Category: The No Asshole Rule

The new Time Magazine has a story and sort of a review of The No Asshole Rule called No Jerks Allowed.  Author Lisa Cullen writes for Time about workplace issues (that is her picture below). Lisa has a fun angle and writes with pizazz. She does, however, seem to celebrate assholes more than I do, asking: "Imagine American Idol without Simon, House without House, Family Guy without Stewie. Colleagues of Steve Jobs bear the scars, but wouldn’t you prefer him on your team than theirs?" I see the upside of assholes, as seen in my Changethis essay and chapter on "the virtues of assholes."

Unlike Lisa, however, I think that most assholes aren’t worth the trouble, as even if being an asshole helps people win at times, my view is that if you are a winner and an asshole, you are still an asshole and I don’t want to be around you. I would also add that the belief that acting like an asshole helps you win is a suspect assumption.  It is at least in large part a cultural myth, and while it may lead to short-term wins at times, the upshot (to steal an old line from Groucho Marx) is that "time  wounds all heels" (or at least most of them).

I was also amused to see that at least two of Lisa’s effective assholes are fictional characters (I say at least two because I sometimes think that American Idol’s Simon Cowell is putting on an act to drive up ratings, albeit a convincing one). And as I also like to emphasize, organizations that enforce the no asshole rule the right way aren’t a breeding ground for wimps.  On the contrary, many are extremely performance oriented and celebrate constructive conflict (rather than demeaning, nasty, and personally insulting conflict).

In any event, it is a fun story, and I don’t want to paint Lisa as exactly an advocate of assholes, because as she admits, "beastly bosses have shaved months off my life."

P.S. Note that Lisa Cullen has a post up called "In Defense of Office Assholes."
Again, she makes some good arguments, but I am concerned that she is creating an excuse for people to act like assholes or to tolerate them too much.

A study of
American workers released today found that nearly half have worked for an
abusive boss. This study was conducted by the Reed Group for the Employment Law Alliance.  They surveyed a representative sample of 1,000
American adults within the past two weeks, which resulted in interviews with
534 workers. Much research on bullying
and abusive supervision uses “convenience samples,” which means the researchers find anyone
they can to complete the survey, a method that does not produce results that can be generalized
to a larger sample. So this study uses a much
better sample than most. Check out the press release if you want to learn more.

The main finding was that 44% of the respondents said they have worked
for a supervisor or employer whom they considered to be abusive.  I will write a longer post about this later,
but it adds to a growing body of research demonstrating that workplace assholes
are a serious and widespread problem. And
note that this is a study supported by a big group of employment lawyers, who
are leading the charge against organizations that allow, or even encourage, such
abuse to persist.

So it might be a lot cheaper and less time-consuming to
implement the no asshole rule in your organization now, then facing an onslaught
of lawyers and lawsuits later. I am not a fan of litigation and believe that
some people who routinely file lawsuits are assholes who do it to exact revenge.
And some do it in place of therapy (or
as a misguided form of anger management therapy).  But if some companies won’t implement the rule
for the right reasons, perhaps the threat of litigation will cause them to implement
it for the wrong reasons

P.S. I was also interested in their findings that “Southern workers (34%)
are less likely to have experience with an abusive boss than are their
Northeastern (56%) and Midwestern (48%) counterparts.” In the 1980’s, I worked with Anat Rafaeli and
Larry Ford on a study of courtesy in 7/Eleven Stores.  Larry, who was then their director of field
research, drew a representative sample of 576 stores (out of about 7000 in North America), and had an army of
researchers who went into the stores to observe employee courtesy – measured as
greeting customers, smiling, establishing eye contact, and saying thank you. We
found a similar pattern: people in the South were the most civilized and people
in the Northeast were least.  Midwesterners
and Westerners were somewhere in the middle.

P.P.S. This graphic is actually from a Reuters story about The No Asshole Rule, but I like it so much that I have been looking for an excuse to post is again.

One of the best things about working on The No Asshole Rule has been that the folks at Warner Business Books have a sense of humor, especially Rick Wolff, my relentless editor.  Rick understood the book, and what it needed to contain from our first conversation onward — often more completely than I did. And while some publishers wanted the book despite the title, he wanted it partly because of the title. This was made crystal clear to me when Warner had the cover design completed before I had written a word — which had the added advantage of convincing me that they were serious about their deadlines.

