Work Matters

Category: Bosses

  • Clueless And Comical Bosses: Please Help Me With Examples!


    Clueless-pointy-haired-boss-Microsoft-Windows-7-Phone-Designed-By-Dilbert-Committee Good Boss, Bad Boss     is a serious book, and certainly there is plenty of evidence that bad bosses do much harm and good bosses do a great deal of good for their followers, customers, and organizations.  But it is nice to take a break now and then and have some fun.  So I thought it might be fun to come up with a top ten list of funny, weird, astounding, and otherwise amusing (if sometimes destructive) things that clueless bosses do.  Research on power poisoning suggests that because wielding authority over others leads to "dis-inhibition," impulsiveness, and disregard for and detachment from the reactions of others –so bosses are likely to do some pretty strange and offensive things.  Here are a few examples to get you started:

        He walks around the office with his shoes off, and doesn't realize that his feet stink.

        She picks her nose during meetings.

        He talks VERY loudly on his cell phone, even when talking of company secrets.

        She talks and talks and talks, and seems incapable of listening.

        He keeps forgetting to zip-up his pants after going to the men's room.

        When we go to lunch, she eats food off our plates without asking permission

        He calls women "honey" and "sweetheart" and doesn't realize that they find it offensive.

    I would love to hear other examples.  I will propose a top 10 or 15 list after going through your comments and emails.  Bonus points for stories and real examples — but for this kind of thing, let's err on the side of being too silly rather than too serious

    Thanks, Bob

  • A Great Comment From Kelley Eskridge About Bosses and Control

    I have been a huge fan of Kelley Eskridge for awhile now, and have written about her here before and I quote her Good Boss, Bad Boss. I am always especially struck by the power of her writing.  Just yesterday, she wrote a comment in response to my post on authenticity versus the challenge a boss faces of convincing people that he or she is in charge.  Check out a snippet from Kelley's comment:

    "Controlling a team is like driving a car. The whole machine can work
    wonderfully well, but if no one's at the wheel… Who's driving is
    either an agreement, or it's a car crash.
    Whenever I work in a situation where someone else is in the lead, I want
    that person to assume control. I agree to trust them to have a notion
    of where we're going. I do not want to have to backseat drive all the
    damn time."

    I think that is lovely and emotionally compelling.  It also is consistent with a lot of research on the differences between competent and crummy bosses. 

    P.S. I am not entirely sure what Kelley is up to these days; I know she was running Humans at Work and also writing fiction, and has significant management experience.  But her blog suggests she is really focusing on writing fiction these days — clearly, that woman can write!

  • Good Boss, Bad Boss Speech at the Commonwealth Club On Monday Night

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    As indicated in my post about speeches in September, I have been busy talking to various groups about the main ideas in Good Boss, Bad Boss.  I had a lot fun at Pixar, Disney Studios, IDEO, and Google talking to large groups, and also learned a lot from an interactive two hour session with a dozen or CEOs in Boston last Thursday.  Unfortunately, those talks were not open to the public. But the one I am doing tomorrow at the venerable Commonwealth Club is open.  I think this is my fourth or fifth talk at the Commonwealth Club, and the audiences are diverse and smart.  I am also going to have the honor of being introduced by Mary Cranston, the first woman to head a top 100 hundred law firm in the United States (and my wife's former boss!). Mary now serves on several corporate boards, including Visa.   

    Here are the details of the talk and a place to buy tickets online.  It starts at 6PM. 

    Also, for those on Peninsula, I have open talks on the Peninsula on September 30th, at Xerox PARC and at the Silicon Valley Commonwealth Club.

  • A Tough Question From Professor Bret Simmons About Being An Authentic Boss

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    I did an online interview on Good Boss, Bad Boss with Professor Bret Simmons, who is one of my favorite bloggers.  Bret does a lovely job of striking a practical balance between what the best evidence shows about management and other organizational behavior and the practicalities and realities of organizational life (as an example, don't miss his most recent post on the Ten Most Important Leadership Functions).  Bret asked me some mighty hard questions about the book; perhaps the one that caused me to pause most is this exchange (see the rest of the interview here)

    Bret's Question:

    Of
    all your suggestions on how to be a good boss, the one I struggled the
    most with was the first one – take control. Is it really possible to
    “trick” others that you are in control? What conditions might cause the
    illusion of control to be ineffective or even backfire?

