Work Matters

Category: The No Asshole Rule

  • Adopting The No Asshole Rule: Don’t Bother If The Words Are Hollow

    I just got off the phone with executives from an unnamed large company who are thinking about implementing a "no jerk rule." I am, of course, a big fan of this idea. And there are organizations that have such rules and the implement them effectively, such as Baird, the financial services firm.

    But I think they were a bit taken aback by how vehement I was about the dangers of just plastering the words everywhere, and not following it with the real work of implementing The No Asshole Rule (and, of course, this applies to any other norm in the organization… we wrote a lot about this in The Knowing-Doing Gap).  I wanted to know if the reward and prestige systems already supported the rule, and if not, how they were going to change things.  I wanted to know if the senior executives already modeled the right behavior, and if not, was something being done to make sure they changed their behavior.  I wanted to know if there were known assholes in visible positions, and if there were, was something going to be done to change their behavior or send them packing –to signal that the words were not hollow. 

    As with all norms, the espoused beliefs don't mean much unless they are backed by what people do — especially during the little moments.  Google is an interesting case in point.  Although they are imperfect like every human organization, it remains a civilized place because, as one senior executive explained to me years ago, "it isn't efficient to be an asshole here."  That is a sign to me that the norm is working, and all the strategy and product stuff aside, it is impressive they seem to have sustained this norm despite their size and the relentless performance pressures.  

    To return to the dangers of hollow rhetoric: It is especially destructive when it comes to the no jerk or or no asshole rule.  When organizations say it, but don't do it, when it does not constrain and describe how people act — and no serious efforts are being made to begin implementing the norm — the result is that double-whammy:  Leaders are seen as both assholes and hypocrites.  

  • New Study: Helpful and Friendly Co-Workers Can Keep You Alive

    Tiffany West from the World Economic Forum just alerted me to an intriguing new study that suggests having the right co-workers can help us live longer, while having the wrong ones might kill us.  The article was published by Arie Shirom and four of his colleagues and is based on a diverse sample of approximately 800 Israeli employees, who were tracked by the researchers for 20 years.  The main finding is that those who had unsupportive co-workers died at a much higher rate (2.4 times lower).  You can read a good summary here, along with some other bells and whistles. 

    Here are the two questions they used to measure "peer social support, as described on  page 270 of the original article:

    Peer social support was scored high for participants who reported (a) that their immediate coworkers were helpful to them in solving problems, and (b) were friendly to them.

    I was most intrigued by these two items because they remind me of the two hallmarks of a good boss that I saw over and over again as I read research when writing Good Boss, Bad Boss.  A good boss is one who is both competent at the work at hand and who treats his or her charges with dignity and respect.  One of the most fun variations of this theme is David Kelley's "love and money" balancing act. 

    But it is instructive that, when you step back and look at all this evidence about what we, as humans, want and need from the people for lead us and who work with us, much of it boils down to two simple things. We want people who are skilled at the work and using to use those skills to help us perform our jobs when we have too much work to do or don't know how to solve the problem at hand.  And we want people who treat us with warmth, respect, and who inject a bit of fun in life (at least that is what I want from from a friendly co-worker).  Academics have found many nuances and will find many more, but these two simple categories jump out again — and they make sense.

    These findings also reinforce that advice I have given again and again about the kind of workplaces it is best to seek versus avoid, and my related advice on surviving an asshole infested workplace.  As I have always said, if you are surrounded by a bunch of assholes — and people who won't help you solve work problems and who are unfriendly would qualify — get out as fast as you can.  This study suggests that, they longer you stay around such people, the more your health will suffer, and eventually, your risk of an early death will rise.

    This is not a perfect study, the sample is not representative, a larger one would have enabled the researcher to do more fine-grained analyses, and while the two item measure of co-worker support was suggestive, it is rather coarse.  But all studies are imperfect, and this one is impressive because the authors followed this group for so long and took considerable care to rule out competing explanations, such as the health of the worker when the first measurements were taken in 1988.

    P.S. There was an interesting twist in the findings, the mortality effects seen in 2008 were driven mostly by the impact of support on workers who were 38 to 43 when the measurements were first taken in 1988. As the authors suggest, the younger workers may have still been healthy enough to avoid the mortality effects of bad co-workers, but the lack of effects on older workers seem harder to explain.