Warner’s sense of fun is on full display in the advertisements that they are running in The New York Times this week, which poke fun at the Times because they won’t print the title. Here is one of the four ads that they are running this week:

I’ve been getting a lot of emails lately from people who are asking about the more subtle ways that assholes do their dirty work, the "passive aggressive" and seemingly fun and friendly tricks that they use — often unwittingly — that leave behind a trail of demeaned and de-energized people. Teasing is one of the subtle moves that assholes employ to bring others down.  It often used by "clueless assholes" who don’t realize that they are hurting other people (or at least won’t admit they are doing it intentionally).  As I’ve written here before, the best description I’ve ever seen of the damage done by “friendly” teasing
is in the late Gordon Mackenzie’s masterpiece Orbiting
the Giant Hairball.  When I was writing
Weird
Ideas That Work, I read this little gem over and over again, for general inspiration,
and to quote little gems like this one. Gordon MacKenzie was known as the “Creative
Paradox” during his years at Hallmark Cards and he often ran creativity works. In
Hairball, he describes a woman who, “with a bashful eagerness,”  began a sketch that showed how she felt about
herself, the Management of Information Systems group she was part of, and
Hallmark. As I said in Weird Ideas, ‘Her
co-workers reacted with a “rowdy taunting” about her lack of drawing skills;
she quickly changed from looking eager to looking hurt, and then “After an
apologetic explanation of her drawing, she scurried, eyes down, back to her
seat.”’

In many organizations, people would be allowed to get away
with such nastiness. To his credit, MacKenzie
confronted the group with about the demeaning behavior. He said to them:

“Teasing
is a disguised form of shaming… I suspect that when you teased this woman, it
was an unconscious effort to throw her off balance – to stop her from risking,
which she was most clearly beginning to do. Why would you want to do that? …[B]ecause we don’t want to admit to
others or ourselves that we are trying to stop growth, we disguise our shaming
as teasing – ‘all in the spirit of good fun.’ ”

Guy Kawasaki has a new post that tells the story behind the The No Asshole Rule.  As Guy points out out, one lesson  is that “premature buzz” is an oxymoron — this book had a lot of early buzz among bloggers (notably Guy, who seems to be the Oprah of the online world; he had a big impact on the Heath brother’s wonderful Made to Stick too). Guy also points out that that the Asshole Rating Self-Exam, or ARSE Test (which is approaching 60,000 completions), demonstrates the virtues of having something fun, interactive, and viral linked to a book.

Guy introduces the next web-based toy linked to The No Asshole Rule, ARSEmail.  I’ve been working with the great people at Electric Pulp and entrepreneur Brian Witlin to develop web-based "e-cards."  You have a choice of sending one of two cards, one to help someone who is dealing with an asshole, OR the other to apologize if you have been asshole.  You can send a personal message with each card.  Plus the card about dealing with assholes has some tips, as well as a link to my post on tips for victims of workplace assholes.  You pick your card, write your message, and then send it. Let me know what you think of our latest little "asshole management" tool

I thought of this famous George Bernard Shaw quote when I was interviewed by a BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) "presenter" (English for "announcer") a few days ago; she told me that her producer had agreed to let me use the word "asshole" to describe the title of my book on the air without censoring so long as it wasn’t used "gratuitously ."  Then I asked her about using the word "arse" on the air, and she said she wasn’t sure because she believed that many people in the audience would be more offended by "arse."   The presenter added that she used the word "asshole" instead of "arse" at times because it is less offensive in her country. I laughed because, with members of the media in the U.S., I sometimes use the word "arse" instead of "asshole" because they find it less offensive.  And to my American ears, the "ARSE test" sounds considerably less obscene than the "asshole test."

This is an older post, but I was reminded of it this week when I was at SuccessConnect, an event for SuccessFactors customers, and was talking with a group of HR executives about how many ways that workplace assholes cost their organizations lots of money.  In addition to the cases in this post, there has been subsequent research showing how working with assholes — especially asshole bosses — saps the motivation out of people. Anyhow, here is the post I wrote about the waster for talent right after the book came out.

Like
any author would be, I am pleased with the success of my book. The No
Asshole Rule has sold well at places like Amazon
and Barnes
& Noble.com since it first appeared about a month ago, sitting among
the 12 books overall and among the top 3 non-fiction books at Amazon much of
the time. It is also is doing well in
book stores, especially during the last two weeks (this is clearly a book that
“started” on the web and then moved other places). And it continues to receive attention from the
press, notably recent stories in BusinessWeek
and Newsweek and a long Associated
Press story called He Wrote The Book On Jerks.

 I
confess that the book is selling better than I expected given its mildly
obscene title. But the part that keeps surprising me most is that –- although I
received a deluge of email after writing about the no asshole rule in Harvard Business Review in 2004 and received
a lot of mail before the book was published –  I am getting far more email than ever and it
seems even more emotionally intense than before.

