‘It was just banter!’ (When banter becomes bullying)

Over the years, there’s a conversation I’ve had more than once with senior leaders who are, by any reasonable measure, decent people. Something has happened in their team - a complaint, a difficult HR conversation, an atmosphere that’s shifted - and they’re genuinely confused. Because from where they were standing, the situation was a storm in a teacup. Ultimately, it was ‘just banter’.

That confusion is worth taking seriously. Not because they’re right, necessarily, but because the grey area here is real - and pretending it isn’t doesn’t help anyone.

Banter matters

Let’s start there. Workplace humour, teasing, the kind of irreverence that makes a team feel like a team - this isn’t trivial. It’s a gauge of how at ease a group are with each other. It’s often how trust gets built informally. How pressure gets released. How people signal that they’re comfortable enough with each other to not be on their best behaviour all the time.

Healthy banter is mutual. It moves around. Nobody is always the target, and nobody is visibly flinching. When it’s working, everyone - including the person being ribbed - is genuinely in on it.

That’s worth protecting. The answer to ‘when does banter become bullying?’ isn’t to eliminate banter.

It’s to understand what actually distinguishes the two.

That pesky word ‘just’

I’ve noticed that the phrase ‘it was just banter’ almost always contains that word: just.

Just in this sentence is doing a lot of work.

It’s minimising. It’s pre-emptively dismissing the other person’s experience before they’ve even had a chance to name it. It frames any discomfort as an overreaction - which puts the person who was uncomfortable in an impossible position. Now they have to defend not only how they felt, but their right to feel it.

That’s where banter starts to curdle. Not necessarily in the original comment, but in what happens when someone signals - directly or indirectly - that it landed badly.

The grey area

Here’s what makes this genuinely difficult. Impact and intent are not the same thing, but they’re not entirely separate either.

Someone can cause real harm without meaning to. That’s true. But intent still matters - not as a get-out, but as part of the full picture. There’s a meaningful difference between someone who made a misjudged joke and someone who uses humour as a consistent vehicle for putting particular people down while maintaining plausible deniability.

The latter is a pattern. And patterns are where the real question lies.

A single comment that missed the mark is a conversation. A repeated dynamic in which the same person is always the target, always expected to laugh it off, and quietly learns that raising it will only make things worse - that’s something else entirely.

What leaders often miss

Seniority changes the equation in ways that aren’t always obvious. When a leader is the one doing the bantering, the power differential matters. People laugh. They go along with it. They don’t feel they can do otherwise; and that performance of enjoyment can be easily mistaken for genuine enjoyment.

This isn’t hypothetical. It’s one of the more common dynamics I encounter. A leader who genuinely believes the atmosphere in their team is warm and playful, while several members of that team experience it as something they simply endure.

The leader isn’t a monster. They’re just not seeing something they’re not positioned to see.

A more useful question

Rather than ‘was that banter or bullying?’ - which tends to produce defensiveness on one side and frustration on the other - the more useful question is: what would it take for someone to tell me honestly if something I said landed badly?

If the honest answer is ‘not much - people feel comfortable raising things with me’ that’s genuinely reassuring. If there’s a pause before the answer, that pause is worth sitting with.

Psychological safety isn’t just about big things. It’s built or eroded in small moments, over time, through exactly these kinds of exchanges. How a leader responds when their humour doesn’t land is one of the more telling signals of the culture they’re actually creating - as opposed to the one they think they are.

This isn’t about walking on eggshells

I want to be clear. The goal isn’t a workplace where nobody jokes, nobody teases, and everything is relentlessly professional. That would be its own kind of problem.

The goal is a leader who is honest enough to ask themselves the harder questions. Who doesn’t need the word ‘just’ to feel comfortable about their behaviour, or anyone else’s. And who has built enough genuine trust in others that if something does miss the mark and needs addressing, someone will actually tell them.

That, in the end, is what distinguishes leaders who are easy to work for from those who merely think they are.

If this resonates - whether you’re navigating something like this in your own team, or simply want to think more carefully about the culture you’re creating - I’d be glad to talk it through.

My approach combines actor training with psychology and the latest behavioural science to develop clarity, presence and authority when it matters most.

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