    The citation is: Work-based predictors of mortality: A 20-year follow-up of healthy employees. Shirom, Arie; Toker, Sharon; Alkaly, Yasmin; Jacobson, Orit; Balicer, Ran. Health Psychology, Vol 30(3), May 2011, 268-275.

  • Horrible Bosses and Revenge: The Uncut Version

    I had a little piece published today in the Financial Times called "Revenge Can Be Sweet for Smart Workers."  Follow the link if you want to read the article (you need to register, but it is free).  I have been doing a lot of interviews and such lately about Good Boss, Bad Boss and The No Asshole Rule as both books are related to the new comedy Horrible Bosses, but the Financial Times is the only place where I have done an original piece.  I found the editors at the FT to be wonderful, far better than most I work with to be blunt (although no one beats Julia Kirby at Harvard Business Review). Nontheless, given space restrictions, the editors cut several hundred words out of my original piece, so I thought I would put the "uncut" version here.  Like most films that are "director's cuts," the shorter version is probably better.  But I hope you might like the long one too:

    The new hit movie, Horrible Bosses, provides a satisfying if rather shallow dose of guilty pleasure for just about anyone who has endured a nasty and incompetent superior.  The three hapless protagonists, played by Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis, hatch a plot to murder their cruel overseers.  Their plans fail miserably, but they (sort of) win in the end anyway.   Horrible Bosses, like any decent comedy, is both logically absurd and emotionally truthful.  Plotting to murder your boss, let alone trying to do it, is immoral, unlawful, and impractical.  And while people may love hearing and telling stories about dramatic acts of revenge short of murder, this approach usually backfires.  The audience in my theatre laughed and laughed when the cruel dentist played by Jennifer Aniston, a heartless sexual harasser, was filmed stripping-off an anesthetized patient’s pants by her long-suffering dental assistant – who used the incriminating evidence to force Aniston to pay for his honeymoon.

    Unfortunately, real-life victims who live-out their revenge fantasies rarely fare so well.  Since publishing The No Asshole Rule in 2007, I have been told and emailed a steady stream of “getting even” stories from victims of lousy bosses.  My readers especially like the story I heard from a radio producer whose relentlessly demeaning boss kept stealing food off her desk. She got even by cooking brownies that contained Ex-Lax, the chocolate laxative, and placing them prominently on her desk.  Her boss promptly gobbled them down (without asking permission, of course). She waited an hour or so before telling him the ingredients.  Like most dramatic and entertaining revenge stories, it did not end well for the victim in real life.  The boss stopped eating her food, but he turned even nastier in other ways — browbeating her and giving her time-consuming, boring, and useless assignments. So the producer quit, even though she did not have another job lined up. The problem with revenge, as this story hints, is that all too often it fuels a vicious circle – and because bosses have more power than their underlings, they typically inflict the greater damage.

    Yet the impulse to exact revenge that fuels Horrible Bosses is not only a potent and widely felt emotion, it has helped bring down many managers who have fallen prey to power poisoning.   The actions by the three awful bosses in the film were cartoonish, but all suffered symptoms identified by psychologists who study the perils of power: They were self-absorbed, greedy, lacked impulse control, insensitive to subordinates feelings, and acted like the rules applied to everyone but them.  When the Kevin Spacey character gave himself a promotion and knocked down walls to reward himself with an even bigger office, it didn’t seem like fiction to me.  It reminded me of real bosses who had done similar things and how, just like the Kevin Spacey character, they were oblivious to the resentment it fueled among employees who felt that the boss already had enough money, power, and related goodies.

