Work Matters

Category: The No Asshole Rule

  • “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.

  • An Asshole Infested Workplace — And How One Guy Survived It

    Even though it has been five years since The No Asshole Rule was published in hardback, I still get 15 or 20 emails a week about issues pertinent to the book — descriptions of workplace tyrants and creeps, on how to avoid breeding them, and on what to do about them when you work with one — or a lot of them.  

    This blog would contain nothing but "asshole stories" and I would be posting a couple times a day if I reported them all. Clearly, that would be both boring and depressing.  And I am interested in other things. But every now and and then, I get one that is so well-crafted that I feel compelled to post it. I got a great one yesterday. 

    I don't want to put the whole email here both because it is so detailed and because I don't want to reveal any names. But the fellow who wrote this had quite an experience and did a great job of describing how he fought back. Here are some key excerpts (with some deletions to obscure identities):

    His note starts:

    I just finished reading The No A$$hole rule for a second time (I use $ instead of "s" just in case your email filters emails with the word "A$$hole," though I'd bet it does not. I'm just airing on the side of caution). Here is my reaction. Feel free to use my full name and any contents of this email in any of your published works. Back in 2005, I began my second job out of college working as a project manager at a marketing company. It was, and still is, a family business consisting of about 100 total employees.   Here is a snippet what I endured, for nearly 7 years, from the A$$hole Family.

    This is a partial list of behaviors in the cesspool where he worked:

    • If I was eating something, a bag of potato chips for example, the President would walk into my cubicle, stick his hands in the bag, then look at me and say, "Can I have some?"
    • Someone would walk into my cubicle and have a conversation with the person in the cube across from me…while I was on the phone!
    • A coworker of mine made a mistake on a project, so the VP of Sales sent the client an email, copying my boss, which said something to the effect of, "I just fired ____. This mistake was completely unacceptable, and please accept my apology. We don't tolerate people like that here…" Ironically enough, it was a lie; ____ was never fired, but just moved off the account.
    • The family members would routinely yell across the entire office to one another
    • I was having a meeting with a vendor in a conference room. The door was shut. The Sales Consultant walked in, sans knocking, and proceeded to say, "I need this room" and set her things on the conference table. And no, she had not reserved the conference room; reserving a conference room in this company was far-too-advanced of an idea.
    •  [A married couple] who also worked at the A$$hole company were going through a divorce. They routinely had shouting and yelling matches, followed by slamming drawers, desks, and just about anything else that could make a loud noise and disrupt everyone in the office.
    • [One family member] often spoke to me like I was a 5-year old child (she did the same to most underlings, especially the men), and always loudly enough so everyone in the surrounding area could hear that I was being thrown under the bus. She liked to make an example of her victims. Oddly enough, she apparently has a Psychology degree (No offense to you at all, Dr. Sutton).
    • [Another executive] was famous for bullying vendors, yelling at them on the phone, slamming desks and drawers, etc.. He would also do this by using his blue-tooth ear-piece and his cell phone as he walked around the office, yelling on the phone.
    • They hired another A$$hole (You wrote that A$$holes tend to hire other A$$holes). He was most lethal behind a computer, where he would send scathing emails to co-workers. However, he would not limit his exchanges to emails, as my colleague would often complain that he said things—NOT in private—like, "If you think you need a raise, then maybe you should quit and get another job."
    •  I literally witnessed my manager turn into an A$$hole overtime due to over-exposure to the A$$hole Family. In the beginning, he was an optimistic, friendly, driven, trustworthy manager. 6+ years later, he scowled and glared at co-workers; he became two-faced; I lost trust in him.

    I love this summary, it is sad but funny at the same time:

    There is such an infestation of A$$holes at this company that someone should tent the building and spray it with A$$hole insecticide. I could go on for pages about these stories. I wish I had documented more of them, because some of them were really funny.

     Then, he tells us how he too started catching the sickness — as I have written here many times, bad behavior is contagious. Thank goodness, he and his colleagues hatched exit plans:

    After working there for a year, I realized that I was turning into an A$$hole: I was losing my temper with vendors on the phone; my stress-level was getting too high to manage; and I started to send more scathing emails. It also started to affect my personal life, as I would come home from work and lose my temper with my partner for no reason. I then realized that I needed to get out. Nothing I could do would help me manage this job long-term. So, 3 of my colleagues and I all made a pact to get new jobs as quickly as possible.