 The
recent round of emails has made especially clear to me that enforcing the no
asshole is not only humane, it is wise from an economic perspective – as an
economist would put it, the rule leads to efficient use of human capital. I am confronted with one case after another of
how pervasive nastiness drives skilled people out of their jobs and
occupations, and short of that, massively undermines their performance.

 Consider these excerpts from notes that I received in just that last few days:

 A woman
who wrote:

 I am a 50 year old woman who was
recently propelled back into the work force simply part-time once my children
left the nest.  My first experience was horrific,
worked for a Dean [at a major university] who was rude, verbally abusive
and made demeaning comments in front of other colleagues.  I went to HR on
numerous occasions and was told Dr. Dean had been with [the school] for thirty
years and had a history of not being able to keep his admins …so, where
did that leave me? I walked out one day, never returned, and simply went to HR
and said goodbye… I will never forget the days with the
Dean as I actually became physically ill and the bullying episodes which I
could not control nor stop. 

The
physician who wrote me about her experience as a surgical resident and beyond:

 We were overwhelmed
with the sickest patients and unfortunately had some less than optimal outcomes,
not because we didn't try our hardest, but because we were often abandoned by
the attending staff.  Of course, the Friday morning morbidity and
mortality statistics were not about learning from our mistakes, but seeing who
could be the meanest bully to the resident physicians.  Some were
crucified more than others.  One felt triumphant if one was able to escape
fairly unscathed. 

 The
former aerospace worker who wrote:

I once worked for an aerospace company and my immediate
supervisor was a BIG asshole. She used to belittle me in front of my co-workers
(all of them at once or whoever was present) by yelling loudly, abruptly
snatching papers out of my hands, giving me dirty looks, interrupting me &
any number of other rude behaviors. She seemed to really enjoy dressing me down
whenever possible, especially in front of her favorite salesman, whose office
was directly behind my cubicle. There was little in the way of my work
performance to justify treating me this way. I wanted to quit many times and
there were many days I would end up crying at my desk.

 And
an ex-schoolteacher wrote:

 I wish I would have known about you two years ago.  I was
in the middle of my seventh year of teaching elementary school and living in a
nightmare.  I was being bullied, harassed, demeaned, etc., but I could not
find any support in this hostile working environment. I took a leave of absence
at the end of the school year, eventually quit, and landed my current job at a
local university.

 We
need administrative assistants, aerospace workers, doctors who are educated
rather than terrorized, and of course, we need skilled schoolteachers. When organizations
are serious about enforcing the rule, they not only stem the human damage, they
stop wasting human capital and organizational resources. And it isn’t all bad news
out there, as the book shows, and so does this note from a school principal in
the Midwest:

 I just finished your book, "The
No Asshole Rule" and I found it funny but factual.  In my position as
a principal, I have to work with a variety of personality types and of course,
the parents who also come in all varieties.   As I began this year, I told my staff [and the
parents] via newsletters, conversations, etc. that poor relationships, gossip,
etc., would not be tolerated.  I feel that because of this attitude, the
atmosphere at my school has improved 100% (and I've heard this from teachers,
parents, and students).

I appreciate all the emails that people
send me, the sad ones, funny ones, and everything else. But I would especially
appreciate ideas about good things that leaders and organizations can do to
build civilized workplaces, as I believe that is one of the most powerful
solutions to the problem. What practices do you use – or are thinking about
using – to screen out, reform, and chase out demeaning people?  Thanks.

Gawker, which
focuses on gossip about life in Manhattan, is running an evil boss competition. This
is how they describe it:

With your help, we’ve ID’d 14 of
the potentially worst bosses in  New York. We’ll be parading them in front of you daily,
and when we’re done, we’ll all decide together who’s the worst. Feel free to shout out
your suggestions if any of these tales joggles a traumatized (or happy) memory!

Yesterday, they talked about (allegedly) evil
boss Scott Rudin, the film producer.  I write about him in The
No Asshole Rule, as he is infamous for having burned through 109 assistants
(his estimate, the Wall Street Journal estimated 250) in 5 years, and
apparently, for firing an assistant for brining him the wrong breakfast muffin.
Check out the comments and stories about him; scary The other noiminees thus
far are Faith
Popcorn, the renowned markter who published the best-seller The Popcorn Report; Mireille
Guiliano, the author of French Women Don’t Get Fat; Conde Nast executive
Richard Beckman; and publicist
Claudine Gumbel.

