I am always interested in good ideas and good stories about how to fight back against workplace assholes, as I use them to keep refining my list of Tips for Surviving Workplace Assholes. An engineer sent me a good story last week about how he fought back, which is entertaining and suggests some important lessons for both assholes who want to push people around and their targets:
In 2004, I was working for a major
Windows software utility company (name withheld deliberately).
I was the lead engineer on the company’s premier product. We were all
exhaling as we’d just turned the final build over for general release. It was
about 6:30 in the evening, and suddenly the CEO’s right hand man came running
into the software development area, ACTUALLY FLAPPING HIS ARMS, saying that we
couldn’t release the software as the documentation changes hadn’t been
reviewed. Could I do it? Sure, I said,
give me 20 minutes. He then started into a self-important rant about how it couldn’t take 20 minutes because
he was the CEO’s right-hand man and he had
to report back to the CEO that it was done and it had to be done faster
without stops because it was important
to get it done fast and he couldn’t let the CEO down because the CEO had
ordered it. I was walking from my office to the lead tech writer’s office as
this rant was going on. When I stepped into the lead tech writer’s office
I put one hand on the door, looked him
dead in the eye, and waited for him to finish his rant, which took several
minutes. My whole team was clustered in the hall behind the ranter looking over
his shoulder at me, trying to see what I was going to do. The ranter continued,
saying how important it was to get it done fast and sooner and how urgent it
was that this not stop the software release because he’d already told the CEO
that all the release steps were done. When he finished ranting, I
continued to look him straight in the eye and said, "Twenty-five
minutes," and shut the door in his face.
Later I heard that all my team was behind me 110% but they didn’t have the
nerve to say it in front of the ranter…the CEO’s "right hand man".
It isn’t always possible to do what the
lead engineer did in this case – to shut the door in an asshole’s face. I suspect that “the ranter” made the serious
mistake of believing that –- because he was associated with the CEO –- he
had more power than the lead engineer on the company’s most important
product. Note the lesson: It is bad
enough to be an asshole, but if you act like an asshole when you believe that you have
a lot of power, but actually have little, you are in big trouble. There was a double whammy in this case: The ranter didn’t get
the deference that he demanded and everyone around him saw him as jerk.
Being an effective asshole requires
substantial skill, especially at assessing power dynamics, and “the ranter”
clearly didn’t have it.
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