    My Answer:

    Bret, I struggled with this too.  In fact, if you look at the table
    that summarizes these tricks I warn “Learn to be assertive enough. Don’t
    become an overbearing asshole when you use these strategies.”  I guess
    there is sometimes a fine line between what is “faking it” versus what
    means a skilled leader uses to convince others that he or she is in
    charge.  There is pretty strong evidence that when we BELIEVE our
    leaders are in charge, we do better work and they have a better chance
    of keeping their jobs and being admired by others.   That list was meant
    to show well-meaning leaders the evidence-based moves that help
    convince others they are in charge so they can get things done.

    So, in
    the case of one leader I worked with a bit who was well-liked but was
    not instilling enough confidence, it was useful for him to learn things
    like he should go to the head of the room and stand-up, to battle back
    when others interrupt him too much, that going through a process of
    grabbing some power and then giving it away (he did this by taking a
    large high status for awhile and then, as he saw how crowded people
    were, he had it turned into a conference room and took a smaller
    office).  On one level, these are “tricks,” but on another level, by
    learning about the kinds of things that were seen by his people as
    evidence that he was “finally stepping-up and taking charge” made him a
    more effective leader.

    When does that backfire?  It backfires especially badly when a boss
    becomes so confident or pig-headed that he or she feels superior to
    everyone else – the smartest person in the room, who doesn’t need to do
    things like listen to people, like allow and encourage them to question
    his or judgment, and to admit and learn from setbacks and failure.  Note
    this is delicate balance that I talk about a lot in Chapter 3 on
    wisdom.  More broadly, the best bosses constantly do a balancing act
    here – acting confident but not really sure (see this post
    at HBR).  I think of three bosses I’ve met who are especially adept at
    his, David Kelley of IDEO, Brad Bird at Pixar, and AG Lafley at Procter
    & Gamble.  In fact, I seriously considered naming the book “Top Dog
    On A Tightrope (this was Marc Hershon’s idea, a guy who, among other
    things, names things for a living – he named the Blackberry and the
    Swiffer).

    I think that Bret forced me to think more deeply what I see as a real dilemma for bosses.  Yes, I believe that all of us, including bosses should aim to be our "authentic selves" BUT we also need to realize that there might be times when we follow or habits and instincts and say whatever is on our minds, that we undermine the ability of others to get their work done, drive them crazy, and undermine their confidence in us.  Or to put it another, I once had a rather unpleasant argument with a colleague where (without using the word), I asked him to be less of an asshole to students, he argued back that  he was just being his natural sense.  I argued back that his authentic self was doing enough doing enough damage to other people and to his reputation that he might want to think about making some adjustments. I am not arguing for bringing in the clones,there is clearly a tough balance to reach here as weirdos, people rough edges, naysayers, and a host of other difficult people play essential roles and, if we stomp the zest out of them or send them packing, our lives will be duller for it, we will make worse decisions, and our organizations will be less creative.

    I would appreciate your thoughts on this dilemma or balancing act, as it can be a tough one for bosses and their followers, peers, superiors and mentors to navigate.

  • When The Shit Hits The Fan, Women Are Seen As Better Bosses Than Men

    A pair of intriguing experiments shows that women are more likely than men to be selected as leaders during times of crisis.  Check out this summary over at BPS research of the "glass cliff" by Susanne Bruckmüller and Nyla Branscombe.  In the first study:

    "They presented 119 male and female participants with different versions
    of newspaper articles about an organic food company. Participants were
    more likely to select a fictitious female candidate to take over the
    company if it was described as being in crisis, and its previous
    three leaders had all been male. For participants who read that the
    previous managers had all been female, the glass cliff disappeared –
    they were just as likely to select a fictitious male candidate to take
    over the crisis stricken firm as they were to select a female." 

