Work Matters

  • The No Asshole Rule: A CEO Presses The Delete Button

    Button I am mostly focused on the upcoming publication of Good Boss, Bad Boss. But I am and will always be the "asshole guy."  I still get a good 20 to 30 emails a week about issues and reactions related to The No Asshole Rule. There are still a lot of people suffering out there and assholes will always be with us.  But I still love a good success story.  Yesterday, I got a lovely one about the role that a rather brave employee — who used the book as ammunition — played in expelling the local certified asshole.  I removed his name but the rest of the email is unchanged.

    Bob,
     
    I ran across your book while I was studying the
    literature on workplace bullying.  As a
    victim myself, a colleague and I had been fighting an asshole Director and a
    Section Head above us for over two years. 
    I actually sought psychological treatment to help me with the emotional
    troubles I was obviously having in this battle.
     
    3 weeks ago I sent your book to our CEO.  He said he'd read it already and sent it
    back.  I met with our HR director at the
    CEO's request and I gave it to him.  This
    led into a meeting with our VP, and I gave him a copy as well.
     
    Today it was announced that this director was fired.
     
    Thanks!

    I am always interested in your notes and comments about The No Asshole
    Rule     (and anything else) but I confess that success stories are
    especially nice to hear

    P.S. Speaking of The No Asshole Rule, I got a note today that the Asshole Rating Self-Exam (ARSE), our online test to see if you are a certified asshole, is just about to hit 237,000 completions.  It is currently at 236,950. The self-examination continues!

  • Free Good Boss, Bad Boss Webinar: Hosted By Rypple on July 8th

     Rypple is a company that sells "social software" that is designed to make giving (and getting) frequent feedback easier and more constructive.  They are hosting a free one hour webinar on Good Boss, Bad Boss. It will be on July 8th at 2:00 PM Eastern (or 11 AM Pacific).  I will talk about the main ideas in the book for 40 minutes or so and then we will open it up to Q&A.  Please go here to sign-up.

    I look forward to it, especially to your questions and comments.

  • “Humility isn’t thinking less of yourself, but thinking less about yourself.”

    Gina from Maestro Consulting Group posted the above saying in response to my post today over at HBR on "The Delicate Art of Being Perfectly Assertive."  I think it is a lovely and wise saying.  Indeed, it is a perfect companion to the "the attitude of wisdom," the ability to have the courage to act on what you know in concert with the ability to doubt what you know and do.  Gina, great stuff!

  • The Delicate Art of Being Perfectly Assertive: The 4th Belief of Good Bosses

    I put-up a new post over at HBR this morning, which is the 4th in what will ultimately be 12 Things the Good Bosses Believe.  This fourth belief builds on research showing that the best bosses strike the middle ground between being too assertive and not assertive enough — the press their people hard enough to motivate and guide them, but stop short of being overbearing or micromanaging to the point of pissing-off followers or undermining their confidence or work.  As I say in the post, this requires much flexibility, and is one reason that perhaps the central idea in Good Boss, Bad Boss is that the best bosses are in tune with what it feels like to work for them — which means in this case to understand just how hard to push your people on average  and to be able to "read" when it is time to interject, perhaps lean on them or instruct them, versus when to back-off, is a crucial and difficult craft to develop.  As I say at HBR, my favorite quote about this fine art comes from Tommy Lasorda:

    When I heard about this research, I couldn't help but think of a quote
    from Tommy Lasorda, who has worked for the Los Angeles Dodgers for
    almost 50 years, including a 20-year stint as the team's manager. The
    first day he took charge of the team, Tommy said to the press: "I
    believe managing is like holding a dove in your hand. If you hold it too
    tightly you kill it, but if you hold it too loosely, you lose it."

