Work Matters

Category: Bosses

  • Good Boss, Bad Boss on Five “Best Business Book” Lists for 2010

    Good Boss, Bad Boss has been selected as among the best business books of the year on five lists I've heard about.  These are:

    1. INC Magazine's list of "Best Books for Business Owners."

    2. One of the Globe & Mail's Top 10 Ten Business Reads of 2010.

    3. One of the four "best of the rest" selections by 1-800-CEO-Read in the leadership category, behind the winner Bury My Heart at Conference Room B. (I love that title, just brilliant).

    4. The New York Post's Round-Up of Notable Career Books for 2010.

    5. The Strategy & Business list of the four best Best Business Books in the leadership category.  See the excerpt below from, Walter Kiechel III's story here, which I found to be generally fun, thoughtful, and well-written (you have to register, but it is free). Here is Walter's rollicking review:

    Better Bossiness

    Finally, for a head-clearing blast of sauciness, pick up a copy of Robert I. Sutton’s Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best…and Learn from the Worst. In a year when too many leadership books combined solemn with vapid, Sutton’s decision to focus on the figure of “the boss” comes across as thoroughly refreshing. Even after decades of study, we may not agree on what constitutes a leader or all the proper functions of a manager, but everybody knows who the boss is.

    If it’s you, however long you’ve been at it, you can probably benefit from Sutton’s breezy tour of the wisdom he has distilled from scholarly studies, his own experience, and the thousands of responses he received to his last book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t (Business Plus, 2007). To say that Sutton, a Stanford professor, wears his learning lightly is to understate the case. At times he wears it like a vaudeville comedian’s gonzo-striped blazer with accompanying plastic boutonniere shooting water. This is a weirdly merry book, perfect for a down year — but not an unserious book.

    Consider, for example, Sutton on the imperative to take control. Yes, you as a leader have to, he counsels, in the sense that “you have to convince people that your words and deeds pack a punch.” And he offers up a series of fairly familiar gambits to that end: “Talk more than others — but not too much.” “Interrupt people occasionally — and don’t let them interrupt you much.” “Try a little flash of anger now and then.” What redeems this from being mere Machiavellian gamesmanship is Sutton’s admission that any control you pretend to is probably largely an illusion — there’s a lot of play-acting in any executive role, he wants us to know. He makes the case that pushing too hard in the wrong way is a lot more dangerous than not pushing hard enough. Given the danger of the “toxic tandem” — your people are always scrutinizing you, at the same time that power invites you to become self-absorbed — leaders are always on the edge of becoming bad bosses, or even worse, bossholes. So he also advises you to blame yourself for the big mistakes, serves you up a seven-part recipe for an effective executive apology, reminds you to ask the troops what they need, and finishes with the injunction, “Give away some power or status, but make sure everyone knows it was your choice.”

    Another chapter title captures the overall aspiration Sutton advocates: “Strive to Be Wise.” His is a street-smart, been-around-the-block-but-still-a-happy-warrior brand of wisdom, rooted in a boss’s understanding of himself or herself coupled with an appreciation that bosses have to take action and make decisions, including doing lots of what Sutton labels “dirty work.” As a boss “it is your job to issue reprimands, fire people, deny budget requests, transfer employees to jobs they don’t want, and implement mergers, layoffs, and shutdowns.” Wise bosses understand that although they may not be able to avoid such unpleasantness, how they go about the dirty work makes an enormous difference. Empathy and compassion are good places to start, says Sutton. Layer on constant communication with the affected, including feedback from them you really listen to, however painful it is. Finally, you’ll probably need to cultivate a measure of emotional detachment, beginning with forgiveness for the people who lash out at you. And maybe reserving some forgiveness for yourself.