    Finally, I was especially taken with his description of the things he did to cope with the infestation of assholes around him, many are consistent with my survival tips, others are new twists and turns. Here is most of his list:

    •  I confronted [a boss] about him throwing me under the bus. I explained to him that after throwing me under the bus, I become anxious, nervous, embarrassed, and I cannot concentrate, which greater increases my chances for making mistakes. My solution was to instead speak to me in private about a way that we can work together to reduce any mistakes and increase productivity for our whole department. He never threw me under the bus again (to my face, anyway), but he never took me up on the offer to speak with me about how to help improve my job performance, as well as my co-workers. 
    • Wrote in my daily journal (this was a tremendous small win; I could vent my frustrations and focus on my strategy to get out of the A$$hole Factory. I still write in my journal)
    • Using any downtime at work to apply for other jobs
    • Using the "I have a doctor's appointment" excuse to go on job interviews
    • The President/CEO ran for a political post. I voted for the other guy.
    • Working as hard as possible at my job, so that when I left, it would be difficult to replace me
    • Wear headphones to drown out the A$$holes yelling across the office at one another
    • Piled things like my briefcase and books near the entrance to my cubicle so A$$holes could not enter un-invited
    • Deleted scathing emails and never responding to them instead of responding and escalating into email World War III
    • Gave 2 weeks notice: No more, no less

    Again, I don't usually provide so much detail, but this fellow did such a brilliant job of showing what an asshole infested workplace looks and feels like, the negative effects it has on everyone in its grips, and of listing the little and big things he did to cope with it.  And, thank goodness, he realized he needed to escape and eventually got out — while protecting himself along the way. 

    I won't name him (even though he said it was OK, I think a bit of discretion is in order). But I do want to thank this anonymous reader for taking the time to write me such a long note and for doing it so well.

  • Book Excerpt: Why What You “Learn” From Steve Jobs May Reveal More About Yourself Than Him!

    Tomorrow morning, Fortune's Adam Lashinsky and I are going to spend an hour at The Churchill Club talking about Apple and what other organizations and leaders can (and cannot) learn from the world's most (economically) valuable company.  If you want to attend, I think you can tickets here still available and I understand they are filming our discussion (I will let you know how to see the video when I find out).

    Adam is the author of Inside Apple (see my detailed review and discussion here).   I don't know nearly as much about Apple as Adam does, but like virtually every other management writer, I've produced various pieces on Apple and Steve Jobs because they are irresistible subjects (such as this piece on 5 Warning Signs to Watch for at Apple). 

    Part of me believes that Apple and Jobs have much to teach other companies and leaders.  But, as I wrote in the new chapter in the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback, part of me is starting to wonder if what each of us "learns" from Steve Jobs amazing life reveals more about our inner selves — our personalities, preferences, and personal experiences — than anything else.  Below is the excerpt from Good Boss, Bad Boss where I toy with this argument (I edited it slightly because one sentence doesn't make sense unless you read the whole chapter).

    I am writing this epilogue in December 2011, two months after the death of Steve Jobs, the most talked-about boss and innovator of our time. Like many others, I found Jobs’s great strengths, startling weaknesses, and bizarre quirks to be fascinating.  For example, I wrote about him in The No Asshole Rule (in the chapter on “The Virtues of Assholes”). Even though Jobs’s nastiness was well documented before Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography was published, I was a bit shocked by tidbits in the book. As his death loomed, Jobs ran through sixty-seven nurses before finding three he liked. Still, there is no denying Jobs’s genius. Even though I would not have wanted to work for him, his design sensibilities, his ability to build great teams, and (in his later years) the way he structured a large organization that moved at the speed of a small one are admirable.

    Recently, however, I had two experiences that led me to believe it is difficult for bosses who want to improve
    their craft to learn from Steve Jobs. The first came after I had taught a two-hour session on innovation to forty CEOs of midsized Chinese companies. None spoke English and I don’t speak Mandarin, so there was a translator to enable communication. I put up a few Steve Job quotes and had fun figuring out that thirty-eight of the forty CEOs had iPhones. During the question-and-answer period, they seemed obsessed with Jobs.