    Yes, it stinks to work for one of these creeps, as millions of victims of bully bosses can tell you.  Fortunately, although enacting revenge fantasies is a recipe for self-destruction, smart employees who are unable or unwilling to escape such jerks battle back via less dramatic and more effective steps.  They patiently document every cruel word (like the nurse who counted how often a surgeon said she was “chubby”), every hostile move (like the TV producer whose boss flicked a lit cigarette at her during a contentious meeting), and every unethical or incompetent act (like the executive secretary who kept records of every suspect travel expense claimed by her boss).  They band together with fellow victims so the documentation comes from multiple sources.   That way, when they do go to battle, they have a stronger case and can’t be portrayed as a single nut case.  Above all, smart victims are patient. They build an iron-clad case and a large group of allies.  And they wait for the right moment to strike back – after stretch of poor job performance by the boss, a widely known ethical lapse, or perhaps best of all, after the boss’s superiors have started asking around because they have their own concerns about that boss.   The top management team of one U.S. nonprofit organization did this rather masterfully.  As a member of the team explained to me, the board of directors was initially unresponsive to concerns raised by an individual staff member about their two-faced executive director.  This boss was apparently unusually adept at kissing-up to the board and kicking-down at those she led.  The team members patiently built their case and waited for the right moment – which came after a board member ran into a couple former staff members and was horrified by the stories he heard.  When the board  brought in the full management team (minus the executive director), the team presented extensive documentation against their boss and, as group, threatened to resign unless the bully was fired – which the board voted to do later that day.

    The lesson for victims of nasty and incompetent bosses is that, if you can’t or won’t flee from your vile overseers, and want to get even, having revenge fantasies is probably inevitable.  But acting on such fantasies is probably a bad idea for you — even though doing so (sort of) worked for the three underlings in Horrible Bosses.  Your boss has a lot more power than you do.  So you’ve got to build your case, develop allies, and wait to fight back when your boss turns vulnerable.  

    Nonetheless, putting all the silliness and impracticalities aside, Horrible Bosses offers a useful cautionary tale for every manager and executive.  If you treat your people like dirt, just because they comply with your absurd requests and smile sweetly through your insults and tantrums does not mean that all is well.  Your charges just might be waiting oh-so-patiently for you to slip-up or for your past sins to catch-up with you.  Then your followers will pounce and you will be in a world of hurt.   Certainly, there are plenty of nasty and incompetent bosses out there who escape unscathed – the world is not perfectly just place.  But if you are a horrible boss, and you lead some smart and patient people, the revenge the exact against you may, in the end, be just as sweet for them as any Hollywood fantasy.

  • Is Your Future Boss Horrible? A 10 Point Reference Check

    The film Horrible Bosses  opens on July 8th.  The basic plot, as I understand it, is that three guys who hate their bosses, played by  Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis, conspire to murder them.  I don't recommend that way of dealing with a bosshole, and have been suggesting more constructive approaches (see this ABC interview).  As part of the film's release, I have been getting quite a few media calls about bosses. This reminded me of a checklist that I worked on with the folks at LinkedIn and Guy Kawasaki a few years back to help  assesses if a prospective boss is likely to be an asshole.   The list builds on the ideas in The No Asshole Rule and some ideas that appeared in Good Boss, Bad Boss.   

    We developed ten "reference check"  questions that you can ask people who have worked with and for your prospective boss — or perhaps had him or her as a client — to help determine if you are at risk of going to work for an asshole.

    Discovering the answers to these questions before you take a job can save you a lot of heartache. One of the key points in The No Asshole Rule is that one of the most effective ways to avoid being harmed by assholes — and becoming one yourself — is (to steal a phrase from Leonardo da Vinci) "to resist at the beginning," to avoid working for an asshole boss (or joining an asshole infested workplace) in the first place.  Here is our 10 point checklist:

    1. Kisses-up and kicks-down: “How does the prospective boss respond to feedback from people higher in rank and lower in rank?” “Can you provide examples from experience?” One characteristic of certified assholes is that they tend to demean those who are less powerful while brown-nosing their superiors.

    2. Can’t take it: “Does the prospective boss accept criticism or blame when the going gets tough?” Be wary of people who constantly dish out criticism but can’t take a healthy dose themselves.        

    3. Short fuse    : “In what situations have you seen the prospective boss lose his temper?” Sometimes anger is justified or even effective when used sparingly, but someone who “shoots-the-messenger” too often can breed a climate of fear in the workplace. Are co-workers scared of getting in an elevator with this person?  

    4. Bad credit: “Which style best describes the prospective boss: gives out gratuitous credit, assigns credit where credit is due, or believes everyone should be their own champion?” This question opens the door to discuss whether or not someone tends to take a lot of credit while not recognizing the work of his or her team.