    I love that.  Also, Julia Kirby, who edits my posts at HBR, dug up the fabulous picture below.  It is in the final link in the article, but I couldn't resist inserting it here:

    081019_p03_tp

    The reason I love this picture so much is, as I have discussed on Work Matters before, and explain in the new HBR post:

    [w]hen I had finished writing much of my
    new book    , I had a conversation with the very talented Marc Hershon about
    what to call it. Marc is unusually good at naming things. He's the
    branding expert who named the Blackberry and the Swiffer, for example,
    and has helped authors like Tom
    Kelley     and Dr.
    Phil     come up with titles for books that turned into bestsellers.
    (Marc also co-authored his own book called I Hate People and
    produces all manner of other creative output, including screenplays, TV
    scripts, jokes for the likes of Jay Leno and Dana Carvey, and weekly
    political cartoons for San Francisco-area newspapers.) Based on the
    chapters he read, and thinking about the bosses he knew, he suggested
    the title "Top Dog on a Tightrope." What struck him, in other words,
    was the constant balancing act required. He also thought it was
    important to emphasize that, while everyone misjudges a step now and
    then, the best ones fall less often, because they have the skill to make
    constant and correct adjustments to stay out of trouble.

    Being a "perfectly assertive" boss is a lot easier to talk about then to do. I would love to hear your ideas about how you –or bosses you know — have accomplished this feat.  Please comment here or over at the HBR post

  • Launch Pad: A Stanford Class Where Students Started 11 Companies

    IMG_5857
    There are many entrepreneurship classes taught throughout the world, in some students talk about how what explains the success and failure of start-ups, and very often, such classes include a business plan competition, where groups pitch ideas for new companies.  These classes often do help people start companies, and at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, our faculty have taught classes that have helped future entrepreneurs in many ways.  But this last term, two Stanford d.school faculty members (and experienced entrepreneurs and bosses) Michael Dearing and Perry Klebahn ran a class called Launch Pad where students were just expected to talk about starting a company, the focus on was on launching the company during the 10 week class.  To be part of the class, student teams — and many more applied than were accepted — had to pitch their idea to Michael and Perry, and if they believed the idea was viable and the team was motivated enough, then they were accepted in the class to try to launch their company. 

    The class has been over for a few week and was one of the most successful things ever done at the d.school.  (To be clear, a lot of what do fails, and I have been involved in some less successful classes with Michael and Perry, but they like most people at the d.school have the attitude that if you are failing a fair amount, you aren't trying hard enough or taking enough risks).  Here is what the d.school website says about the class:

    From the first day, students pushed to both launch their own products,
    while using their experience and expertise to help classmates do the
    same. Throughout the quarter, teams constantly cycled through the design
    process, often making major changes to their initial idea in order to
    hone in on what their potential customers wanted, and what would be
    viable in the market    .
     
    The result? Eleven products or service were launched.
    Collectively, the teams had over $100,000 in revenue by the last day of
    class. Eight teams are now incorporated in four countries. Add in a bit
    of press from the New York Times and NBC, as well as a shout-out from
    Steve Jobs during his talk at the World Wide Developers conference, and
    you’ve got Launchpad: lifting design thinking teams into entrepreneurial
    orbit.

    Not bad for a 10 week class, Huh? As just two example, check -out this story about Pulse, which Tech Crunch described as a "must have" app for the iPad, it is a news reader that you can but at itunes for 3.99, and is selling quite well. The students who founded it are Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta.  They already have a company called Alphonso Labs, and two employees, and are the one's who got the shout out from Jobs — note that they just graduated from Stanford two weeks ago and are off to quite a start!  And check out this story on the d.school blog from as few weeks back, they were up to 50,000 downloads and were the #1 paid app at the iPad store.

    A much different, but also very promising, is a service called Worker Express that was founded by Pablo Fuentes and Joe Mellin, which helps unemployed construction workers find jobs.  Check out this story on on the local NBC affiliate and this one at Fast Company.  I think the picture above is especially interesting because it shows how the prototyping process worked during Launch Pad, essentially, in the d.school space, the founders of the 11 companies had a "beta" or practice trade-show where they set-up booths and pitched their ideas to a a host of diverse people on campus and to the classes coaches and teachers too, so they could develop and refine their messages.  The picture captures Pablo and Joe pitching their service.