    The most interesting thing happened, however, after I ended the session. As I left, one CEO grabbed the microphone and started hollering into it, and as I walked outside for another meeting, they were yelling at each other. The translator told me they were arguing over whether Jobs was an asshole and whether they should emulate such behavior to be better bosses. When I came back thirty minutes later, the translators ran up to me— laughing—because those CEOs were still arguing over the same thing.

    As I was driving home, I started thinking that Steve Jobs (or at least the idea of Steve Jobs) was so vivid, so
    complicated, and so idolized that for those CEOs, he was like an inkblot test: they projected their inner beliefs, values, desires, and justifications for their behavior onto him. The conversation was sparked by Jobs, but the content had little or nothing to do with what Jobs was like in life or in the lessons he could teach those CEOs.

    Then, a couple weeks later, I went to a party and talked with two people who worked closely with Jobs for years.
    They started pretty much the same argument that those Chinese executives had. Although one asserted the good
    deeds Jobs had done weren’t emphasized enough in media reports or the Isaacson biography, they nonetheless started arguing (and people who hadn’t worked for Jobs jumped in) about whether Jobs’s success meant it was wise or acceptable to be a jerk and when it was worth tolerating an asshole boss. As I listened, I believed once again that the idea of Steve Jobs was prompting people to make sense of and justify their behavior, personal values, and pet theories.

    So I raised my hypothesis: that people couldn’t learn much from Jobs. That he was so hyped, so complex, and
    apparently inconsistent that the “lessons” they derived from him where really more about who they were and hoped to be than about Jobs himself. The two people who worked closely with him agreed. And one added another reason why Jobs was and is a bad role model for bosses: Steve had such a weird and rare brain that it simply isn’t possible for another human being to copy him anyway!

    I am curious, what do you think?  As I re-read this, part of me still believes the argument above and part of me still believes that, well, every boss and innovator can learn something from him (despite the biases we all bring to the table).  I also find it easier to think about Apple and its organization and management in a detached way than about Jobs — perhaps because an organization, even Apple, could never have a personality and presence as vivid and intriguing as Mr. Jobs had. 

    P.S. The event at the Churchill Club was really fun, in part, because Adam and I didn't fully agree with each other.  I especially disagreed with his arguments that Apple was unique in terms of its structure (especially how centralized it is for its size).  We agreed on most things. But we had more fun and learned more — and I think the audience did too — because we pushed each other to refine or logic and examples.  He is a smart and charming guy.

  • Amazon Can Say “Asshole” But You Can’t

    This isn't the first time I have written a post like this, but the experience a No Asshole Rule fan had with Amazon today reminded me of how weird their policies are around the book's title.  In short, if you write a review of the book, and you use the word "asshole, they not only reject it, they won't let you edit it or submit another review.  Over the years, at least ten people who have written submitted positive reviews have written me to complain about this problem (I suspect people who have written negative reviews have the same problem, but they don't write me). 

    I got a new one today from Bill.  There isn't much hope of changing the policy: I've tried and so has my publisher.   Bill, we will try again but will probably fail. But I do appreciate all the effort you took to write such a nice and detailed review even if Amazon won't print it.

    Also, to all readers, note Bill only used the word "Asshole" once, at the very end,when he mentioned the book's title. But that was enough for Amazon's automated screening to kill the review and freeze him out from repairing it or submitting another one!

    Here it is, and thanks again Bill!

    A crucial and enlightening read_Page_1

    By Bill SM

    Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

    This review is from: The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't (Paperback)

    Through eight years of higher education, and 20-odd years in the work-force, this book is the most important, eye-opening, business self-help book I have ever read; it literally changed my way of thinking about myself as a professional, and my functioning as an employee. I have recommended it to hundreds of college students and dozens of colleagues and friends. I have lent it to and bought it for people who needed protection from JERKS in their own places of work, and I have given it as a gift to people whom I could see had the potential to become JERK bosses – as an inoculation, if you will.

    In all my years of gainful employment, I had never spent more than 3 years at any one job, picking up and leaving each time because of the JERKS (or so I thought) to whom I had to answer and with whom I had to contend. Repeatedly, I found myself saying, "I will not be associated with him/her," and then I picked up my family and moved to a new city and a new job, where I kept finding the same problems – JERKS were everywhere!

