Forbes.com has a nice, and slightly censored, story by Tara Weiss on The No Asshole Rule in question and answer formant, called "Are you an A$&*@?." Tara was quite fun to talk to, and was especially struck by the research on the nastiness that happens in hospitals, as her boyfriend is a doctor (a resident as I recall).
The interview also contains a cool new story about coping with assholes that I heard from a former CEO a few weeks ago:
Often we’re trapped with them. Find little ways to avoid them. I
interviewed the CEO of a tech company who had an a——- board member
who screamed at her whenever they spoke. She never had a face-to-face
meeting with him. Instead, when they spoke on the phone, she put the
phone on mute and did her nails. She would unmute the phone every three
to four minutes to see if he was still yelling. She was trapped with
the board member, especially since they had the ability to fire her.
It amazed me to hear this in the halls of the Stanford Engineering School. Even for a CEO, you can see the host of effective coping strategies that people use to ride out a rough time with an asshole — the use of technology to make the interaction "lower resolution" (she told me tried to avoid face to face interactions so she didn’t have to see his nasty expressions and veins popping out), finding small ways to gain control over the source of stress (hitting the mute button to stop it), and when you are trapped with an asshole — whether you work serving coffee at Starbucks or are a CEO — finding ways to distance yourself emotionally from the asshole in question (I love the mental image of her calmly doing her nails, and occasionally undoing the mute button to see if his tiriade had subsided.). Great social psychology. And as I always like to say, it is better to avoid assholes if you can, to get out, but when you are stuck with them, there are sometimes ways to limit the damage, as this clever former-CEO shows us.
Also, Forbes has re-reprinted an online version of the Asshole Self-Test, which is done well. I confess, however, to be partial to the original ARSE test because we’ve had over 13,000 people complete it and it is fun to keep track of the numbers. But Forbes did a nice job.
Leave a Reply