Work Matters

Category: Bosses

  • Felt Accountability: Some Emerging Thoughts

    This blog and much of the rest of my life were swamped last week by the intense reactions to the story about how badly United Airlines treated Phoebe and her parents when she traveled as an unaccompanied minor.  You can read the blog post with the original story (and the 90 comments that were not too hostile to print) and the family's statement if you missed it. Also, Diego at Metacool did an insightful post about why the story went so viral.

    At some point, I should write a post with the twists and turns of the story: the surprising hostility, the lies and veiled threats from the media, the stories about United that are far worse than the one published here (warning: stranded older teenagers might be worse than stranded young kids in some ways as they fall into a weird no-mans-land), and the senior executive ( I won't name him, he can out himself) who is on United constantly because he has no choice for his job, despises what they have devolved to, and reports he is sending back the expensive gift he got a few days ago to thank him for the 2 million miles he has flown with United — he is going to suggest that they use the money to give some passenger a little better (or at least less bad) service.

    As I recover from all this madness, I continue to think about felt accountability, the concept that I used to frame the United story.  Huggy Rao and I are rather obsessed with this notion as it is so central to scaling-up excellence — and for de-scaling bad behavior of all kinds.   United is, I believe, a place that has lost that feeling of mutual obligation to do the right thing, where management helps employees, employees help management, employees help each other, employees help customers,  and where customers feel compelled to pitch and play a helpful role too. 

    I am thinking — Huggy gets part of the blame here too — that there might be four different levels or kinds of accountability that a group or organization might have, which go something like this:

    Authorship

    This comes from my friend, early stage venture capitalist, and d.school teaching star Michael Dearing — we heard it just yesterday from him.  This is what you get get in a small start-up, from an inventor, and yes, from book authors like me.  That feeling that not only am I obligated to do the right thing, but that I am the person responsible for designing and making it as great as I can.  Steve Jobs had this in spades, of course, but you mostly see it in smaller organizations or pockets of bigger organizations.  I think of Brad Bird at Pixar as another example, especially his amazing efforts on The Incredibles, how it was his vision, but how he still instilled the feeling in so much of team:  Whatever little part they were working on, he made many members of the team feel as if they were authors — if you want the feel of working with Brad, although DVD's are fading, check out the "behind the scenes" material on The Incredibles DVD.  Amazing stuff. 

    Mutual Obligation

    David Novak, CEO of Yum! brands, argues that this should be the goal of a great leader, to create a place where it feels like you own it and it owns you.   This is what United has lost, what I still feel at Virgin America, JetBlue, and Southwest most of the time.  IDEO and McKinsey have the same feel, as do Procter & Gamble and GE.  I saw it at the Cleveland Clinic when I was patient there.  I also think of people who work for the Singapore government, who can be remarkable in this regard.  These organizations aren't perfect, none can be, but there is palpable weight on people, they feel pressure to do the right thing even when no one is looking, as the old saying goes. And they pressure others to do so as well.   

    Indifference

    Think of the average hair salon, where each stylist rents a chair.  Or a group dental practice, where dentists share a common receptionist and a few services and little else. Some organizations are designed this way and can be quite effective. The mutual dependence is weak, it is a "we don't do much for you, so you don't have to do much for us" situation.   People don't have contempt for their colleagues or customers, it is just indifference.  I was thinking that United had devolved to this state.  But after the deluge last week, I realized it was worse than that.  Hence, my proposed last category.

    Mutual  Contempt

    I first heard hints of this notion at an unnamed university I worked at briefly quite a few years ago.  Right after I arrived, one of my new colleagues said something "this is the kind of place where, when you a full professor, you not only don't care about your colleagues, you feel good when something bad happens to them."   I should hasten to add that this was probably an overstatement, that such contempt seemed to be largely between groups and departments, not so much within them — and they have new leadership and things seem to be better. 

    BUT I also fear that this describes the modern United Airlines, everyone seems to despise everyone else.  I hope I am wrong about this, but the awful stories rolled in from so many sources that it seems as if all the years of cost-cutting, all the battles with unions, all the management changes, all the stress that customers have endured over the years have conspired to bring the organization — at least most it — to this dark place.   It appears that many United employees are keenly aware of this sad state of affairs and it hurts them deeply — especially front line employees.