    The second study involved "122 male and female participants reading about a supermarket chain described either as thriving or in crisis" and found that:

    "In a successful context, the male candidate was judged to be more
    suitable for the role and was more likely to be selected – a replication
    of the bias seen in real life. More intriguing was that a crisis
    context led participants to attribute fewer stereotypically female
    attributes to the male candidate and to judge him as less suitable for
    the managerial role. Meanwhile, the crisis context didn't alter the
    qualities attributed to the the female candidate, nor the perception of
    her suitability. Crucially, however, she was more likely to be selected
    in the crisis situation – you might say almost by default, given that
    the male candidate was now seen as being less suitable and having fewer
    appropriate attributes."

    The authors overall conclusion is not very comforting as they suggest that people (and perhaps companies too) only prefer female leaders when things have been so screwed up by men that they are desperate enough to try different path.  In their words:

    Our findings indicate that women find themselves in precarious
    leadership positions not because they are singled out for them, but
    because men no longer seem to fit… There is, of course, a double irony here. When women get to
    enjoy the spoils of leadership (a) it is not because they are seen to
    deserve them, but because men no longer do, and (b) this only occurs
    when, and because, there are fewer spoils to enjoy.

    Remember that this is an experiment so we don't know how well it generalizes to the real bosses in real companies in the real world.  There are certainly cases that fit the evidence, such as the appointment of Anne Mulchay at Xerox during the firm's darkest hour.  But it remains to be seen if this pattern can be replicated in sample of leaders and firms.

    What do you think?  Does this ring true?

    Here is the citation: Bruckmüller, S. & Branscombe, N. (2010). The glass cliff: When and why women are selected as leaders in crisis contexts. British Journal of Social Psychology, 49 (3)

  • Good Boss, Bad Boss On New York Times Bestseller List

    We're Number 9! That is, Good Boss, Bad Boss is #9 on The New York Times "Advice, How-To, and Miscellaneous" list, which will be published on Sunday, September 26th.  Don't ask me why they release this so far in advance, I don't understand it — indeed, even after five books, I remain bewildered by the publishing industry. I have a zillion people to thank, but for this post, I will stick to my wife, Marina Park, to whom the book is dedicated to; Marina was not only was enormously supportive while I wrote it, she also taught me much about being a boss because while I mostly just study and write about the craft, she has been practicing it for a long time.  In addition, I was pleased to learn that the new paperback of The No Asshole Rule is #15 on the "extended" paperback bestseller list.  "Extended" means they only list the top 10 in the newspaper, but add five more online and in the pdfs they send around.  Here is the hardcover list.. sorry it is a little awkward looking, but I am not great at this cropping thing!

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  • CEOs Love Their iPads

    A couple months back, I wrote a blog post reporting I had bought an iPad and was trying to love it, but couldn't bring myself to do it.  I am pretty much in the same place with the gizzmo as I write this post.  It sits next to the bed, and I occasionally use it to read The New York Times or do a quick web search — but I still find it awkward for reading or watching movies as it gets heavy in my hand and the glare is bad enough that I have trouble getting it in the right position.  I also wonder about its intrinsic appeal because neither my wife nor kids seem interested in borrowing it from me.

    But clearly there are many others who love the thing, and if my experience in recent months is any guide, CEOs especially love them. I have done a couple workshops on Good Boss, Bad Boss for CEOs in the last few months (for small groups, 12 or so in each case), and was rather surprised to see that iPad's seem to be the tool of choice for these folks.  In June, at the session I did for CEOs, about half of them had iPads.  And at the session I did this week, about 75% of them had them.  I asked one CEO why he had one, and then a a few more jumped in to add comments.  They really did seem to love them.  The reasons I heard included:

    1.  They boot faster than a PC or a mac.

    2. They have much longer battery life than a PC, Mac, or iPhone — which was better for meetings, planes, and home use as they don't have to deal with running out of power all the time.

    3.  They are a lot better to type emails on or read emails on than an iPhone or Blackberry. 

    4.  Related to point 3, because the screen is bigger than a phone, you can more easily glance at emails during meetings than on a phone.