    I listened to this book on CD (a good recording by actor Kerin McCue) and then read the print version after having separated from my last place of work in the industry in which I had intended to make my entire career. Filled with anger and bitterness at having been treated poorly, bullied, and abruptly canned after seven months of my new three-year contract in my new city, Professor Sutton's book finally helped me to recognize my own role in all of this – I had never learned how to deal with JERKS, and I didn't recognize how much power I was letting them have over me (and therefore my family, as well).

    Since experiencing the revelations this book offered, I have launched a new career in a different, but related, industry, and I am once again climbing the corporate ladder in a company for which I have now been working for five years and going strong. I am much happier and more relaxed as a professional than ever before. I still have to contend with JERKS, but they do not bother me anymore. I have come to realize that their being horrible human beings has nothing to do with me, and they would be horrible to anyone else, as well, which is where I am now able to step in and offer support and perspective to others.

    I only wish this book had been written and published two years earlier! If it had, I would still be earning twice the money I am now. Nevertheless, The No Asshole Rule helped me to understand myself and my career, and laid the groundwork for my current and future success.

  • A Method For Determining If A Boss Is Self-Aware (And Listens Well)

    I was talking with a journalist from Men's Health today about how bosses can become more aware of how they act and are seen by the people they lead, and how so many bosses (like most human-beings) can be clueless of how they come across to others.  This reminded of a method I used some years back with one boss that proved pretty effective for helping him come to grips with his overbearing and "all transmission, no reception" style; here is how it is described in Good Boss, Bad Boss:

    A few years ago, I did a workshop with a management team that was suffering from “group dynamics problems.” In particular, team members felt their boss, a senior vice-president, was overbearing, listened poorly, and routinely “ran over” others.  The VP denied all this and called his people “thin-skinned wimps.”

    I asked the team – the boss and five direct reports — to do a variation of an exercise I’ve used in the classroom for years.  They spent about 20 minutes brainstorming ideas about products their business might bring to market; they then spent 10 minutes narrowing their choices to just three:  The most feasible, wildest, and most likely to fail.   But as the group brainstormed and made these decisions, I didn’t pay attention to the content of their ideas.  Instead, I worked with a couple others from the company to make rough counts of the number of comments made by each member, the number of times each interrupted other members, and the number of times each was interrupted.  During this short exercise, the VP made about 65% of the comments, interrupted others at least 20 times, and was never interrupted once.  I then had the VP leave the room after the exercise and asked his five underlings to estimate the results; their recollections were quite accurate, especially about their boss’s stifling actions.  When we brought the VP back in, he recalled making about 25% of the comments, interrupting others two or three times, and being interrupted three or four times.  When we gave the boss the results, and told him that his direct reports made far more accurate estimates, he was flabbergasted and a bit pissed-off at everyone in the room.

    As this VP discovered, being a boss is much like being a high status primate in any group:  The creatures beneath you in the pecking order watch every move you make – and so they know a lot more about you than you know about them. 

    My colleague Huggy Rao has a related test he uses to determine if a boss is leading in ways that enables him or her to stay in tune with others.  In addition to how much the boss talks, Huggy counts the proportion of statements the boss makes versus the number of questions asked.  "Transmit only bosses" make lots of statements and assertions and ask few questions. 

    What do you think of these assessment methods?  What other methods have you used to determine how self-aware and sensitive you are other bosses are — and to makes things better?

  • Are Incompetent and Nice Bosses Even Worse The Competent Assholes? An Excerpt from My New Chapter

    Tomorrow is the official publication day for the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback.  It contains a new chapter called "What Great Bosses Do," which digs into some of the lessons I learned about leadership since publishing the hardback in September 2010.  I have already published excerpts from the new chapter  on power poisoning,  bad apples, and embracing the mess at Fast Company.

    As I am teaching all day tomorrow, I am publishing another here today excerpt here to mark the occasion.  It considers one of the most personally troubling lessons I've learned (or at least am on the verge of believing).  I am starting to wonder, as the headline says, if nice but incompetent bosses are even worse (at least in some ways and at certain times) than competent assholes. 