    I was especially struck by a long comment from a guy who said he was a 25 year United pilot.   If you want to read the whole thing, it takes awhile to get there from the original post as there are 90 comments, and you have to click about four pages back, it is by Greenpolymer, August 14th, at 9:24 pm.  I think this link gets you to the right page if you scroll down toward the bottom.

    This pilot tells a brief story earlier in the post that really got to
    me. It reflects terribly on United's management, and shows that people who act on feelings they are accountable to passengers are punished  — despite claims by senior executives to the contrary:

    I had the
    gall to apologize to my 150 passengers for a shares delay of 45 minutes
    one day. I was asked to write a letter of apology TO MANAGEMENT for
    mentioning the problem. (I think the videos also say something about
    being truthful and taking responsibility)

    This is the worst — and most disturbing — part:

    I used
    to be the Captain who ran downstairs to make sure the jetway air
    conditioning was cold and properly hooked up. Who helped the mechanic
    with the cowling and held the flashlight for him. I used to write notes
    to MY guests, and thank them for their business. I wrote reports,
    hundreds of reports, on everything from bad coffee to more efficient
    taxi techniques.

    No more. I have been told to do my job, and I do my job. My love
    for aviation has been ground into dust. After 15 years of being lied
    to, deceived, ignored, blamed falsely; and watching the same mistakes
    being made over and over again by a "professional management" that never
    seems to learn from the copious reports of our new "watchers", I give.

    It's not an easy thing to do. I am an Eagle Scout, an entrepreneur,
    and a retired Air Force Officer with over 22 years of service. Those
    twelve points of the Scout law still mean something to me, especially
    the first three. I have been in great units and not so great units, and
    the difference ALWAYS came down to LEADERSHIP. Most (and I will be the
    first to admit not all) of the employees that you all have been talking
    about here are desperate. They would give anything to find a LEADER,
    with a VISION, and a sense of HONOR to lead this company.

    Painful, isn't it?  "I used to be… I used to be… I used to be."  I think he is a victim of the years of contempt, which is something far more vile than indifference — not just for United customers, but for people like him who want to care.

    Once again, this post is just to explore some emerging ideas — and to start stepping back from the United incident (although clearly I have not been completely successful at that).  To return to the big picture:

    1. Any comments on the my four categories?  Do they ring true? Any advice?

    2. Now the hard part.  We will return to this one.  How do you build an organization that starts and remains a place where felt accountability prevails?  Tougher still, once it is lost — as seems to be the case at United — how do you get it back?  Or is it impossible?

  • Adding Women Makes Your Group Smarter — The Evidence Keeps Growing

    I was intrigued to see the new study that shows companies perform better when they have women on their boards.  Check out this story and video at CNBC.   Here is the upshot: "Credit Suisse analyzed more than 2,500 companies and found that companies with more than one woman on the board have outperformed those with no women on the board by 26 percent since 2005."

    This result becomes even more compelling when you pair it with a rigorous study done a couple years ago.  It showed that groups that have a higher percentage of women have higher "collective intelligence" — they perform better across an array of difficult tasks "that ranged from visual puzzles to negotiations, brainstorming, games and complex rule-based design assignments," as this summary from Science News reports. In that research, the explanation was pretty interesting, as the authors set out to study collective intelligence, not gender.  As Science News reported:

    Only when analyzing the data did the co-authors suspect that the number of women in a group had significant predictive power. "We didn't design this study to focus on the gender effect," Malone says. "That was a surprise to us." However, further analysis revealed that the effect seemed to be explained by the higher social sensitivity exhibited by females, on average. "So having group members with higher social sensitivity is better regardless of whether they are male or female,"

    Yet, despite all this, there is still massive sexism out there, especially in the upper reaches of many corporations. Note this report from the Women's Forum: "While women comprise 51% of the population, they make up only 15.7% of Fortune 500 boards of directors, less than 10% of California tech company boards, and 9.1% of Silicon Valley boards." 

    Pathetic huh?  And it is pretty good evidence that all those sexist boys who love going to board meetings and retreats unfettered by those pesky women are just hurting themselves — and their shareholders — in the end.  But perhaps there is justice in the world, as this just may be a case where "times wounds all heels."