    Indeed, Good Boss, Bad Boss is in its entirety a page-by-page guide to better bossly self-awareness. The variety of sources cited can be dizzying. On one page you may get a summary of two academic studies, a quote from Dodgers coach Tommy Lasorda, a recollection of Sutton’s parents, and three examples of bad bosses sent in to Sutton’s website. (At times, the book seems almost crowdsourced and puts one in mind of Charlene Li on the power of social technology to expose behavior.) What gives all this consistency and makes for an enjoyable read is Sutton’s voice throughout — at times yammering, on rare occasions bordering on the bumptious, but in general so “can you believe this?” ready to laugh at the author’s own pratfalls, and so eager to help, that the net effect is sneakily endearing. Rather a comfort in a low, mean year.

    That guy can write, huh?

    As a closing comment, I am tickled with the recognition this book received and certainly that it appeared on The New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists.  But perhaps the most important thing to me is that, when I talk to bosses of all levels — from management trainees, to project managers, to chefs, to film directors and producers, to CEOs and top management teams, the core themes in the book sometimes surprise them a bit, but nh early always strike them as pertinent and central to the challenges they face.   I have talked to some 50 different groups about the ideas in Good Boss, Bad Boss since June and — although I enjoy talking about all my stuff with engaged audiences — there is something about this book that engages people more deeply than any book I've written since Jeff Pfeffer and I came out with The Knowing-Doing Gap in 1999.

    Finally, I want to thank all of you who read my blog for your support and encouragement. Your suggestions, stories, and disagreements (with me me and each other) played a huge role in shaping the content and tone of Good Boss, Bad Boss, and I am most grateful for all the ways you helped.

  • New Study: When NBA Players Touch Teammates More, They and Their Teams Play Better

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    I've written here before about research on the power of "non-sexual touching," notably evidence that when waitresses touch both male and female customers on the arm or wrist, they tend to be rewarded with bigger tips. Plus I wrote about another study that shows when either women or men are touched lightly on the back by women, they tend to take bigger financial risks.  That second study showed that touching by men had no effect.  Well, there is a new study that shows the power of nonsexual touch among male professional basketball players.  You can read the pre-publication version here.

    It is called : "Tactile Communication, Cooperation, and Performance: An Ethological Study of the NBA" and was published by Michael W. Kraus, Cassy Huang, and Dacher Keltner in a well-respected peer reviewed journal called Emotion earlier this year (Volume 10, pages 745-749).

    In brief, here is how they set-up the paper; these are opening two paragraphs:

    Some nonhuman primates spend upward of 20% of their waking hours grooming, a behavior primates rely upon to reconcile following conflict, to reward cooperative acts of food sharing, to maintain close proximity with caretakers, and to soothe (de Waal, 1989; Harlow, 1958). In humans, touch may be even more vital to trust, cooperation, and group functioning. Touch is the most highly developed sense at birth, and preceded language in hominid evolution (Burgoon, Buller, & Woodall, 1996). With brief, 1-second touches to the forearm, strangers can communicate prosocial emotions essential to cooperation within groups—gratitude, sympathy, and love—at rates of accuracy seven times as high as chance (Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, & Jaskolka, 2006). Touch also promotes trust, a central component of
    long-term cooperative bonds (Craig, Chen, Bandy, & Reiman, 2000; Sung et al., 2007; Williams & Bargh, 2008).

    Guided by recent analyses of the social functions of touch (Hertenstein, 2002), we tested two hypotheses. First, we expected touch early in the season to predict both individual and team performance later on in the season. Second, we expected that touch would predict improved team performance through enhancing cooperative behaviors between teammates.

    I love that. As I always tell doctoral students, and I emphasized during the years that I edited academic journals.  A research paper is not a murder mystery.  The reader should know what you are studying and why by the end of the second paragraph — this is a nice example.

    Kraus and his colleagues go onto explain their research method a bit later:

    Coding of the tactile communication of 294 players from all 30 National Basketball Association (NBA) teams yielded the data to test our hypotheses. Each team’s tactile behavior was coded during one game played within the first 2 months of the start of the 2008–2009 NBA regular season. Games were coded for physical touch and cooperation by two separate teams of coders.

