Work Matters

Tag: No Asshole Rule

  • The Croatian No Asshole Cover: One of the Most Funny

    NAR in Croatian

    One of the most fun things about The No Asshole Rule is seeing all the different ways that designers have fun with the cover.  There are some wonderful variations. 

    I love the Italian cover, with its shocking red.  The Polish one is charmingly weird (especially the picture of the guy hanging himself from his tie). The Slovenian cover, with the pig is one of my favorites for its silly simplicity. The Russian cover is strange with the stop sign — several native speakers have told me the title is rather obscene.  The Portuguese cover is a bit dull.  I think the Japanese cover is the most beautiful. I have a hard copy of the Chinese translation, which has all these cute panda bears, but can't find a picture. And then there is another one that is Chinese too that has picture of a fly swatter smacking little people around (sorry the picture on the web is pretty small). I can't find a picture of the Korean cover on the web, but they say it has sold well and I still get inquires from Korean journalists about it.

      I also can't complain about the original design and how several countries including Denmark, Germany, Holland, France just used the original delete button.  The French version published in Quebec is different and the way they translated is pretty funny, something like "Zero dirty dogs,"  which similar to the Korean take on it, which I think is "Zero Asshole Rule." 

    I was reminded of all this last week when I got a few copies of the latest translation — in Croatian.  The cover just cracked me up, and everyone else in the family. That exploding head is pretty weird. I probably missed a few countries in my list here, but is was entertaining to go back and look at all the crazy versions.

  • Bad is Stronger than Good: Why Eliminating the Negative is More Important than Accentuating the Positive

    I  had a piece appear today in the Wall Street Journal called "How a Few Bad Apples Can Ruin Everything," a topic I have written on before and her, especially, in Good Boss, Bad Boss.  A fun discussion of bad apples can also be found on This American Life; check out the opening interview of this episode with Will Felps, who has done some cool research on how bad apples have a disproportionately negative effect on group performance. 

    The underlying theory and evidence for my argument that bad apples do so much damage, and more broadly destructive emotions and incompetence undermine performance and well-being so much, that the first order of business for any boss is to eliminate the negative rather than accentuate the positive (I am not discouraging goodness and excellence… but getting rid of the bad is importance for achieving greatness).  This perspective is inspired by a masterpiece of an academic article called "Bad is Stronger Than Good," which was published in 2001 by Roy F. Baumeister and three other colleagues. If you want to really dig in, I invite you to download Bad is Stronger Than Good.. it is very detailed but readable.

    Essentially, the authors meticulously go through topic after topic — personal relationships, learning, memory, self-image, and numerous others — and show that bad packs a much stronger impact than good. They review a couple hundred diverse studies to make this point, and as they say at the end, the consistency of their findings about the disproportionate impact of bad things (compared to the power of good things)– like negative emotions, hostility, abuse, dysfunctional acts, destructive relationships, serious injuries and accidents, incompetence, and on and on — is depressingly consistent across study after after study. 

    One implication for managers and numerous other influencers in organizations is that, while bringing and breeding great people, and encouraging civility, competence, effort, and other kinds of goodness is an important part of the job, such efforts will be undermined if you aren't constantly vigilant about eliminating the negative, which includes dealing with people who are bad apples.  Baumeister and his colleagues also do suggest that another implication is sheer volume — overwhelming strong bad stuff with lots of weak good stuff.  I will discuss that approach at the end of this post.

    By coincidence, my doctoral course on leadership is reading and discussing this article today, so I re-read it closely this weekend, and it just knocks my socks off.  Here are just a few quotes from the article that got my attention:

    This one explains why bad could be so much stronger — we are selected to focus on it:

    From our perspective, it is evolutionarily adaptive for bad to be stronger than good. We believe that throughout our evolutionary history, organisms that were better attuned to bad things would have been more likely to survive threats and, consequently, would have increased probability of passing along their genes. (p. 325)

    On bad versus events:

