Assholes Are Us

Guy Kawasaki just put up a post called Is Your Boss an Asshole? He does an effective and somewhat horrifying job of listing the kinds of things that asshole bosses do — calling on Saturday, destroying other’s careers, seeing others primarily as means to satisfy their own needs, and a host of other nasty and all too common things.  The point I would add, and as I commented on at Guy’s blog, is that it is important to remember that — although some people are more prone to it than others — power can turn any of us into assholes.

Being an asshole isn’t just something that only happens to others and can’t possibly happen to wonderful people like you and me —  all of us are at risk. As I like to say, assholes are us. To elaborate a bit on what I said in Guy’s blog, if you take a position of power, there are several things you can do to stop yourself from turning into an asshole, to fight back against the focus on your own needs and the tendency to act as if social norms don’t really apply to you:

1. Eliminate as many unnecessary power differences between yourself and others.  There was a great story  in the New York Times earlier in the week about Home Depot’s new CEO ,  Frank Blake, which shows how this is done. He has eliminated the executive dining room, so now employees have to go to the employee cafeteria like everyone else.  He cut his own pay, and most interesting to me:

Mr. Blake has distributed an old company
icon, called the Inverted Pyramid, that lays out the retailer’s
hierarchy, with customers and employees above the chief executive on
the bottom. The image, which fell out of favor under Mr. Nardelli, has
begun popping up in store break rooms and office cubicles across the
company.

“It’s not about me,” Mr. Blake has told investors and
analysts in introductory meetings, according to people who have
attended the sessions.

2. If you don’t have them already, get some friends and colleagues who can and will tell you when you are acting like an asshole. And when they tell you, listen to them.  Remember, power will blind you to all the ways that you are acting like a jerk and all the ways you are hurting other people. If other people tell you that you are an asshole or there are other warning signs (see the ARSE test), and your reaction is that they wrong, odds are you are fooling yourself.

3. Even better yet, hold your subordinates responsible for telling you when you have been asshole and make it safe for them to do so. If you haven’t seen it already, check out "My boss thanked me for calling him a jerk."