    5. Canker sore: “What do past collaborators say about working with the prospective boss?” Assholes usually have a history of infecting teams with nasty and dysfunctional conflict. The world seems willing to tolerate talented assholes, but that doesn’t mean you have to.              

    6. Flamer: What kind of email sender is the prospective boss? Most assholes cannot contain themselves when it comes to email: flaming people, carbon-copying the world, blind carbon copying to cover his own buttocks. Email etiquette is a window into one’s soul.

    7. Downer: “What types of people find it difficult to work with the prospective boss? What type of people seem to work very well with the prospective boss?” Pay attention to responses that suggest “strong-willed” or “self-motivated” people tend to work best with the prospective boss because assholes tend to leave people around them feeling de-energized and deflated.

    8. Card shark: “Does the prospective boss share information for everyone’s benefit?” A tendency to hold cards close to one’s chest—i.e., a reluctance to share information—is a sign that this person treats co-workers as competitors who must be defeated so he or she can get ahead.                    

    9. Army of one: “Would people pick the prospective boss for their team?” Sometimes there is upside to having an asshole on your team, but that won’t matter if the coworkers refuse to work with that person. Use this question to help determine if the benefit of having the prospective boss on your team outweighs any asshole behaviors.

    10. Open architecture: “How would the prospective boss respond if a copy of The No Asshole Rule appeared on her desk?” Be careful if the answer is, “Duck!”

    Those are our 10 questions. I would love to hear other tips about what has helped you avoid taking a job with an asshole boss — or warning signs that you wish you would have noticed before going to work for a demeaning creep.   

  • I’m on BNET’s “The Live One” Webcast Today

    I will be interviewed on BNET's new webcast show, "The Live One" today at 10AM pacific.  I plan to talk about Good Boss, Bad Boss and related stuff including Google's recent research differentiating their best and worst managers (technical skills didn't matter nearly as much as people skills, which surprised a lot of people at Google), a cool new study that shows having more women on your team will make it act smarter (in fact, it is more important than having people with higher IQ's), and the recent appearance of The No Asshole Rule in Doonesbury.  At least that is what I am planning on talking about.  It will be a fairly informal conversation, so who knows exactly what will happen.  I hope you can tune in.  Again, the URL is here — check out the past interviews, with people including Peter Sims and Penelope Trunk.

  • Doonesbury Slaps Donald Trump With The No Asshole Rule

       Two frames
    My old buddy from graduate school, Larry Ford, sent me an email this morning and told me to check out Doonesbury.  To my amazement, it features The No Asshole Rule, or as they call it "The No A——- Rule."  Here is where you can go to see the complete cartoon. The cartoon does a great job of summarizing the main points of the book (see two frames above)  and then it goes on to use the ideas in the book to rip Donald Trump a new asshole (see below).

    Trimmed version Doonesbury donald
    In my book, Trump really does qualify as a certified asshole, as having achieved the lowest level a human can short of committing horrific crimes or something.  His narcissism is something to behold. Listen to how often he uses the word "I" when he speaks about the buildings built by his company. He says things like "I built the Trump International Hotel and Tower."  It sounds as if no one helped at all, it was all him, designing the building, putting it up, and so on.

    Trump also loves to sue people, as that is what a rich bully does.  And, as one lawyer I know well explained to me, there are an interesting group of people out there who sue others as a replacement for psychotherapy — The Donald appears to be of this twisted ilk.  In this vein, I was talking to a former editor of a rather famous publication a few months back and I asked him who was the biggest asshole he ever dealt with — it took less than a second for him to name Trump.  The editor then went on to tell me that, after his magazine published a piece on Trump, Trump called him and started screaming at him and told him that the lawsuit against the magazine was already being prepared. The former editor then asked Donald an interesting question: " Have you read the story?"  The Donald said "No."  After reading it, Trump decided not to sue. 

    A lovely human being, huh?

    Well, I never thought The No Asshole Rule would make Doonesbury. And given my intense dislike of The Donald, I am delighted with how it appeared.  Now, let's see if Trump already has his lawyers going after Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau because — after all, that is what rich certified asshole would do!

    P.S. This Doonesbury was apparently written before Trump withdrew from the race — although now The Donald seems to be backpeddling a bit, saying he wouldn't completely rule it out.