    I am very proud of all the students in the class, of Michael and Perry, as well as d.school Fellow Corey Ford, who were part of the teaching team that made this all happen.  Great work.


  • The Wall Street Journal Asks: Are More Bosses Looking to Reform?

    I was interviewed by Sue Shellenbarger for a Wall Street Journal post on whether or not more bosses want to change their incompetent and mean spirited ways these days, and how they can do it.  The post just came out today, and Sue does a nice job of suggesting that there is more pressure on bosses to reform these days because, as we come out of the recession, retaining good people becomes more important as they have more exit options (see this post) — and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that people quit bad bosses, not bad companies. Sue describes a couple bosses who changed their ways:

    One, a division manager, had a habit of yelling when he was disappointed
    in people’s performance. Like many bad bosses, he had no idea how mean
    and scary he looked when he delivered criticism. Coaching and pressure
    from his own superiors prompted him to ask subordinates for feedback,
    and he gradually learned how to deliver criticism in a more constructive
    way.     

    Another manager was a control freak who also yelled a lot, rather than
    trying to help subordinates develop their skills. It was the adoption by
    his company of a formal performance-review process, whereby employees,
    peers and bosses all offered candid feedback on his destructive
    behavior, that helped this executive see the light.

    Sue also describes my perspective on reform:

    The key to reform, says Robert Sutton, author of a forthcoming book on the
    topic, “Good Boss, Bad Boss,”  is to learn to notice how
    your behavior affects others. Almost all of us fail sometimes to contain
    “our inner jerk,” he says. The key to change is to train yourself to
    notice that you are behaving badly, stop, apologize, and work
    consciously on being less destructive in the future.

    Sue has generated almost 50 vehement comments by asking questions WSJ readers whether reform is possible and how it can happen.  What do you think?  Can bosses reform? Are any of you bosses who have changed for the better?  Or is it one of those things that companies and management pay lip service to because they are naive or don't have the courage to get get rid of these rotten apples?

  • Winner Take All Incentives And Cheating

    Steve Levitt of Freakonomics fame has shown that, when teacher's pay is linked to the the performance of their students on standardized tests, they are prone to cheat — I mean the teacher's cheat.  Levitt's data from Chicago suggest that about 5% of teachers cheated to get bonuses and other goodies.  A recent New York Times article shows that this problem persists, and tells a rather discouraging story of a principal from Georgia who "erased bubbles on the multiple-choice answer sheets and
    filled in the right answers." And if you look check out the Freakonomics blog, there is evidence that Australian teachers cheat too.   

    The kind of pressures that educators face aren't just financial
    incentives (although that alone is plenty of pressure as many systems
    reward only the top performers no matter how well everyone else does),
    they also risk being fired, demoted, or their schools may lose
    accreditation, be put on probation, and in some cases, closed for poor
    performance

    The Times article offers an interesting quote that has implications beyond education:

    John Fremer, a specialist in data forensics
    who was hired by an independent panel to dig deeper into the Atlanta
    schools, and who investigated earlier scandals in Texas and elsewhere,
    said educator cheating was rising. “Every time you increase the stakes
    associated with any testing program, you get more cheating,” he said.  

    I found this quote to be interesting because a related implication is that, the more pressure that people face for performance, the more likely they are to cheat.  Perhaps the most extreme case are winner take all games.  Just watch how soccer players in the World Cup fake severe injuries to draw fouls again and again, even though they have barely been touched by opponents or not at all.

    To this point, BPS research reports a new study by Spanish researchers that shows the dangers of winner take all incentive systems.  The experiment entailed online completing mazes but divided subjects into two conditions.  In the first condition, students were paid based on how many mazes they completed.  So, there were incentives, but not competition or severe pressures to succeed.  In the second condition, subjects were only paid if they completed more mazes then the other five members of their group — so it was winner take all.  The subjects in the winner take all condition didn't perform any better, but they cheated more (the researchers figured out a clever way to catch them), especially if they were poor performers or women. 