    Now, to be clear, they both suck and having to choose between the two is sort of like deciding whether to be kicked in the stomach or kicked in the head.  And I have even suggested here that there might be certain advantages to having a lousy boss (and readers came up with numerous other great reasons).  But I have seen so much damage done by lousy bosses who are really nice people in recent years that I am starting to wonder…

    Here is the excerpt from the new chapter (the 4th of 9 lessons):

    4. Bosses who are civilized and caring, but incompetent, can be really horrible.

    Perhaps because I am the author of The No Asshole Rule, I kept running into people—journalists, employees,project managers, even a few CEOs—who picked a fight with me. They would argue that good bosses are more than caring human beings; they make sure the job gets done. I responded by expressing agreement and pointing out this book defines a good boss as one who drives performance and treats people humanely. Yet, as I started digging into the experiences that drove my critics to raise this point— and thought about some lousy bosses—I realized I hadn’t placed enough emphasis on the damage done, as one put it, by “a really incompetent, but really nice, boss.”

    As The No Asshole Rule shows, if you are a boss who is a certified jerk, you may be able to maintain your position so long as your charges keep performing at impressive levels. I warned, however, that your enemies are lying in wait, and once you slip up you are likely to be pushed aside with stunning speed. In contrast, one reason that baseball coach Leo Durocher’s famous saying “Nice guys finish last” is sometimes right is that when a boss is adored by followers (and peers and superiors, too) they often can’t bring themselves to bad-mouth, let alone fire or demote, that lovely person.

    People may love that crummy boss so much they constantly excuse, or don’t even notice, clear signs of incompetence. For example, there is one senior executive I know who is utterly lacking in the necessary skills or thirst for excellence his job requires. He communicates poorly (he rarely returns even important e-mails and devotes little attention to developing the network of partners his organization needs), lacks the courage to confront—let alone fire—destructive employees, and there are multiple signs his organization’s reputation is slipping. But he is such a lovely person, so caring and so empathetic, that his superiors can’t bring themselves to fire him.

    There are two lessons here. The first is for bosses. If you are well-liked, civilized, and caring, your charms provide
    protective armor when things go wrong. Your superiors are likely to give you the benefit of the doubt as well
    as second and third chances—sometimes even if you are incompetent. I would add, however, that if you are a truly crummy boss—but care as much for others as they do for you—stepping aside is the noble thing to do. The second lesson is for those who oversee lovable losers. Doing the dirty work with such bosses is distasteful. But if rehabilitation has failed—or things are falling apart too fast to risk it—the time has come to hit the delete button.

    Thoughts?

  • The Power of the People Around You

    I spent the morning trying to organize and make sense of various materials that Huggy Rao and I have been gathering about scaling.  I came across a most interesting post on "Learnings from 2011" that was apparently written by Xenios Thrasyvoulou, CEO of European-based start-up called Peopleperhour.com, which enables you to hire people "remotely, for small projects or a few hours a week." 

    The post was quite interesting, well-crafted and introspective.  But the advice at the end stopped me in my tracks:

    “Life is too short to waste it with people who don’t get it, whatever “it” may be for you, so make sure you surround yourself with people who do”

    This is such good advice because human attitudes and behaviors are so infectious.  If you are surrounded with a bunch of smart, graceful, caring, and action-oriented people, all that goodness will rub-off on you; and if you are surrounded with a bunch of people with the opposite attributes, that will infect you too.  This is why who you choose to hang out with, hire, fire, spend time with, and avoid has so much influence on everything from acting like an asshole, to building a creative organization, to scaling-ip excellence, to living a happy life. 

    Yet, implementing this philosophy in real life isn't easy.  I would love to hear some ideas about how people make it happen.

  • The Rise of a Culture of Contempt and the Demise of UCLA Men’s Basketball

    Work Matters reader and fellow blogger, Chris Yeh, sent me a link to a Sport's Illustrated story about the discouraging downfall of the UCLA basketball program.  And I don't mean the drop off in performance at UCLA in the past few years, I mean the loss of its soul and the rise of a culture of contempt — with rampant lousy leadership, bad role models, asshole poisoning.  Chris summed it all up well:

    It’s terrible.  Thank goodness John Wooden isn’t alive, or this would have killed him.  To trample on his legacy like this is atrocious.

    UCLA's John Wooden, the "Wizard of Westwood" not only won more national championships than any coach of a male college basketball team, he fostered a culture of mutual respect and individual development that turned his players — whether they were superstars like Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Bill Walton or bench-warmers — into more confident, cooperative, and compassionate human beings.