So, get your votes in, add your comments, and read the stories and comments — those about Rudin were especially scary — if they are true because, after all, this is a gossip blog.

These bosses do sound like jerks, if the
reports about them are true. At the same time, compared to some of the asshole
bosses that people write me about, they seem pretty tame (except perhaps for
Rudin).  Consider the guy who was bullied
by a boss when he had Leukemia. Also,
in terms of public figures, I suspect book publisher Judith Regan doesn’t
qualify for the contest because she was fired recently (and I believe lives in the Los Angles
area), but she makes most of these other allegedly evil bosses look tame, at
least if the Vanity
Fair story is accurate.

Research on the psychological abuse suffered by nurses, medical, students, and residents suggests that physicians are especially prone to be nasty to their less-powerful co-workers.  I talk about some of this research, and what Dan Denison and I saw years ago when we did an ethnography at a hospital in Michigan, in my post on Dr. Gooser and Asshole Poisoning in Hospitals. 

The great power that doctors have other others are one the forces that turns them into jerks, because as a long series of studies shows, it isn’t just a myth that power turns people into insensitive jerks.  This is especially true among surgeons, who are often the alpha dogs in hospitals.
A related reasons that so many doctors turn into jerks is that like members of all professions, they imitate their mentors — and if your mentors are assholes, you are in great danger of becoming just like them.   

BUT it doesn’t need to be that way. Look at this note that I got from a former surgical resident — and now  renowned surgeon — about how he and his peers fought the temptation to fall prey to asshole poisoning, and how it has had positive effects 20 years later.  This report suggests that it is possible to apply and enforce The No Asshole Rule, even against powerful structural forces and social pressures to act just like your demeaning superiors.

This is the exact email that he sent me.  I use it with his permission, with only his name is removed as he requested:

Thanks
and an Anecdote

I
just finished your book The No Asshole
Rule in about 4 hours. Thanks for writing it. Every page resonated with
my work experiences. I am a surgeon and have worked in academic medicine my
entire career. I trained at an "elite" training program at an Ivy
League teaching hospital. As you can imagine, my specialty has been a haven for
assholes and, even worse, sociopaths. My training program was better than most;
but, we still had our share of assholes. During my training, I witnessed
episodes of unbelievable mental cruelty on a daily basis. As residents, we met
every Friday for a few beers at a local bar after another arduous work week. We
kept a leather-bound journal book. The highlight of the happy hour was nominating
and electing the "Attending Asshole of the Week" or "AAOTW.”  Each aggrieved individual would recount their
episode with an attending that would merit their nomination as the “Asshole of
the Week.” The group voted and the “winner’s” name was entered into the journal
book. A brief synopsis of the "asshole incident" was also placed in
the journal. We had one attending who was such an asshole, he automatically won
if there was a tie. It didn’t matter if he was in the running that week or not.
The journal was passed on every year to the new Chief Residents. It was a
closely held secret among the residents. I understand they still have a
journal.

This was 20 years ago. It is possible to look at these sessions as "bitch"
sessions with no meaningful result. However, every one of my resident
colleagues learned from those sessions. We learned how destructive "asshole"
behavior was in our specialty. We vowed not to imitate the pathologic behavior
we encountered daily. 20 years later, we are now the program chairs and department
chairmen. We are spread across the country. I am proud to say that everybody
who was a part of that Friday group runs their training programs with an
unwritten "no asshole" rule.

I’ve
talked a lot here about methods for enduring abusive bosses and
co-workers.  Some of these tips come from
your comments and e-mails, some from the
No Asshole Rule, and some from academic research. I thought it would be useful to list some of the most effective
methods in one place. I update this list every few months, so please keep your suggestions coming!   

Before
I get to the rest of the tips, one is in a class by itself:

THE BIGGEST AND BEST
LESSON: ESCAPE IF YOU POSSIBLY CAN. The best thing to do if you are stuck under thumb
of an asshole (or a bunch of them) is to
get out as fast as you can. You are
at great risk of suffering personal damage and of turning into as asshole
yourself. Acting like a jerk isn’t just
something that a few twisted people are born with; it is a contagious
disease. But escape isn’t always possible;
as one woman wrote me, “I have to feed my family and pay my mortgage, and there
aren’t a lot of jobs that pay well enough to do that around here.”