    They explain:

    We focused our analysis on 12 distinct types of touch that occurred when two or more players were in the midst of celebrating a positive play that helped their team (e.g., making a shot). These celebratory touches included fist bumps, high fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team huddles.On average, a player touched other teammates (M = 1.80, SD = 2.05) for a little less than 2 seconds during the game, or about one tenth of a second for every minute played.

    They also had coders rate the amount of cooperation by each player studied during that same early season game:

    [t]he following behaviors were considered expressions of cooperation and trust: talking to teammates
    during games, pointing or gesturing to one’s teammates, passing the basketball to a teammate who is less closely defended by the opposing team, helping other teammates on defense, helping other teammates escape defensive pressure (e.g., setting screens), and any other behaviors displaying a reliance on one’s teammates at the expense of one’s individual performance. In contrast, the following behaviors were considered expressions of a lack of cooperation and trust: taking shots when one is closely defended by the opposing team, holding the basketball without passing to teammates, shooting the basketball excessively, and any other behavior displaying reliance primarily on one’s self rather than on one’s teammates.

    Karaus and his coauthors then used these imperfect but intriguing measures of touching and cooperation to predict the subsequent performance of players and their teams later in the season; I won't go into all the analysis they did, but the authors did at least a decent job of ruling out alternative explanations for the link between touching and performance such as players salaries, early season performance, and expert's expectations about the prospects for team performance in 2008-2009.  And they still got some rather amazing findings:

    1. Players who touched their teammates more had higher "Win scores," defined as "a performance measure that accounts for the positive impact a player has on his team’s success (rebounds, points, assists, blocks, steals) while also accounting for the amount of the team’s possessions that player uses (turnovers, shot attempts). "

    2. Teams where players touched teammates more also enjoyed significantly superior team performance than those where players touch teammates less (the authors used a more complicated measure of team performance than win-loss record, it took into account multiple factors like scoring efficiency and assists, and other measures, which correlated .84 with the number of wins that season.

    3. The authors present further analyses suggesting that the increased cooperation among teams where players engage in more "fist bumps, high fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team huddles" explain why touching is linked to individual and team performance.

    Now, to be clear, as the authors point out, this an imperfect study. They only looked at touching in one game for each team.  So there is plenty to complain about if you want to picky.  But I would add two reminders before we all get too critical.  The first is that there is no reason I can see to expect that the weaknesses in this study would inflate the effects of touching; rather, quite the opposite.  The second is that the touching and cooperation were coded by multiple independent coders who did not know the researchers' hypotheses or the patterns they were looking for, and there was very high agreement (over 80%) among them.

    As the researchers emphasize. more research is needed, but this study at least suggests that it is worth doing.  It is at least strong enough to increase rather decrease my confidence in the the touching-cooperation-team performance link.   And the way it plays out in different settings might require some careful adjustments in research methods and employee behavior.  For example,  basketball is setting where touch is clearly more socially acceptable than in the offices that many of us work in.  So if you and your sales or project team all of a sudden decide to start doing high-fives, group hugs, and chest bumps, it might backfire given local norms.  Perhaps a more reasonable inference is that, given what is socially acceptable where you work, touching on the high side of the observed natural range just might help.

    I would love to hear reader's comments ont his research, as it is quite intriguing to me.

    P.S.  No, this is not an invitation for you creepy guys out there to start grabbing your colleagues and followers in inappropriate ways that make them squirm and make you even more disgusting to be around!

     

  • Building a Better Boss: A Webinar With Polly LaBarre and Me

    Labarre2007-bw Polly LaBarre has been developing, sparking, and spreading ideas about innovative companies and people for about 15 years now, first as one of the most insightful (and downright fun) editors of Fast Company in its early days, then as a TV personality who did cool innovation stuff at CNN, co-author of Mavericks at Work, a great speaker at events of all kinds, and now at her latest adventure, the Management Innovation Exchange (or MIX) — which she is  leading with Gary Hamel, Michele Zanini, and David Sims.  I love the MIX Manifesto:

    Why Not?