    Indeed, I wonder when we will see the first shareholders' suit where a company that has no women on the board, and suffers financial setbacks, is sued.  Their failure to do so could be construed as a violation of their fiduciary responsibility.  I know this sounds silly, it does to me.   But lawyers and shareholders have sued — and won — over far more absurd things, as this would at least be an evidence-based claim (albeit one that stretches the evidence a bit too far for my tastes).

  • Wired Story Wraps With My Argument That Steve Jobs Is Like A Rorschach Test

    2012_08

    I can't even recall quite when it happened, but several month back a Wired reporter named Ben Austen called me about a piece he was doing on Steve Jobs' legacy.  I confess that kept the conversation short, in large part because I was just getting tired of the story — and I think everyone else is as well.  But this turned into the cover story, which — despite my lack of enthusiasm about the topic — is one of the most balanced and well-researched pieces I have seen.  At least that became my biased opinion after I saw that he plugged my last two books in the final three paragraphs!  Here is the whole piece if you want to read it and here is my argument — you can read the whole excerpt about Jobs as a Rorschach test here, where I put it in earlier post. Here is how Ben Austen ended his piece:

    As he was writing his 2007 book, The No Asshole Rule, Robert Sutton, a professor of management and engineering at Stanford, felt obligated to include a chapter on “the virtues of assholes,” as he puts it, in large part because of Jobs and his reputation even then as a highly effective bully. Sutton granted in this section that intimidation can be used strategically to gain power. But in most situations, the asshole simply does not get the best results. Psychological studies show that abusive bosses reduce productivity, stifle creativity, and cause high rates of absenteeism, company theft, and turnover—25 percent of bullied employees and 20 percent of those who witness the bullying will eventually quit because of it, according to one study.

    When I asked Sutton about the divided response to Jobs’ character, he sent me an excerpt from the epilogue to the new paperback edition of his Good Boss, Bad Boss, written two months after Jobs’ death. In it he describes teaching an innovation seminar to a group of Chinese CEOs who seemed infatuated with Jobs. They began debating in high-volume Mandarin whether copying Jobs’ bad behavior would improve their ability to lead. After a half-hour break, Sutton returned to the classroom to find the CEOs still hollering at one another, many of them emphatic that Jobs succeeded because of—not in spite of—his cruel treatment of those around him.

    Sutton now thinks that Jobs was too contradictory and contentious a man, too singular a figure, to offer many usable lessons. As the tale of those Chinese CEOs demonstrates, Jobs has become a Rorschach test, a screen onto which entrepreneurs and executives can project a justification of their own lives: choices they would have made anyway, difficult traits they already possess. “Everyone has their own private Steve Jobs,” Sutton says. “It usually tells you a lot about them—and little about Jobs.”

    The point at which I really decided that the Jobs obsession was both silly and dangerous came about a month after his death.  Huggy Rao and I were doing an interview on scaling-up excellence with a local CEO who founded a very successful company — you would recognize the name of his company.  After I stopped recording the interview, this guy — who has a reputation as a caring, calm, and wickedly smart CEO — asked Huggy Rao and me if we thought he had to be an asshole like Jobs in order for his company to achieve the next level of success…. he seemed genuinely worried that his inability to be nasty to people was career limiting. 

    Ugh.  I felt rather ill and argued that it was important to be tough and do the dirty work when necessary, but treating people like dirt along way was not the path to success as a leader or a human-being.  Perhaps this is my answer to the Steve Jobs Rorschach test: I believe that Jobs succeeded largely despite rather than because of the abuse he sometimes heaped on people.  Of course, this probably tells you more about me than Jobs!

  • Can You Handle the Mess?

    Proto messy

    Remember that speech from a  Few Good Men where Jack Nicholson famously ranted at Tom Cruise "You can't handle the truth?" I was vaguely reminded of it when I saw this picture. It reminded me that, when it comes to creativity and innovation, if you want the innovations, money, and prestige it sometimes produces, you've get to be ready to handle the mess. 