    5. They are much better than a phone for surfing the web — important during meetings as you can do it more quickly and more discreetly than on a phone.

    6. They are less intrusive to use during a meeting than a laptop because you don't have the screen up in front of you, which is borderline rude.

    7. It is almost as good as laptop yet much lighter, and has a lot longer battery life to compensate. 

    If you take these comments as a set, one interpretation is that CEOs spend A LOT of time in meetings and on planes, and it is a better device than a phone or laptop for both settings when you balance all the competing demands. 

    I wonder, how do others who own iPads, or who have considered getting them, react to this apparent pattern?  (The sample I have is very small, but I find their arguments in combination with the prevalence in these meetings to be suggestive and intriguing).  Do any of you do work where the iPad fits in beautifully too?  Or is it just for elites like CEOs?  Given the millions that have been sold, they clearly are not just being bought by CEOs.

  • “Name two great bosses and two bossholes Pink Blog readers might recognize. Don’t be shy.”

    My last post was about the review and interview with me that
    Dan Pink posted earlier in the week about Good Boss, Bad Boss.  I thought it would be fun to
    repeat the last question that he asked me and my answ    er. 

    Here is my answer to the question in the title. Do you agree or disagree?  Who would you add to lists of bossholes and great bosses?

    Let’s start with the bossholes.  My least favorite CEO in recent
    years was Carly Fiorina because I witnessed her lead changes that helped
    destroy one of the most constructive organizational cultures I have
    ever encountered.   I worked closely with a couple HP insiders during
    much her reign (and before that) and saw the spirit of that wonderful
    place die under her leadership – it wasn’t all her fault, other forces
    were in place.  But a CEO who does massive layoffs and then buys
    (actually leases) a very fancy new corporate jet for herself ought to be
    ashamed.  She was infamous for “shooting the messenger” and for being
    impatient with implementation – for example (very similar to President
    Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech) Carly announced that the
    merger integration with Compaq was complete and successful to the horror
    of people on her senior team who still believed that it wasn’t nearly
    done. (Indeed, for example, Mark Hurd took out millions and millions of
    IT costs when he took charge that were created by the unfinished
    merger.)  Carly’s unfortunate experience shows that, to be an effective
    leader, you not only need some wisdom, you also need the right
    experience.  Note that she never had profit and loss responsibility in
    any prior job before coming to work at HP (this was reported by Fortune
    and I have confirmed it from other sources).  Right around the Compaq
    merger, a very knowledgeable Silicon Valley insider who knew Carly well
    said something I thought was a joke, something like “Carly ought to go
    into politics; she gives great speeches and there really aren’t any
    tangible deliverables.”   As most readers know, now Carly is running for
    Senate in California.

    To pick a second bosshole, I believe the current champion here might be Dov Charney, founder
    and CEO of the American Apparel clothing empire, which is the largest
    clothing manufacturer operating in the U.S.  He has done good things
    like paying employees high wages and providing them and their families
    health insurance, and sells hip clothing and developed a great brand. 
    They operate 260 stores in 19 countries.  But piles of evidence  of
    strange boss behavior and bad financial performance now hound him and
    the company.  Although several sexual harassment law suits against
    Charney were dropped, he admits holding a staff meeting naked except for
    the sock on his penis, walking around the office in just underpants and
    referring to fashion models as “sluts.”  The tales of such antics in
    combination with deepening financial losses,
    plummeting stock price, and Deloitte’s concerns about accounting
    irregularities have this once high flying firm in an apparent death
    spiral.   Apparently, among other flaws, Mr. Charney suffered from – or
    perhaps enjoyed – one of the most severe cases of power poisoning in
    recent times – especially the lack of inhibition and impulsiveness that
    are often part of the syndrome.

    To turn to the good bosses, I am a huge fan Pixar’s Brad Bird, Academy Award winning Director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille.  I was part of a group that interviewed him for the McKinsey Quarterly
    a couple years back, and was taken with him.  But I am in even bigger
    fan after talking to multiple people at Pixar and Disney studios about
    him last week.  They love him and love how he encourages open argument
    and makes it so fun – and as one executive who worked with Brad through
    these two films told me “Everyone who works with him once can’t wait to
    do it again.”  And people who work with him are simply blown away by his
    technical skill: John Walker, who was a Producer on both films, went on
    and on with examples of Bard’s amazing technical expertise.