    What law decrees that our organizations have to be bureaucratic, inertial and politicized, or that life within them has to be disempowering, dispiriting and often downright boring? No law we know of. So why not build organizations that are as resilient, inventive, inspiring and socially responsible, as the people who work within them? Why not, indeed. This is the mission of the MIX.

    I've known Polly at least 12 years, as I was involved a bit in the delightful madness of Fast Company conferences and other things in its crazy early years, and she wrote one of the best stories on Weird Ideas That Work. Polly is also, as many of you will recall, the person who I learned the phrase "Jargon Monoxide" from, which I still love. 

    As part of the MIX adventure, Polly and I are doing a webinar on bosses on this Thursday, December 9th at 11AM Eastern.  The basic plan is that I will spend about 25 minutes or so presenting core ideas from Good Boss, Bad Boss.  Then Polly and I will spend 15 or 20 minutes have a more rollicking a no doubt less linear conversation about it, and then the last 15 minutes or so will be more general Q&A. Polly is fun and always imaginative; I hope you will join us — and yes, it is free! Once again, you can sign-up here.

  • Asshole Bosses and You: A Cartoon By Team Synchronicity at North Carolina State


     

    I just got an email from Scott Bolin, an MBA student at North Carolina State, who worked with his team of fellow MBA's,  James Wall, My Le, and Bikram Jit Singh, create a funny and well-crafted cartoon called Asshole Bosses and You.  It not only is quite funny, "Team  Synchronicity," as they call themselves, did a great job of summarizing the main ideas in The No Asshole Rule.   I love the creativity, and while it may not be my place, I would call it "A" work if their teacher, Professor Roger Mayer, asked for my advice!  I especially love the way the evil boss looks and sounds.

  • CEO Decision-Making: A Great Observation By Venture Capitalist Ben Horowitz

    I have been reading through "Ben's Blog," which is written by Ben Horowitz of Andreesen Horowitiz (a firm that just raised 650 million, yikes!)  He wrote a great post awhile back on how the firm evaluates CEOs. Read the whole thing, it is inspired.  I especially love this part, because it is so true and explodes the myth of the all knowing and all powerful CEO:

    Courage is particularly important, because every decision that a CEO makes is based on incomplete information. In fact, at the time of the decision, the CEO will generally have less than 10% of the information typically present in the ensuing Harvard Business School case study (emphasis added by me).  As a result, the CEO must have the courage to bet the company on a direction even though she does not know if the direction is right. The most difficult decisions (and often the most important) are difficult precisely because they will be deeply unpopular with the CEO’s most important constituencies (employees, investors, and customers).

    This point dovetails well with the quote at the top of Ben's Blog:

    There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. - John Von Neumann

    I will poke around more; he is a very thoughtful guy. Also, Ben's point reminds of something I heard Andy Grove say several years back along similar lines — see this HBR post on how a good boss is confident, but not really sure.

  • Dan Pink: “It’s a short step from scale to sclerosis.”

    Dan's lovely quote is from a story in this morning's New York Times.  It is about how Google has become so big that it has lost its start-up feel and some of its best employees are heading for more exciting places, especially Facebook.  As further evidence of Google's concern about a talent drain, Google gave every employee a 10% (or larger) raise this month.  I agree with the story's premise that Facebook is one of the hottest employers in Silicon Valley, partly because they do give technical folks very cool work (although so does Google) and partly because they are pre-IPO, so there is the lure of a big payday when they go public. 