    It appears coach Ben Howland has had the opposite effect.  As you can see in this excerpt from the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback over at Fast Company on the power of subtraction, there is plenty of evidence that when leaders and peers display bad behavior and don't act swiftly and firmly to stop, the vile actions and attitudes spread like wildfire — and the result isn't just bad performance, it is a culture of contempt that damages everyone involved.

    Here is the upshot of the SI story about what happened the last few years under coach Ben Howland:

    "Over the last two months SI spoke with more than a dozen players and staff members from the past four Bruins teams. They portrayed the program as having drifted from the UCLA way as Howland allowed an influx of talented but immature recruits to undermine team discipline and morale. Fistfights broke out among teammates. Several players routinely used alcohol and drugs, sometimes before practice. One player intentionally injured teammates but received no punishment."

    The story offers many twists and turns, it is long and well-researched.  It provides many old but true lessons about how a bad boss can ruin a good team. If you are a leader of a group or organization of any size, it is worth studying and then taking a long hard look in the mirror and asking yourself — am I doing that too?  Here are a few questions you might ask yourself:

    1.  Are you focusing on strategy, but ignoring your team?

    Strategy matters, but it is not enough.  According to the story this was Howland's general management style. He acted as if the human part of his job was a nuisance. As the article explains:

    Other than during practices and games, he had little contact with his athletes, according to players. He showed up moments before a workout began and was gone before players paired off to shoot free throws at the end. Several team members say that his approach was how they imagined an NBA coach would run a team.

    2. What behavior do you model? 

    The SI story reports numerous examples of abusive and disrespectful behavior on his part:

    Each of the players who spoke to SI said they found Howland socially awkward and disapproved of the verbal abuse they say he directed at his staff, the student managers and the weakest players. One player said if he saw Howland waiting for the elevator he would take the stairs.

    3. Are you so focused on your own needs and wants that you insist that others indulge your little quirks? 

    The inner focus that comes with power poisoning can cause leaders to indulge and bizarre and petty behavior that — even if they are not aware of it — conveys that they are focused on their own self importance and don't give a hoot about others.  For example, SI reports:
    The players were puzzled by some of their coach's idiosyncrasies. Howland seemed obsessed with the temperature in the film room. If it was not exactly 76º a student manager was certain to feel Howland's wrath. The water bottles handed to him had to be just cold enough and not too large.
    4. Do you apply different rules to "stars" than to other team members even when they take reprehensible actions? 

    The story describes how star freshman Reeves Nelson was repeatedly physically abusive to fellow players in practice. Here is one of a string of such incidents:

    Walk-on Tyler Trapani was another Nelson victim. After Trapani took a charge that negated a Nelson dunk, Nelson went out of his way to step on Trapani's chest as he lay on the ground. Trapani is John Wooden's great-grandson.

    There are many other examples, but this one is symbolic as Nelson was literally trampling on a body that contained some of Wooden's DNA.  Here is how Howland was reported to have responded to such bad behavior:

    After each of the incidents, Howland looked the other way. One team member says he asked Howland after a practice why he wasn't punishing Nelson, to which he said Howland responded, "He's producing."

    5. Are you succeeding because the peer culture among your followers is hiding or offsetting your deep flaws? 

    This is one of the interesting parts of the story, and something every leader should think about.  In many cases, teams and organizations succeed DESPITE rather than BECAUSE of their leaders flaws.  In Howland's early years at UCLA, when the team was winning and morale among the players was good despite Howland's quirks and flaws, it was apparently due in large part to the tight bonds among the team members, an unusually mature and low ego group (which began unraveling in about 2008):

     It was a team of prefects, the protectors of the UCLA dynamic, who looked out for each other, making sure that no one got into trouble, that no one threatened what they were trying to accomplish or what UCLA has always been about. They were a tight group. If they went out, to the movies or a party, they were 15 strong. That kind of camaraderie is not unusual on good teams, but Howland's former players say he had very little to do with instilling it.