    Finally, my favorite CEO of a large U.S. company in recent years was
    AG Lafley, who led Procter & Gamble for decade.  He is polite,
    persistent, and instilled constructive values throughout the company.
    Like Brad Bird, people loved working with him because he was so smart,
    supportive, and honorable.  And I love his management philosophy: “Keep
    thing Sesame Street simple,” especially in light of the contrast to the
    deeply complex business practices used by Wall Street firms that led to
    the meltdown.

    Again, please let me know your reactions — especially who should be added to the two lists.

  • Dan Pink’s Review and Interview:Good Boss, Bad Boss

    Images Dan Pink, author of numerous bestsellers including Drive and A Whole New Mind, wrote a very nice review of Good Boss, Bad Boss on his blog. I also think he did a great job of capturing the main point:

    The core point, at least as I read it, is that good bosses are adept
    at working both sides of the street. They improve people’s performance and they deepen their humanity.
    As Sutton says, good
    bosses “do everything possible to help people do great work,” yet they
    also “do everything possible to help people experience dignity and
    pride.”

     Dan also links to the answers that I gave to a series of interview questions that he  sent me.  I got carried away answering them — as Dan put it oh-so diplomatically — so they were a "tad long" for a reasonable post.   Dan decided it was best to just put the whole interview on separate link, which he did here.  For better or worse, it is the longest interview in print about Good Boss, Bad Boss.

  • Bad Is Stronger Than Good: Why Good Bosses Eliminate the Negative First

    The Sunday New York Times just published a piece I wrote for their "Preoccupations" section called "How Bad Apples Infect the Tree."  This post digs into the arguments that I made about rotten apples in more detail.

    Of all the tunes in the Johnny Mercer songbook, the most generally beloved must be "Accentuate the Positive" — whether your favorite cover is Bing Crosby's, Willie Nelson's, or someone else's. Chances are that you yourself could summon up the chorus word for word (and click here if you want accompaniment).

    You've got to accentuate the positive
    Eliminate the negative
    Latch on to the affirmative
    Don't mess with Mister In-Between

    It trips off the tongue so easily that you might not even notice that Mercer is telling you to do two things, not just one. Eliminating the negative, as any skilled leader can tell you, is not just the flipside of accentuating the positive. It's a whole different set of activities. For someone with people to manage, accentuating the positive means recognizing productive and constructive effort, for example, and helping people discover and build on their strengths. Eliminating the negative, for the same boss, might mean tearing down maddening obstacles and shielding people from abuse.

    Certainly, every leader should try to do both. Yet, given that every boss has limited time, attention, and resources, an interesting question is: which should take priority? A growing body of behavioral science research provides a pretty clear answer here: It's more important to eliminate the negative.

    The seminal academic paper here is called "Bad is Stronger Than Good" [pdf]. Roy Baumeister and his colleagues draw on a huge pile of peer-reviewed studies to show that negative information, experiences, and people have far deeper impacts than positive ones. In the context of romantic relationships and marriages, for example, the truth is stark: unless positive interactions outnumber negative interactions by five to one, odds are that the relationship will fail.

    Scary, isn't it? Yet it was confirmed by several studies that, among relationships where the proportion of negative interactions exceeds this one-in-five rule, divorce rates go way up and marital satisfaction goes way down. The implication for all of us in long-term relationships is both instructive and daunting: If you have a bad interaction with your partner, following up with a positive one (or apparently two, three, or four) won't be enough to dig out of that hole. Average five or more and you might stay in his or her good graces.

