I wrote a post last week called "Of Baboons and Bosses" that described the source supporting my assertion that, in baboon troops, the other members of the troop glance at the alpha male two or three times a minute. I talk about this in my new Harvard Business Review article on "How to Be a Good Boss in a Bad Economy" to help make the point that, when you are a boss, your people watch your moves very closely, especially when fear is in the air.
Julia Kirby over at Harvard Business Review online has added a lovely post on the baboon angle over at the editors blog, called Beware the Baboon Boss. I like Julia's opening:
If your workplace is like many these days, all eyes are on the boss.
The numbers aren't good, the senior team is huddling, and change is in
the air. Everyone studies their supervisor's every move and utterance
for clues to the danger ahead.
It turns out this isn't just a rational response to uncertainty; it's in our evolutionary biology.
Julia edited this and many of my past HBR articles, and perhaps more than anyone else, is responsible for the sequence of events that led me to write The No Asshole Rule, as she wrote me about five years ago to ask if I had an ideas for their annual breakthrough ideas. I said I had an idea, but they wouldn't publish it because it involved publishing a seven-word expletive that would not be acceptable in a respectable publication like HBR. I also added that it probably was not a breakthrough idea. Julia seemed undeterred and, although the essay was called "More Trouble Than They Are Worth," it contained the "A word' at least seven times. The essay was published and it unleashed a deluge of responses — notably hundreds of emails — that led me to realize that the damage done by assholes in the workplace was something that people cared about a lot, and that touched many lives. If Julia had not supported the idea, and urged me to send her text, the book never would have happened.
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