So
here are my top tips for coping with workplace assholes that you can’t escape (at
least for now):

 1. Start with polite
confrontation.
Some people really don’t mean to be
assholes. They might be surprised if you
gently let them know that they are leaving you feeling belittled and demeaned.  Other assholes are demeaning on purpose, but
may stop if you stand-up to them in a civil, but, firm manner. An office worker wrote me that her boss was
“a major asshole” (he was a former army major, who was infamous for his
nastiness). She found that “the major” left her alone after she
gave him “a hard stare” and told him his behavior was “absolutely unacceptable and
I simply won’t tolerate it.” This is
also pretty much what Ron
Reagan (the late president’s son) told me on his radio show about how he
dealt with assholes, as did a fashion model who described a constructive way to confront an asshole

2. If a bully keeps spewing venom at you, limit your contact with the creep
as much as possible.  Try to avoid any meetings you can with the jerk.  Do telephone meetings if possible. Keep conversations as short as possible. Be
polite but don’t provide a lot of personal information during meetings of any
kind, including email exchanges.  If the
creep says or writes something nasty, try to avoid snapping back; it can fuel a
vicious circle of asshole poisoning. Don’t sit down during meetings if you can
avoid it. Recent research suggests that
stand-up meetings are just as effective sit-down meetings, but are shorter; so try
to meet places without chairs and avoid sitting down during meetings with assholes
whenever possible – it limits your exposure to their abuse.

3. Find ways to enjoy “small
wins” over assholes.  If you can’t reform or expel
the bully, find small ways to gain control and to fight back -– it will make
you feel powerful and just might convince the bully to leave you and others alone. Exhibit one here is the radio producer who told
me that she felt oppressed because her boss was constantly stealing her food –-
right off her desk. So she made some candy out of EX-Lax, the chocolate
flavored laxative, and left it on her desk. As usual, he ate them without permission. When she told this thief what
was in the candy, “he was not happy.” 

4. Practice indifference and
emotional detachment– learn how not to let an asshole touch your soul.  Management gurus and executives are constantly
ranting about the importance of commitment, passion, and giving all you have to
a job. That is good advice when your
bosses and peers treat you with dignity. But if you work with people who treat you like dirt, they have not
earned your passion and commitment. Practice going through the motions without really caring. Don’t let their vicious words and deeds touch
your soul: Learn
to be comfortably numb until the day comes when you find a workplace that
deserves your passion and full commitment.

5. Keep an asshole diary — carefully document
what the jerk does and when it happens. Carefully document what the jerk does and when it happens. A government
employee wrote me a detailed email about how she used a diary to get rid of a
nasty, racist co-worker ‘I documented the many harmful things she did with
dates and times…..basically I kept an "Asshole
Journal."  I encouraged her other victims to do so too
and these written and signed statements were presented to our supervisor. Our
supervisors knew this worker was an asshole but didn’t really seem to be doing
anything to stop her harmful behaviors until they received these statements.
The asshole went on a mysterious leave that no supervisor was permitted to
discuss and she never returned.’  Similarly, a salesman wrote me that he has
been the top performer in his group until he got
leukemia, but his performance slowed during chemotherapy. His supervisor called him every day to yell
at him about how incompetent he was, and then doubled the sick salesperson’s
quota. The salesman eventually quit and
found a better workplace, but apparently because he documented the abuse, his
boss was demoted.  Note that, as the government employee shows us, an especially effective tactic is to
recruit other colleagues to keep “asshole diaries” too about an abusive boss or
workplace. It is far more difficult for
management – or a judge – to dismiss a complaint from a group of victims than a
single victim.

6. Take legal action if you must, but
do so as a last resort. There is a
growing legal movement against bullying in the workplace, and employment
lawyers keep telling me that it will get easier to collect damages against
“equal opportunity assholes,” not just against racist and sexist jerks. Documentation is essential if you are
considering making a legal claim. And
certainly there are plenty of asshole bosses and employers that deserve to be
slapped with massive fines.  BUT if you
are suffering workplace abuse, the best thing for YOU might be to get out
before you suffer much, if any, damage. I had a long conversation
with two smart lawyers about this recently, and they pointed out an unfortunate
fact of life that every person with an asshole boss needs to understand: The
more you lose – – the deeper your depression, your anxiety, and your financial
losses, and the more physical ailments you suffer –- the better your legal case
against the asshole boss or company.  So the
more you suffer, the more money you can get. The implication for me is, if you possibly can, why not get out before you suffer horrible damages in the first
place? 

There are no instant cures and easy answers for people who are trapped in
nasty workplaces. But I hope my little
list of tips can help those of who are struggling to fight back against an
asshole boss. And please write me at robert.sutton@stanford.edu to let
me know what you think of these tips, and especially, if you have more tips for
battling back – and winning — against workplace assholes.