    Studies on workplaces suggest, along similar lines, that bosses and companies will get more bang for the buck if they focus on eliminating the negative rather than accentuating the positive. For some time, I've been campaigning for a certain form of this, urging companies to eliminate the worst kind of colleagues from their workplaces. Research by Will Felps and his colleagues on "bad apples" is instructive. (You can hear him talk about it on This American Life). Felps decided to look at the effect of toxic colleagues on work groups, including what I would call deadbeats ("withholders of effort"), downers (who "express pessimism, anxiety, insecurity, and irritation," a toxic breed of de-energizers), and assholes (who violate "interpersonal norms of respect"). His estimates that a team with just one person in any of these categories suffers a performance disadvantage of 30% to 40% compared to teams that have no bad apples.

    Similarly, another study by Andrew Miner and his colleagues tracked employees' moods, and found that the impact on an employee's feelings of a negative interaction with the boss or a coworker was five times stronger than that of a positive interaction.

    So, negative interactions (and the bad apples that provoke them) pack a real wallop in relationships at work and elsewhere. They are distracting, emotionally draining, and deflating. When a group does interdependent work, rotten apples drag down and infect everyone else. Unfortunately, grumpiness, nastiness, laziness, and stupidity are remarkably contagious.

    My chapter in Good Boss, Bad Boss on "Stars and Rotten Apples" opens with the story of how I got to know a CEO named Paul Purcell. It was after his company, Baird, had landed on Fortune magazine's list of the "100 Best Places to Work". Fortune briefly explained, "What makes it so great? They tout the "no-a**hole rule" at this financial services firm; candidates are interviewed extensively, even by assistants who will be working with them." Having written an entire book on that topic, I immediately contacted Leslie Dixon, their HR chief, and she introduced me to Paul Purcell. As I wrote in Good Boss, Bad Boss:

    Paul told me that he had seen and suffered destructive assholes in past jobs, so when he got to Baird, he vowed to build a jerk-free workplace. When I asked how he enforced the rule, Paul said that most jerks were screened-out via background checks and interviews before they met him. But he did his own filtering too, 'During the interview, I look them in the eye, and tell them, "If I discover that you are an asshole, I am going to fire you."' He added, "Most candidates aren't fazed by this, but every now and then, one turns pale, and we never see them again — they find some reason to back out of the search." When I asked Paul what kinds of jerks are most poisonous, he said: "The worst assholes consistently do two things: 1.Put their self-interest ahead of co-workers and 2. Put their self-interest ahead of the company."

    Clearly this is someone who didn't need any research to tell him that "bad is stronger than good." By refusing to tolerate selfish jerks, Paul Purcell gives us a great model of eliminating the negative. And the fact that he doesn't seem to procrastinate when it comes to doing the unpleasant work of dealing with destructive people and poor performers is another benefit backed up by research. Consider a classic study [pdf] by Charles O'Reilly and Barton Weitz on how supervisors handled "problematic" sales employees (in which category they placed salespeople guilty of bad attitudes as well as other problems like low productivity and lack of punctuality). Bosses of the most productive groups confronted problems directly and quickly, issued more warnings and formal punishments, and promptly fired employees when warnings failed. The words and deeds of these no-nonsense bosses inspired performance because they made crystal clear that they would not tolerate crummy work. Related studies of punishment in the workplace show that employees respect bosses more when they punish destructive characters more swiftly and intensely – so long as they are fair and consistent.

    The upshot is, if you are the boss, doing such "dirty work" is part of your job — and although you might not enjoy playing the heavy, doing it doesn't make you the jerk. If you can't or won't do it, either you ought to be in another line of work or, at least, you ought to team up with someone who can.

    With further apologies to Johnny Mercer, sure, as boss you should spread joy up to the maximum, but your main task is to bring gloom down to the minimum. Get that priority straight, and set the stage for your people to do their best work. Or pandemonium is liable to walk upon the scene.

    Note: I originally posted this over at HBR.org as number 10 of my list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe.  Some of the comments over there are from people who don't quite buy this perspective, and think that accentuating the positive is job one for a boss.  Part of me agrees with these concerns, as in some ways, asking what is more important — accentuating the positive or eliminating the negative — is a silly question.  It is akin to asking "what is more important, your heart or your brain?"  But an evidence-based perspective suggests that step 1 for leading a great team is getting rid of (or repairing) bad actions, procedures, and people and step 2 is amplifying and importing "good" stuff.