    I love this picture because it is such a great demonstration that prototyping — like so many other parts of creative process — is so messy that it can be distressing to people with orderly minds.  This picture comes from a presentation I heard at an executive program last week called Design Thinking Bootcamp. 

    It was by the amazing Claudia Kotchka, who did great things at VP of Design Innovation and Strategy at P&G — see this video and article.  She built a 300 person organization to spread innovation methods across the company. She retired from P&G a few years back and now helps all sorts of organizations (including the the Stanford d school) imagine and implement design thinking and related insights.  As part of her presentation, she put up this picture from a project P&G did with IDEO  (they did many). We always love having Claudia at the d.school because she spreads so much wisdom and confidence to people who are dealing with such messes.

    That is what prototyping looks like… it even can look this messy when people are developing ideas about HR issues like training and leadership development and organizational strategy issues such as analyses of competitors.

  • Dysfunctional Internal Competition at Microsoft: We’ve seen the enemy, and it is us!

    My colleague Jeff Pfeffer and I have been writing about the dysfunctional internal competition at Microsoft for a long time, going back to the chapter in The Knowing-Doing Gap (published in 2000) on "When Internal Competition Turns Friends Into Enemies."  We quoted a Microsoft engineer who complained there were incentives NOT to cooperate:

    "There are instances where a single individual may really be cranking and doing some excellent work, but not communicating…and working within the team toward implementation.  These folks may be viewed as high rated by top management… As long as the individual is bonused highly for their innovation and gutsy risk-taking only, and not on how well the team accomplishes the goal, there can be a real disconnect and the individual never really gets the message that you should keep doing great things but share them with the team so you don’t surprise them."

    And we quoted another insider who complained about the forced curve, or "stacking system:"

    This caused people to resist helping one another.  It wasn’t just that helping a colleague took time away from someone’s own work.  The forced curve meant that “Helping your fellow worker become more productive can actually hurt your chances of getting a higher bonus.”

    This downside of forced-rankings is supported by a pretty big pile of research we review in both both The Knowing-Doing Gap and in Hard Facts, and I return to a bit in Good Boss, Bad Boss.  The upshot is that when people are put in a position where they are rewarded for treating their co-worker as their enemy, all sorts of dysfunctions follow.  Forced rankings are probably OK when there is never reason to cooperate — think of competitors in a golf tournament — or perhaps when sales territories or (for truck drivers and such) routes can be designed so that people don't need to cooperate.  And there is one trick I've seen used (at GE for example) where people are ranked, but part of the ranking is based on how much they help others succeed — but people at GE have told me that forcing the firing of the bottom 10% can still create lots of problems (in fact, my understanding is that GE has softened this policy). 

      As my colleagues Jeff Pfeffer loves to say, the assumption that the bottom 10% have to go every year is really suspect — it assumes a 10% defect rate!  Imagine a manufacturing system where that was expected and acceptable:

    Well, the Microsoft stacking system is in the news again. A story by Kurt Eichenwald in coming out in Vanity Fair that bashes Microsoft in various ways, especially the "stacking system."  It is consistent with past research and reports that have been coming out of Microsoft for decades — I bet I have had a good 50 Microsoft employees complain about the stacking the system to me over the years, including one of their former heads of HR.

    The story isn't out yet, but according to Computerworld and other sources, this is among the damning quotes:

    Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed — every one — cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. 'If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,' says a former software developer. It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.

    To be clear, I am not opposed to pay for performance. But when unnecessary status are created, when small quantitative differences that don't matter are used to decide who is fired, anointed as a star, or treated as mediocre, and when  friends are paid to treat each others as enemies, creating the unity of effort required to run an effective organization gets mighty tough — some organizations find clever ways to get around the downsides of stacking, but some succeed despite rather than because of how they do it. 

    The late quality guru W. Edwards Deming despised force rankings.  Let's give him the last word here. Here is another little excerpt from The Knowing-Doing Gap:

    He argued that these systems require leaders to label many people as poor performers even though their work is well within the range of high quality.  Deming maintained that when people get these unfair negative evaluations, it can leave them "bitter, crushed, bruised, battered, desolate, despondent, dejected, feeling inferior, some even depressed, unfit for work for weeks after receipt of the rating, unable to comprehend why they are inferior.”