    The challenges of scaling an exciting small company into a big one are not easy (see this great post by venture capitalist on Taking The Mystery Out of Scaling a Company, which I will likely do a longer post on soon).  But I do think that Google has done a pretty good job here; size creates complexity that is unavoidable, but they've done a good job of staying pretty lean and not adding excessive rules and constraints compared to most rapidly growing companies.  But the process whereby people leave a once small company to start their own company or to join a smaller and more exciting one has always been part of the growth cycle in every company, especially in Silicon Valley.  Indeed, during the glory days of Hewlett-Packard, they fueled the growth of Silicon Valley with employees who left to start their own companies (including Steve Wozniak; his Apple PC to them, but they didn't want it).   Although the loss of specific employees was regretable, these same employees helped fuel an ecosystem of innovation that benefits HP to this day — and the same is true of Google. 

    I wonder, what other companies have impressed people for their ability to scale without sclerosis, and which companies are horror stories of red-tape, unnecessary rules, and petty politics, and bulky bureaucracies?

    P.S. The large company that has done the most impressive job of scaling (although there are some unattractive features about them) is Wall-Mart.  Their lack of excessive complexity and action orientation is really something.

  • Snakes Graphic from New York Times Bad Apples Story, Plus Workplace Asshole Resources

     
    28pre-articleInline Snakes My Sunday New York Times piece on How Bad Apples Infect the Tree was printed with this graphic, which portrays the vile workplace that the star of the story, "Ruth," coped with successfully — and then escaped.  I like it, as it conveys the way it feels to be in a workplace where assholes are everywhere.  Here are some key posts related to challenge of dealing with vile bosses and workplaces:

    1. Check out my tips for dealing with asshole infected workplaces

    2. If you want to help determine if you are a certified asshole or not (or someone you work with is or is not), take the ARSE, a 24-item self-exam.  About 250,000 people have completed it.

    4. Here is my honor roll of places that have no asshole rules.

    5. If you want to determine if you work for a great boss, or a "brasshole," complete the BRASS (Boss Reality Assessment System).

    6. Here are two videos of me talking about The No Asshole Rule, the first is a 50Lessons interview and the other is a CNBC Story called The Jerk at Work.

    7. Here are two videos about my new book Good Boss, Bad Boss.  The first is a CNN appearance and the other is a speech I gave that summer at an AlwaysOn conference at Stanford.

    8. Check-out my post on "Bad is Stronger Than Good" to see more detail about the damage that rotten apples do, and ways that good bosses deal with them.

    Please let Work Matters readers know of other resources that you find to be helpful.

     

     

  • The Power of Escaping a Vile Workplace: His ARSE Score Dropped from 12 to 2

    One of the main themes in The No Asshole Rule is that, if you work with a bunch of mean-spirited creeps, it is difficult to avoid catching these "adult cooties."  There are at least two reasons this happens.  The first is that a pile of studies show that emotions and behavior patterns are remarkably contagious — that without realizing it, we mimic the way that people around us act.  The second reason is self-preservation: If you work with a bunch of nasty creeps who put you down all the time, treat you as if you are invisible, bad-mouth you, and tease you in hostile ways, sometimes the only way to protect yourself (for better or worse) is to return fire.   These points are supported by academic research, especially on emotional contagion.

    Yet it is always fascinating to see how this stuff plays out in the real world. I got an intriguing email the other day from a fellow (who had written me a second time) to report a big drop in his ARSE (Asshole Rating Self-Exam) score after leaving an asshole-infested workplace and moving to a civilized one.  Here is his email, with names of companies and people removed:

    Hi Bob, I sent you an email several years back (I believe around March 2008) when I left a horribly poisonous company after less than 3 months of employment.

    Since then I have started with [an energy company].  Very different environment. It's not Shangri-la but it's definitely a more positive workplace.

    When I was working for [the horribly poisonous company ] I had taken the ARSE exam and scored a 12 (after answering honestly). Today, I retook the test (answering honestly again) and scored a 2. I've sent the test to others in my work group and asked them to give me their test scores. The highest score was a 6.