    As the researchers conclude:

    'It turns out that individuals who are less able to fulfill the
    assigned task do not only have a higher probability to cheat, they also
    cheat in more different ways,' the researchers said. 'It appears that
    poor performers either feel entitled to cheat in a system that does not
    give them any legitimate opportunities to succeed, or they engage in
    "face saving" activity to avoid embarrassment for their poor
    performance.

    After years of reading research and working with organizations of all kinds, I have learned to become very wary of winner take all incentives.  Or as often happens in organizations, systems where the top performers get the lion's share of the money and their more ordinary peers get a few crumbs.  These systems not only encourage cheating, unless they are managed with extreme skill, they also undermine cooperation because, "If I help you, it means I am less likely to succeed."

    Well, whenever I write about these kinds of problems, people ask me what the alternatives should be, and I confess, that is a tough question.  But I do think that a few guidelines are useful:

    1.  When in doubt, anoint a higher percentage of your people as "winners" and a lower percentage as "losers"

    2. When in doubt, err on the side of smaller differences in pay between the top performers and everyone else.

    3.  Define superstars as people who help others succeed ,not who stomp on others on the way to the top.

    Those are my three. Do you have other guidelines to add? This is a tough problem and every organization that I know struggles with such issues. 

    P.S. The article summarized at BPS is: Schwieren,
    C., & Weichselbaumer, D. (2010). Does competition enhance
    performance or cheating? A laboratory experiment Journal of Economic Psychology, 31
    (3), 241-253

    P.P.S. Also see this great article by Chip and Dan Heath on "Why
    Incentives are Effective, Irresistible, and Almost Certain to
    Backfire."

  • The Evolutionary Value of Swearing

    I was just interviewed for a podcast by HBR's Sarah Green about my post on the Strategic Use of Swearing, which was inspired by HBR editor Dan McGinn's great post on Should Leaders Ever Swear?  To prepare for this little interview, I read an article by Timothy Jay published in 2009 (volume 4, number 2, p. 153-161)) in Perspectives on Psychological Science that is called "The Utility and Ubiquity of Taboo Words."  This article reviews all sorts of research and theory on "swear words" (which is uses interchangeably with "taboo words), but there were a few sentences that I found especially striking for understanding the functions of swear words:

    From an evolutionary standpoint, swearing is a unique human behavior that was developed for a purpose.  Taboo words persist because they can intensify emotional communication to a degree that nontaboo words cannot (Jay & Janschewitz, 2007; Potts, 2007).  Fuck you! immediately conveys a level of contempt unparalleled by nontaboo words; there is no way to convey Fuck You! with polite speech.  p. 155.

    Do you love this as much as I do?  Or does something bug you about this? I found it most compelling. But it still may not find enough justification for leaders to swear. 

    Two other gems from this article:

    1. I was also interested, but not shocked, to discover that, in the U.S., one-third to one half of all swear words are either "fuck" or "shit."

    2. Can you explain why American people with Tourette's syndrome often shout 'fuck" and ""motherfucker" but not "poop?" 

    P.S. I meant to do a serious post on competition and cheating, but I got distracted. You will see it later in the week.

  • The Wise Boss: More Evidence For Expressing Confidence, But Harboring Private Doubts

    One of the challenges that I write about in Good Boss, Bad Boss and that Jeff Pfeffer and I discuss in Hard Facts is that leaders walk a fine line between exuding confidence while simultaneously making decisions and updating their actions based on the best possible information.  The best bosses, we argue, have what psychologist's call the attitude of wisdom: They act with confidence, while doubting what they know.  I have written about this here before, and perhaps the best example is in this long post about the wisdom of former Intel CEO Andy Grove.  There is a long quote from Andy in this post, and he demonstrates that attitude of wisdom with this great line, advising bosses:

    Act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction, and when your realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly.

    But perhaps Grove's most intriguing argument is that when you've made a decision you are not quite sure about, you as a boss are still smart to act confident, "to keep up your own spirits even though you well understand that you don't know what you are doing."

