarcasm is always an attack. It’s always aggression. It’s a way of targeting something you actually want to say directly — but you don’t quite have the courage to say it directly, so you use the packaging of humor. The humor I’m talking about is completely different. It’s something like: “Hey, come on, we’ve been through this already — can we try something different this time?” That kind of thing.

And when the team started doing that, he could take it. These people can absorb that kind of interaction — in fact, they love it. When they provoke people and get silence, they’re uncomfortable. What they actually want is engagement, pushback, conversation. They love being in the thick of it.

Morgan Friedman: As a former English literature person, I want to jump in on the point about satire — because classically, Roman literary critics divided satire into two types: Juvenalian and Horatian, after the Roman writers Juvenal and Horace. Juvenal was famous for harsh attacks, while Horace was famous for being genuinely funny. Satire was defined as this combination of anger and humor — and critics would say whether a given work was more Juvenalian (leaning toward anger) or more Horatian (leaning toward laughter). And I feel like that same spectrum applies to sarcasm.

Carlos Davidovich: Yes — and sarcasm, I truly believe, is always Juvenalian. It is always attacking. It is always aggression. It is an attempt to attack something through the vehicle of humor because the person doesn’t have the courage to say it directly. Whereas the kind of humor that builds connection has only one consequence — people laugh together.

What I was trying to do was change the environment and remove fear from the equation. Was I able to do it 100%? No. But I was strong enough that the relationship started changing — and eventually, the bully started making fun of himself, by himself.

Morgan Friedman: Oh, interesting.

Carlos Davidovich: Because listen to this — it’s another way to be the center of attention. If the jokes are about him but with his participation, he’s still the center of attention. And that’s what he wants. He loves being the center of attention. He needs to be in the middle of a conversation.

And I’ll use the word “power” here in a positive sense — because the real definition of power is the capacity to do something. These people want to feel that they can do things. If people are laughing with me, I can laugh about myself too, and that’s fine. I don’t feel offended because I’m part of the game. It makes sense?

So it’s very hard to offend these people — that’s not the point. The point is: they maintain their place at the center. The point is power, attention, and — let’s be honest — results. They are very, very effective at getting things done. That’s why they’re where they are.

Morgan Friedman: I really like your psychological model of bullies. And this part — where non-sarcastic humor actually serves as a healthy way for them to still be the center of attention — is elegant. You’re giving them what they want, but channeling it in a way that helps the whole team.

Carlos Davidovich: Absolutely. And remember — they are very competitive personalities. So if someone makes a joke, they need to come back with a better one. They need to win. When you observe the dynamic at that level, it all comes back to the same motivation: to compete, to win, to keep the power and control and be the center of attention. But the real final insight is this — they need to understand that I need them. It’s not just that they need me.

Morgan Friedman: Wow. I love your story, and so many lessons have come out of it. Thank you for your time. This has been great. Any final advice on dealing with and managing bullies to wrap up?

Carlos Davidovich: Yes — one more thing comes to my mind. Something I normally tell them in the first or second session. I ask them, with a completely straight face, “Why do you have a team of human beings? Why don’t you just fire all of them and buy better computers — if all you need is execution and not thinking?”

Of course they laugh, because they know it’s ridiculous. But then I say, “Okay — let’s define exactly why you need human beings working with you and not just computers.” And the impact of that question is significant. Because I then tell them: “Your team cannot be an extension of your arms. They should be an extension of your brain. It’s not that they execute what you say — it’s that they think about what you say.” That’s a great reframe.

Morgan Friedman: And the biggest difficulty I’ve had with bullies in a work context is that, in my experience, bullies are also almost always micromanagers. It’s not just that things need to go their way at the strategic level — they start wars over the smallest, most insignificant details. And part of the challenge is teaching the bully that they’ll actually have more impact if they can let go, micromanage less, and pull their hands back — even if it sometimes means the results will be slightly different from what they envisioned.

Carlos Davidovich: I approach it differently. I work from the position that it is a complete illusion to believe you can manage everything. It doesn’t exist. No one can actually do it. I’ll tell you — in an international organization, this person cannot see what someone in Europe or someone in Asia is doing from moment to moment. That’s simply not possible. So micromanaging, at that scale, is just a way of deceiving yourself about something that isn’t real.

Morgan Friedman: I love it. “Deceiving themselves about something that isn’t real.” Going straight into my notes. Carlos, this has been so full of insight and so interesting. I’m looking forward to your book on dealing with bullies.

Carlos Davidovich: Well, I was actually asked to write a chapter in a book about bullying a long time ago. And I’ve learned a lot more since then. Life — and coaching them — has taught me a great deal.

Morgan Friedman: This has been great, Carlos. It’s been great getting to know you. Thank you for your time. And to all of our viewers who have made it to the end — thank you for sticking around. We hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have. Until next time.