    I also find myself much more productive and spend most of my time working on how to achieve the group's goals instead of how to protect myself.

    This story also reinforces a point I make over and over again on this blog and  other places that I write and speak: If you are in an asshole-infested work group or organization, the best thing you can do is to get out as fast as you can.  Yes, there are ways to limit the damage, fight back, and to make changes — but they don't always work, and even when they do, you can suffer a lot of damage in the process.

    Note, for readers who may not know, the ARSE, or Asshole Rating Self-Exam, is a 24 item self-test that you can take to determine if you are a certified asshole, a "borderline" case, or not an asshole at all.  Many people also complete with someone else in mind, such as a boss or co-worker.  At last count, it had been completed by just 250,000 people.

    P.S. This is a revised version of a post that first appeared here early this year.  I thought it was a good time to reprint it as it is related to the "bad apple" story that was published in Sunday's New York Times.  In particular, this post reinforces  the importance of escaping from a vile workplace.

  • Bosshole Sues Clown For Not Being Funny Enough

    Since The No Asshole Rule was published in paperback a couple months back, the inflow of asshole stories into my inbox has been on the upswing.  I am getting at least three a day lately, and last week, I got ten one day.  I also expect an upswing next week, as I have a piece coming out in The New York Times business section this Sunday called "When Bad Apples Infect The Tree. "  I only share the most striking and instructive of such stories here; I got one Wednesday that certainly qualifies. The woman who wrote me works for a guy who clearly is a candidate for bosshole of the year. I am leaving out some parts of the email for length and also to protect her identity.  Consider this excerpt from a woman who finally took a job after searching for over a year:

    I was kind of desperate and took this job even though my gut said, "not a good idea."  You should always follow your gut.  I have almost walked out several times.  He lies about my benefits and salary.  He stated one salary and then told me once I started that the salary he quoted included potential bonus.  Of course, there is not going to be any bonus. 

    I don't get a lunch hour, and have to work at my desk or he calls me or texts me all the time.  In this year's time I took some time during lunch twice to go to doctor's appointments and he complained that I needed to not go so much as he was feeling taken advantage of.  Of course, his asking me to stop off at the grocery store and buy milk for him and his family and bring it to him (he was working at home) since it was on my way doesn't constitute being taken advantage of. 

    Needless to say, he has been a nightmare.  He has even texted me in the middle of the night demanding a report be redone immediately, and I actually did it.  Complete and total asshole.  And he's an asshole in his personal life.  His son had a birthday party and they hired a clown.  Well, he wasn't happy with the clown so he and his wife sued the clown to get their money back.  Seriously, this guy make millions a year and he sues a clown??? 

    She added "I've got to get away from asshole.  He's is like a vampire, sucks the joy out of life."  

    No kidding. I hope she finds a better job with a better boss as soon as possible.  I was careful to advise her, however, to resist the temptation to storm out, to tell her boss to take this job and shove it, as it is a lot easier to find a new job when you already have one.

     

  • Why a CEO Needs a Candid Advisor from OUTSIDE the Organization

    I was reading through notes I took about six months ago during a talk given by a CEO of a large company, who was fired by his board because his firm had serious performance problems — and was taking great risks — that he never learned about until it was too late, and the firm was in deep trouble.  I can't identify him, but as I have warned here, at HBR,and in Good Boss, Bad Boss, every boss risks living in a fool's paradise — and the more power the boss wields over others, the greater the risk.

    Here is his comment:

    "You desperately need a candid adviser.  When you become CEO, you get a lot of bullshit.  You don't information so much as you get sales pitches.  You're alone in the ring."

    This guy learned the hard way; I offer it so others can avoid the pain and obvious embarrassment he felt.  He looked like wounded animal during this talk, but I had to give him credit for being honest. 

    P.S. If you read Andrew Sorkin's well-crafted Too Big To Fail, you can see how out of touch the leaders of big financial services firms were in the run-up to the meltdown.