  • Boring = Good? Inspirational = Bad?

    LeadershipINCSutton20012

    That is the title of weird interview that just came out in INC this month, which I did with Leigh Buchanan.  And the above drawing is by Graham Roumieu. 

    Here is the story on the INC website. The title is different online than in the print version, they call it "Thoroughly Counterintuitive Approach to Leading."  

    Leigh is always fun to talk to, and after having done interviews on both The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss, she has emerged as one of my favorite journalists.  For starters, she has such a sense of fun — most of us involved in doing and working with management are entirely too serious — I certainly plead guilty.  Leigh has the rare ability to talk about real ideas while at the same time conveying the absurdity of so much of organizational life .  She is also a great editor. In every interview I have done with her, I've rambled incoherently on for an hour or so, and she somehow put it in a form that made sense.

    This new interview a conglomeration of some of the stranger ideas from the various books I have written, especially Weird Ideas That Work along with some new twists.  As with weird ideas , I offer these ideas to challenge your assumptions (and my own) and to prompt us all to think.  I don't expect you to agree with them (I am not even sure I agree with all of them), but there is actually a fair amount of evidence and theory to support each of these sometimes uncomfortable ideas.

    To give you a taste,here is how the interview kicks-off:

    Leigh: You and I have been e-mailing about leadership traits, and at one point you suggested, “Good leaders know when to be boring, vague, emotionally detached, and authoritarian.” Under what circumstances might such traits be desirable? Start with boring.

    Me: There are two situations in which it’s a good idea to be boring. One is when you’re working on something but, so far, all you’ve got is bad news. Under those circumstances, any outside attention is bad.

    Don Petersen was the CEO of Ford after the Iaccoca era, and he was responsible for turning the company around. He told me a story about being invited to speak at the National Press Club. He didn’t want to do it. At the time, Ford had no good cars at all. But he and his PR chief decided he would go and give a speech about the most boring subject they could think of. At the time, that was safety. He practiced speaking in the most boring way possible, using the passive voice and long sentences. He put up charts that were hard to read, and then turned his back to the audience to talk about the charts. After that, the press lost interest in him for a while, so he could concentrate on doing the work.

    The other situation is when you’re dealing with controversy. Stanford used to have this brilliant provost, James Rosse. When Jim talked about something like the school’s Nobel Prize winners, he would be animated and exciting and charismatic. But when he had to talk about something like the lack of diversity on campus, he would ramble on for 20 minutes while looking at his feet. I thought it was brilliant

    And so it goes.  I hope you enjoy and I think Leigh for being such a delight to work with and for reminding me not to take myself so seriously.

  • Check-out J. Keith Murnighan’s “Do Nothing” for Strange and Fact-Based Advice

    Do-nothing-cover3d_400px

    Kellogg professor J. Keith Murnighan, my colleague and charming friend, has just published a lovely  book called "Do Nothing." I first read the manuscript some months back (and thus could provide the praise you see on the cover) and I just spent a couple hours revisiting this gem.

    This crazy book will bombard you with ideas that challenge your assumptions.  His argument for doing nothing, for example, kicks-off the book. I was ready to argue with him because, even though I believe the best management is sometimes no management at all, I thought he was being too extreme. But as I read the pros and cons (Keith makes extreme statements, but his arguments are always balanced and evidenced-based), I became convinced that if more managers took this advice their organizations would more smoothly, their people would perform better (and learn more), and they would enjoy better work-life balance.

    He convinced me that it this is such a useful half-truth (or perhaps three-quarters-truth) that every boss ought to try his litmus test:  Go on vacation, leave your smart phone at home, and don't check or send any messages. Frankly, many bosses I know can't accomplish this for three hours (and I mean even during the hours they are supposed to be asleep), let alone for the three weeks he suggests.  As Keith says, an interesting question is what is a scarier outcome from this experiment for most bosses: Discovering how MUCH or how LITTLE their people actually need them.

    You will argue with and then have a tough time resisting Keith's logic, evidence, and delightful stories when it comes to his other bits of strange advice as well.  I was especially taken with "start at the end," "trust more,"  "ignore performance goals," and "de-emphasize profits."  Keith shows how the usual managerial approach of starting out relationships by mistrusting people and then slowly letting trust develop is not usually as beneficial as starting by assuming that others can be fully trusted until they prove otherwise.  He will also show you how to make more money by thinking about money less!

