Category: Bosses

The Financial Times is a UK based business paper, but is also widely read in the U.S.  I wrote a piece for them awhile back on "Separating the Best CEOs from the Dolts" and they just came out with a positive, but classically "cheeky" English review by Peter Whitehead. My reaction is that "I wish I could write like that," but I think I was raised in the wrong country!  It is headlined "A timely guide to being a better manager" and here is how it ends:

Having made the case repeatedly that managers need to
consider others in everything they do, Sutton’s perhaps counter-intuitive
conclusion is that they have to accept the role is all about themselves: their
own behaviour is infectious and will be copied; everything they do will be
watched and noted.

Is this good advice? The world’s worst boss, David Brent
of The Office TV comedy series (renamed Michael Scott in the US series)
believes exactly that, with his constant “look at me” antics. But he is utterly
lacking in common sense and compassion. So perhaps the best advice would be
that anyone without these traits should please do everyone a favour and steer
clear of management. 

I confess that I sometimes react to reviews — even positive ones — by whining "the reviewer doesn't quite get it." Mr. Whitehead clearly did, which means he read the book carefully.

P.S. An interview with me about the book just came out at The Invisible Hand if you are interested.

My last post about Boss Poop and the dozens of examples that people posted about Clueless and Comical Bosses (I will post a top 11 list later this week) provide cautionary tales that every person who wields power over others ought to pay attention to — because that clueless boss could be you.  As I have shown here and in Good Boss, Bad Boss, there is extensive and scary evidence that these stories reflect a tendency for people who oversee others, or who simply feel as if they have power, to become more concerned about their own needs, less concerned about the the needs of others, to act like the rules don't apply to them, and a host of other rather scary effects (although not all are bad… for example, power makes people more action oriented, which can be a good thing). 

A new study — actually a series of intertwined experiments — just came out (and was summarized by our friends at BPS Research) that adds to the pile of evidence about power poisoning.  In short, this research shows that when people have power over others, or simply think about a time when they were powerful or role play being powerful, they tend to dehumanize others.  The third of the three studies in this article is summarized by BPS as follows:

In a final study, Lammers and Stapel had 50 student participants
role-play the position of senior surgeon, junior surgeon or nurse before
making a treatment decision about their fictional patient – a
56-year-old man with an abdominal growth. Those participants
role-playing a more powerful position were more likely to opt for the
painful but more effective of two treatment options. Moreover, the
participants role-playing the senior surgeon role were more likely to
show evidence of dehumanising the patient in a 'mechanistic' fashion –
that is, rating him as more passive and less sensitive. The association
between seniority of role and dehumanising was largely mediated by the
decision to opt for the more painful treatment.

See the link to read the rest of the summary. The authors emphasize that there are times when dehumanizing people isn't all bad because it can lead people in power to make "tough" decisions in a more rational fashion.  But as I said at the outset, this is just one more indication that a little power can be a very dangerous thing.

P.S. A note in the spirit of evidence-based management.  This is just one little article that summarizes three studies, and yes it is artificial and does not measure what happens in real workplaces.  So like all research should not be taken as conclusive or the final word.  But it is interesting because adds it just one more twist to the pile of evidence of power poisoning.

Here is the citation:

Lammers, J., and Stapel, D. (2010). Power increases dehumanization. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations DOI: 10.1177/1368430210370042

When I was in New York last week, I had lunch with U.S. News & World Report writer Rick Newman — Rick is also the co-author of Firefight: The Battle to Save the Pentagon.  We had a rambling conversation, with about half of it focusing more or less on Good Boss, Bad Boss, and the other half on a collection of diverse topics.  I warned Rick several times "I have already told you %125 of what I know," but he smiled and pushed on, and said he would show me what he wrote when it was all over.  I made a few minor comments, but Rick really did a nice job of making my rather incoherent and disorganized comments make some sense in the posted interview.  Here is one of the topics I talked about with Rick that, to be honest, is opinion based rather than research based — although the layoff and unemployment numbers fit the plot line:

What are the biggest changes affecting the workplace right now? The biggest change these days is probably the nature of the basic employment contract.
Most companies don't have pensions anymore, you can take your 401(k)
with you, there's no incentive to stay loyal. Layoffs are everywhere.
HP never had layoffs until about 10 years ago. Even Google has had
layoffs.

Sometimes layoffs are an economic necessity. But there used to be a
psychological contract: It used to be, we'll take care of you. Now it's
more like: Take care of yourself and maybe we'll help if we're in a
good mood. People criticize young people for having no loyalty and for
going wherever they want. But why do they owe anybody loyalty? They and
their parents have been treated like shit.