    6. Is your boss letting YOU get away with toxic and incompetent leadership?

    I was pretty stunned to read this:

    UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero, who through a spokesperson declined SI's interview request, told ESPN.com in January, "I need Ben Howland. Why would I even think about looking at someone else?" He added, "By his own admission, [Howland] made some mistakes. But I'm going to work with him. I'm not going to crucify him for those mistakes. Because Ben Howland is a hell of a coach, and anyone who understands basketball, anyone that's been around him, that knows the game, has the utmost respect for what he does as a coach. … We need to turn it around, and we all get that. But we will."

    The above quote is quite discouraging as it suggests that, well, so long as he goes back to winning, all is forgiven. As far as I am concerned, if the SI story is accurate, Howland suffers too deeply from power poisoning, committed too many selfish sins, and has demonstrated so much incompetence in dealing with people he is hired to look after and motivate to be allowed to continue in any leadership position. 
    The problems I've listed only begin to scratch the surface of the damage done under Howland's apparently flawed leadership. I haven't even got into the partying, the players who came to practice still stoned from the night before, and the bench-warmer who couldn't enter a game during "garbage time" because he didn't bother wearing his jersey under his warm-up jacket (the same player now says he can't believe, in retrospect, that he did it — but bad leadership and bad team dynamics cause people to do weird and dysfunctional things).
    Apparently, there are signs that Howland is doing a bit better this year and is taking steps to deal with bad behavior.  Last year, Howland finally stopped putting up with Reeves Nelson's awful behavior — for example, last season, he finally showed the courage to call fouls on Nelson in practice (in the past, "[Howland] always gave Reeves the benefit of the doubt on foul calls in practice so Reeves wouldn't lose it and be even more disruptive").  Nelson finally was kicked-off the team last November.   And now even Nelson and mother believe Howland should have been nipped the bad behavior in the bud.  As Nelson told SI:
    "I'm not trying to make excuses for what I did, but I got into some weird behavior patterns, and I think my mom was saying that if instead of one big punishment at the end, what if there had been smaller punishments along the way."
    Perhaps Howland will change his ways.  People do get better and perhaps he will learn to be less of a jerk, be in tune with the people he leads, to avoid letting superstar run roughshod over others, and to do the little bits dirty work when necessary.  I am not especially optimistic, especially after smelling the "winning is the only thing" attitude from Howland's boss.  Regardless, I believe this is a useful cautionary tale for any boss, and in particular, I  think of this guideline in Chapter 1 of The No Asshole Rule:
    The difference between how a person treats the powerless versus the powerful is as good a measure of human character as I know. 
    P.S. Note that Reeves Nelson did an interview where he disputes many of the bad things said about him in the article and his law firm is demanding that SI retract the article.

  • Good Boss, Bad Boss is Shipping in Paperback: A Look Back

     

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    Good Boss, Bad Boss is already shipping in paperback at Amazon, today is the official publication date.  It has a new red cover (which I like, I hope it isn't too intense for you) and a new chapter, an Epilogue called "What Great Bosses Do: Lessons I've l Learned Since Writing Good Boss, Bad Boss."  Fast Company already published an excerpt from the new chapter on power poisoning and will be publishing more snippets in the coming weeks. 

    This all got me thinking about Good Boss, Bad Boss, about all the fun I had fretting over and talking with people about ideas in the book, and about lots of others ideas about bosses too, since the book was first published in September, 2010.  In doing so, I looked back on some of the most popular posts and related stories on bosses.  These include:

    1. Being a Good Boss is Pretty Damn Hard — Reflections on Publication Day

    2. Lessons from Nightmare (and Dream) Bosses — INC Interview

    3. How to Be a Good Boss — by Matt May

    4. When the Shit Hits the Fan, Women are Seen as Better Bosses than Men

    5. Drinking at Work — It's not all bad — a piece for Cnn.Com

    6. Is it Sometimes Rationally to Select Leaders Randomly?

    7. Clueless and Comical Bosses: Please Help Me With Examples

    8. A Cool Neurological Explanation for the Power of Small Wins

    9. How a Few Bad Apples Can Ruin Everything — a Wall Street Journal piece I wrote

    10. What are Good Things About Having a Lousy Boss?

    11. Pixar Lore: The Day Our Bossses Saved Our Jobs — at HBR.org

    12. David Kelley on Love and Money

    I could have added a lot more — let me know which ones you like, which ones you don't form the above list, and which ones I should have added from the past six years or so I've been writing Work Matters. Thanks so much for everything