    As these bits suggest, Keith didn't write this book with the aim of telling most bosses what they wanted to hear.  Rather his goal was to make readers think, to challenge their assumptions, and to show the way to becoming better managers by thinking and acting differently.  In a world where we have thousands of business books published every year that all seem to say the same thing, I found Do Nothing delightful and refreshing — not just because it is quirky and fun, but because Keith also shows managers how to try these crazy ideas in low-risk and sensible ways.

     

  • Total Institutions, Productivity, and Unemployment

    This isn't an original idea, but it has been gnawing at me lately.  As we all know, unemployment in the U.S. remains frighteningly high — and is  worse in many parts of Europe.  We still haven't really dug our way out of the meltdown.  At the same time, the hours worked by Americans remain incredibly high.  See this 2011 infographic on The Overworked American.  About a third of Americans feel chronically overworked.  And some 39% of us work more than 44 hours a week.

    I was thinking of this because I did an interview for BBC about Google — you can see the piece here.  I think it is done well and quite balanced.  It shows all those lovely things they do at Google to try to make it so good that you never want to go home — the classes, the great food, the laundry service, the massages and so on.   And I do believe from many conversations with senior Google executives over the years that they care deeply about their people's happiness and well-being and seem — somehow — to have sustained a no asshole culture even at 32,000 people strong.  That "don't be evil" motto isn't bullshit, they still mean it and still try to live it.

    But as I said in the BBC piece, although they are more caring than many of their competitors, the result is that many great tech firms including Google border on what sociologist Erving Goffman called "total institutions."  Examples of total institutions are prisons, mental institutions, the military (at least the boot camp part) — places where members spend 100% of the time.  The result is that, especially here in Silicon Valley, the notion of work-life balance is pure fiction most of the time (Sheryl Sandberg may go home at 530 every day, but the folks at Facebook did an all-night hack-a-thon right before the IPO.  I love the folks at Facebook, especially their curious and deeply skilled engineers, but think of the message it sends about the definition of a good citizen in that culture). 

    To return to Google, about five years ago, one of the smartest and most charming students I ever worked with had job offers from two very demanding places: Google and McKinsey.  Now, as most of you know, people work like dogs at McKinsey too.  But this student decided to take the job at McKinsey because "My girlfriend doesn't work at Google, so if I take that job, I will never see her."  He took the McKinsey job because at least that way he would see her on weekends.  I am pleased to report that I recently learned that they are engaged, so I guess it was the right choice.

    Note I am not blaming the leaders at Google, Facebook, or the other firms that expect very long hours out of their people.  It is a sick norm that seems to keep getting stronger and seems to be shared by everyone around here — indeed, my students tell me that they wouldn't want to work at a big tech firm or a start-up where people worked 40 hours a week because it would mean they were a bunch of lazy losers!  I also know plenty of hardcore programmers who love nothing more than spending one long late night after another cranking out beautiful code.  

    Yet, I do wonder if, as a society, given the blend of the damage done by overwork to mental and physical health and to families, and given that so many people need work, if something can be done to cut back on the hours and to create more jobs.  There are few companies that are trying programs (Check out the "lattice" approach at Deloitte).  But it seems to me that we would all be better off if those of us with jobs cut back on our hours, took a bit less pay, and the slack could be used to provide the dignity and income that comes with work to all those people who need it so badly. 

    I know my dream is somewhat naive, and that adding more people creates a host of problems ranging from higher health care costs to the challenges of coordinating bigger groups.   But in the coming decades, it strikes me as something we might work together to achieve.  There are so many workplaces that have become just awful places because of such pressures to work longer and longer hours:  large law firms are perfect example, they have become horrible places to work for lawyers at all levels.  There is lots of talk of reform, but they seem to be getting worse and worse as the race for ever increasing billed hours and profits-per-partner gets worse every year.  And frankly when I see what it takes to get tenure for an assistant professor at a place like Stanford, we are essentially expecting our junior faculty to work Google-like hours for at least seven years if they wish to be promoted, I realize I too am helping to perpetuate a similar system. 