    I talk about this balancing act a lot in Good Boss, Bad Boss and in the workshops I do with managers and executives and they usually immediately get it and tell me that this is their lot in life.   But I have received push back over the years from some readers and some managers too who argue I am telling bosses to be less transparent.  I agree with the sentiment, and their arguments make me squirm, but have argued back that, if you as a boss talk about uncertainty too much, the problem is it undermines both your legitimacy as well as the self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, since you will be seen as less competent if you come across as wishy-washy, to keep your job and sustain your follower's faith, you need to act confident, probably more confident than you really feel.

    On a related point, the lovely new book, by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla (you really should read it, it is scary and wonderful), describes a study done of two hypothetical weather forecasters, Anna and Betty.  Anna predicted a 90% chance of rain for 4 days in a row.  Betty predicted a 75% chance of rain 4 days in a row. The experimental subjects were told that it ended-up raining three of the four days, so Betty was an objectively perfect forecaster — her probabilistic estimates were exactly on target .  Yet still, nearly half of the subjects said that Anna was a better forecaster, because she was more confident in her predictions (even though Better was more accurate).  Chabris and Simons also report related research on confidence; for example, doctors who consult articles and books before making a decision are seen as less competent than those who do not, which the authors take as another sign that we human-beings tend to reward and believe people who act confident, independently of whether that confidence is justified or not.

    When I take all this into account, the best advice I can give bosses is to develop wisdom, to express confidence in their decisions (to sustain legitimacy and inspire people to action) and yet to keep doubting what they know and are doing in private and in backstage discussions with their trusted advisers.  But my advice makes my own stomach turn a bit as, although it explains why our leaders are smart to bullshit us, and that it might even be for own good at times, it is still an argument for deception or at least exaggeration and less transparency.

    I am thinking about this because, in a few days, I am going to be writing point 6 of my list over at HBR of 12 Things That Good Bosses Believe: "I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge,
    but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong."

    In light of the complex forces here — the weird pressures to act confident but to avoid falling prey to evils of overconfidence and the apparent tension between being completely honest and being seen as a competent boss — I would be extremely interested to hear your advice, reactions, and examples of how a good boss navigates through these complex forces. 

  • Baseball Players With Big Smiles Live Longer

    I just visited my favorite psychology blog, BPS research, and found a really cool study of smiling.  The researchers rated the "smile intensity" of 230 baseball
    professional baseball players and "The
    researchers used a three-point smile scale: no smile, half smile (mouth
    only), and genuine 'Duchenne' smile (muscles contracted around the
    mouth and corners of the eyes)."  They found:


    Willie_Mays_cropped Focusing on the 150 players who'd
    died by the time of the study and controlling for extraneous factors
    such as BMI and marital status, the researchers found that those who
    were flashing a genuine 'Duchenne Smile' were half as likely to die in
    any given year compared with non-smilers. Indeed, the average life-span
    of the 63 deceased non-smilers was 72.9 years compared with 75 years for
    the 64 partial smilers and 79.9 years for the 23 Duchenne smilers.

    The question, of course, is does smiling make you healthier, being healthier make you smile more, or perhaps most likely, a smile is a sign of an unpbeat personality, which has been linked to longevity in numerous studies — check out this cool study of nuns in particular.  But there is also a fascinating set of studies that show smiling makes you feel happier and frowning make you feel grumpy.  I wrote about this in fairly gory detail in one of my early blog posts in 2006.  The "mechanism" through which this apparently happens is really cool.  Smiling leads to momentary cooling of blood the brain and frowning leads to momentary heating — and a large body of research shows that being "hot-headed" makes people grumpy and aggressive. 

    I love this weird emotion stuff.  It seems like a smile might be good for us — or perhaps more likely, is a sign of a good mental health.

    P.S. The picture is of baseball great Willie Mays, I think it is from 1952 and that looks like a real smile to me. Mays is still alive, by the way.

    P.P.S. The citation for the study is: Abel,
    E., & Kruger, M. (2010). Smile Intensity in Photographs Predicts
    Longevity. Psychological Science