  • Get a Free PDF of My HBR Essay “Stepping Down Gracefully”

    I wrote a short essay for the June Harvard Business Review on why it is so important for leaders to step down gracefully, whether they are leaving voluntarily or not.  It was inspired by some leaders I know who have not stepped down gracefully, and in the process, have done moderate damage to their organizations and severe damage to their careers.  Here is how it opens:

    Some CEOs of long tenure must have gotten a slightly queasy feeling as they watched the recent events in the Arab world. Even if they bear no resemblance at all to Hosni Mubarak or Muammar Gadhafi—even if they are the most competent and benevolent of leaders—they may well feel horror at how rapidly the fortunes of a comfortable autocrat can disintegrate. They may wonder at the frightening human tendency, when the writing is on the wall, to resort to the denial, delusions, anger, and antics we’ve seen from despots in Africa and the Middle East.

    If you would like a free PDF of this little essay, you can find get it here: https://archive.harvardbusiness.org/cla/web/pl/product.seam?c=11746&i=11748&cs=1e30763be64402b7a624de281722f66b.  They only give 100 free ones so, when they are gone, they are gone. 

    P.S. Please forgive my lack of new posts lately, I am focused on trying to get a new book started and have not been in the blogging mood!  I am hoping to start blogging a bit more soon, but can't predict my mood or motivation very well. 

     

  • The No Asshole Rule in Slovenian – I Think They Call it “The No Pig Rule.”

    I was delighted to get a copy of The No Asshole Rule translated into Slovenian this week.  It just tickles me the different ways that different cultures spin the cover and the language, from the crazy Polish cover to the beautiful red  Italian one.  Below is the cover of Slovenian version. I am wondering, is it called something like  "The No Pig Rule." What is the subtitle?  Do you think this is a good translation of the book's main message? 

    If you speak Slovenian, or know someone who does, I would love to know the answer to the questions.  In any case, I like the clean design and that little pig os pretty cute.

    Ni-prostora-za-prasce_m1

     

  • Kurt Vonnnegut on “Having Enough” A Reminder From The No Asshole Rule

    Yesterday, I was talking to a pair of very smart and very ambitious friends.  As I told them, I am all for high performing teams, excellence in performance, and I love the restlessness that drives creative people at places like Apple, Pixar, and Facebook.  But there is a negative underbelly to this human drive toward achievement.  It can become a disease where, no matter how much some people get, they keep wanting more, and the result is not only chronic unhappiness for themselves and those around them, it is also often propels unethical and otherwise inhuman behavior. 

    The worst examples are seen in the power poisoning and associated delusions among the worst of political leaders, with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and his sons disgusting antics currently playing starring roles on the international stage.  But my focus has been on more mundane crimes against humanity.  In particular, if the charges are true, the insider trading and other unlawful actions taken by Galleon Group's  Raj Rajaratnam, whose trial just started, reflect a similar human flaw. Even more shocking to me is the news this week that Rajat Gupta — former board member at Procter & Gamble and at Goldman Sachs, and former Managing Director of McKinsey — was charged with insider trading.  Procter & Gamble and McKinsey are two firms I know pretty well, and while there is a strong focus on excellence in both places, I was troubled because — each in their own way — they are among the most ethical and non-greedy cultures I have ever encountered. 

    The fact that such a central player in both places fell victim to such apparent bad judgment and greed means, to me, that no matter how wonderful you may think you are as a human-bring,and no matter how good the people around you might be,  we are all at risk of falling prey to own greed, status insecurities, and that feeling that comes with power that "the rules are for the little people."   Apparently, part of Gupta's defense will be that, if he did leak inside information to Raj Rajaratnam, he personally did not benefit financially (See this New York Times column).  To me, this defense is meaningless — at least from a moral perspective –  because it simply suggests that Gupta was trying to get more status from Raj Rajaratnam, pay back some old favor, or set the stage for a future one — all signs of greed (and perhaps some insecurity too — often a hallmark of very successful people).