    I would also note this is not just a "woman's issue."  Or even a matter of structuring work so that both men and women can be around to raise their kids, as it sometimes is described.  Sure, that is part of it.  But I think that everyone could benefit from a change in such norms. Indeed, about five years ago, a managing partner of a large local law firm did a survey of attitudes toward part-time work and was surprised to learn that male associates who didn't have children were among the most enthusiastic supporters of part-time schedules.  Interestingly, they were supportive partly because they couldn't use the "kid excuse" to cut back their hours and resented covering for colleagues who could and did leave work earlier and take days off to be with their children — they resented having less socially acceptable reasons for cutting back days and hours. 

    What do you think?  Is there any hope for change here?  Or am I living in a fool's paradise?

  • “I believe in my heart, I would have worked for an asshole”

    The No Asshole Rule emphasizes that one of the best ways to avoid the negative effects of workplaces that will leave you feeling demeaned and de-energized is to carefully assess your boss and colleagues during the interview and recruitment process.   Guy Kawasaki and I had fun with this challenge a few years back when we developed a list of 10 signs that your future boss is likely to be a bosshole.  In this spirit, I got a remarkable note the other day from a fellow who used his job interview to determine that his future boss was likely to be an asshole. Note the often subtle signs he observed.  This are his exact words, I just removed a couple key sentences (with his permission) to protect his identity:

    Dr. Sutton,

    Just wanted to thank you.  I read your "no Asshole rule" book on the plane my way to an interview.  I suspected from our initial phone interview that he could be a jerk.  I decided to take a new approach to the interview…to see how he interacted with shop floor employees and people that worked directly for him, to see how he spoke to me, and his verbal and visual actions, to see if I wanted this position instead of trying to impress them so they want to hire me.  I watched people that worked for him stand away from him when talking to him.  I saw he never smiled, and no one smiled at him.  He passed people on the line without so much as a nod to them.  And to top it off, he cut me off TWICE when I was talking like I wasn't even speaking, and then once even rudely didn't even PRETEND to listen to me as I talked about my background. In fact, I believe he started looking around and saying "uh huh, uh huh, uh huh" rudely "rushing me along" about 15 seconds into my background discussion.  To top it off, I remember you saying "assholes hire assholes", so I asked him if he had recommended the hiring of the people on his current team, and he boldly bragged "I hire EVERYONE on my team, it is all MY decision"…so I turned down the offer.  I believe in my heart, I would have worked for an asshole. .  And life is too short to do that again.

    I find this guy to be very astute.  What do you think of his analysis?

    What are other signs that you look for that a future boss — or colleague –is likely to be a certified asshole?

  • The Narcissistic Personality Quiz

    I sent out a tweet the other day about a study showing that men who score high on a narcissism test appear to experience more stress than those who score low (but not narcissistic women).  Stress was measured by "cortisol levels,"   a hormone that  "signals the level of activation of the body’s key stress response system, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis." 

    You can see a report about study here.  I thought the most interesting part was the link to the 40 item Narcissistic Personality Quiz, which is based on the measure in this paper: Raskin, R. & Terry, H. (1988). A Principal-Components Analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory and Further Evidence of Its Construct Validity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5). Note that Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is one of the best and most rigorous psychology journals, so the source is excellent.

    Try taking the quiz. I just did and scored an "8,' which suggests a low level of narcissism.  I confess, however, that I am wondering if my low score was a reflection of my lack of narcissism or of my knowledge of the narcissism literature in concert with a bit of self-delusion.  I also confess that I completed it a second time as if I were one especially narcissistic boss that I once worked with.  That boss (in my opinion) earns a 32 — a very high score as above 20 indicates narcissism.  The quiz omits one thing this person did which indicates narcissism:  It was amazing how, no matter what the topic, how within 3 minutes, every conversation with that boss always became conversation about what a successful and impressive person he was and all the people who admired him and his work. 

     If you really are the mood for self-assessment, you can take both this quiz and the (less scientific) Asshole Rating Self-Exam or ARSE.   That way you can find out if you are a narcissist, a certified asshole, or both!

    Enjoy.