    The lesson for all of us, as I emphasized in The No Asshole Rule, is that sometimes it can be remarkably useful to tell yourself "I have enough."  Here is an excerpt from a longer post I put-up in early 2007 on the official publication day of The No Asshole.  Current events suggest that this lesson from the late Kurt Vonnegut  is worth bringing it out again (I edited it lightly for clarity):

    The process of writing The No Asshole Rule entailed many fun twists and turns.  But the very best thing happened when I wrote for permission to reprint a Kurt Vonnegut poem called "Joe Heller," which was published in The New Yorker.  I was hoping that Vonnegut would give me permission to print it in the book, both because I love the poem (more on that later), and Vonnegut is one my heroes.  His books including Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions had a huge effect on me when I was a teenager– both the ideas and the writing style.

    I wrote some anonymous New Yorker address to ask permission to reprint the poem, and to my amazement, I received a personal reply from Vonnegut about two weeks later (see it here).  The postcard he sent me was not only in his handwriting. He gave me permission to use the poem "however you please without compensation or further notice to me."  It remains one of my favorite things.

    The poem fits well in my chapter on how to avoid catching asshole poisoning.  Here is how I set it up in the book:

    'If you read or watch TV programs about business or sports, you often see the world framed as place where everyone wants “more more more” for “me me me,” every minute in every way. The old bumper sticker sums it up: “Whoever dies with the most toys wins.” The potent but usually unstated message is that we are all trapped in a life-long contest where people can never get enough money, prestige, victories, cool stuff, beauty, or sex – and that we do want and should want more goodies than everyone else.

    This attitude fuels a quest for constant improvement that has a big upside, leading to everything from more beautiful athletic and artistic performances, to more elegant and functional products, to better surgical procedures and medicines, to more effective and humane organizations. Yet when taken too far, this blend of constant dissatisfaction, unquenchable desires, and overbearing competitiveness can damage your mental health. It can lead you to treat those “below” you as inferior creatures who are worthy of your disdain and people "above" you who have more stuff and status as objects of envy and jealousy.

    Again, a bit of framing can help. Tell yourself, “I have enough.” Certainly, some people need more than they have, as many people on earth still need a safe place to live, enough good food to eat, and other necessities. But too many of us are never satisfied and feel constantly slighted, even though – by objective standards – we have all we need to live a good life. I got this idea from a lovely little poem that Kurt Vonnegut published in The New Yorker called “Joe Heller,” which was about the author of the renowned World War II novel Catch 22. As you can see, the poem describes a party that Heller and Vonnegut attended at a billionaire’s house. Heller remarks to Vonnegut that he has something that the billionaire can never have, "The knowledge that I've got enough." These wise words provide a frame that can help you be at peace with yourself and to treat those around you with affection and respect:

    Joe Heller  

    True story, Word of Honor:
    Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
    now dead,
    and I were at a party given by a billionaire
    on Shelter Island.

    I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel
    to know that our host only yesterday
    may have made more money
    than your novel 'Catch-22'
    has earned in its entire history?"
    And Joe said, "I've got something he can never have."
    And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"
    And Joe said, "The knowledge that I've got enough."
    Not bad! Rest in peace!"

    –Kurt Vonnegut

    The New Yorker, May 16th, 2005

    (Reprinted with Kurt Vonnegut’s permission)

    To return to Rajat Gupta, if the charges against him are true, it might have spared him and his former colleagues much pain if he had repeated  "I have enough"  to himself over and and over again at key moments.  While this lesson may come too late for him, it isn't for many of us.

  • Carolyn’s Rule: A Great Test of Character

    My attempt to stave off email bankruptcy is not only going pretty well — I am down to 135 emails to deal with — I just found a gem from a couple months back that forgot to write about here.  A reader who asked to described as "Carolyn in Austin, Texas" wrote me nice note about The No Asshole Rule and especially emphasized that she liked my assertion in Chapter 1 that "The difference between how a person treats the powerless versus the powerful is as good a measure of human character as I know. "

    Carolyn suggested a second test that I just love.  In fact, let's call it Carolyn's Rule:

    You can determine someone’s character by how quickly they realize they’ve made a mistake and how readily they admit it.

    Not bad, huh? It makes me think of one colleague I've know from nearly 30 years who has never admitted a mistake — even in multiple cases where it is clear this person has made big mistakes, has damaged other people, and it would be best for all concerned.  Indeed, as I implied over at HBR, Carolyn's Rule is also a good test of a boss's skill.