    A diary study by David, Green, Martin, and Suls (1997) examined the effects of everyday good and bad events, as well as personality traits. Undesirable (bad) events had more pervasive effects on subsequent mood than desirable (good) ones. Although each type of event influenced the relevant mood (i.e., bad events influenced bad mood, and good events predicted good mood) to similar degrees, bad events had an additional effect on the opposite-valence mood that was lacking for good events. In other words, bad events influenced both good and bad moods, whereas good events influenced only good moods. (p. 327)

    How long the impact of everyday events lasts was studied by Sheldon, Ryan, and Reis (1996). Bad events had longer lasting effects. In their data, having a good day did not have any noticeable effect on a person's well-being the following day, whereas having a bad day did carry over and influence the next day. (p.327)

    On close relationships.  Note the implication is that if you do something bad in a close relationship, you've got to do at least five good things (on average) to make up for it:

    On the basis of these results, Gottman (1994) has proposed a revealing diagnostic index for evaluating relationships: He proposed that in order for a relationship to succeed, positive and good interactions must outnumber the negative and bad ones by at least five to one. If the ratio falls below that, the relationship is likely to fail and breakup. This index converges well with the thrust of our argument: Bad events are so much stronger than good ones that the good must outnumber the bad in order to prevail. Gottman's index suggests that bad events are on average five times as powerful as good ones, at least with regard to close relationships. (p. 329)

    The article goes on and on in this vein, digging into seemingly every possible nuance, and constantly concluding that "bad is stronger than good.:  Here are a some excerpts from the wrap-up toward the end:

    Let us briefly summarize the evidence. In everyday life, bad events have stronger and more lasting consequences than comparable good events. Close relationships are more deeply and conclusively affected by destructive actions than by constructive ones, by negative communications than positive ones, and by conflict than harmony. Additionally, these effects extend to marital satisfaction and even to the relationship's survival (vs. breakup or divorce). Even outside of close relationships, unfriendly or conflictual interactions are seen as stronger and have bigger effects than friendly,harmonious ones. Bad moods and negative emotions have stronger effects than good ones on cognitive processing, and the bulk of affect regulation efforts is directed at escaping from bad moods (e.g., as opposed to entering or prolonging good moods). That suggests that people's desire to get out of a bad mood is stronger than their desire to get into a good one. (p. 362)

    Bad parenting can be stronger than genetic influences; good parenting is not. Research on social support has repeatedly found that negative, conflictual behaviors in one's social network have stronger effects than positive, supportive behaviors. Bad things receive more attention and more thorough cognitive processing than good things. When people first learn about one another, bad information has a significantly stronger impact on the total impression than any comparable good information. (p.362)

    Bad stereotypes and reputations are easier to acquire, and harder to shed, than good ones. Bad feedback has stronger effects than good feedback. Bad health has a greater impact on happiness than good health, and health itself is more affected by pessimism (the presence or absence of a negative outlook) than optimism (the presence or absence of a positive outlook). (p.362)

    Their closing paragraph, implies — albeit weakly– to one solution to overcoming the power of bad.

    Although it may seem pessimistic to conclude that bad is stronger than good, we do not think that such pessimism is warranted. As we have suggested, there are several reasons to think that it may be highly adaptive for human beings to respond more strongly to bad than good. In the final analysis, then, the greater power of bad may itself be a good thing. Moreover, good can still triumph in the end by force of numbers. Even though a bad event may have a stronger impact than a comparable good event, many lives can be happy by virtue of having far more good than bad events.

    I think this implied solution of working extra hard to crank up the good to drown out the bad is certainly part of the answer.  But, to me, another and probably more effective solution for managers is to work doggedly to screen out and stop bad people and bad behavior at every stage.  This means dealing with it via big things like recruiting, selection, training, rewards and punishments, and removing people; and, just as important, paying attention to the little things like  giving people feedback when they are destructive.   Another implication I emphasize is that self-awareness is important so that we realize when we are being bad and damaging others — and damn well better work on changing our attitudes and actions.

    I know this is a long and detailed post.  My view is that you can read the lighter and more bouncy piece in the Wall Street Journal, so I thought I would use this post to geek out a bit and dig into the underlying research. 

  • 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.  

  • 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.

  • 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

     

  • 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.

  • The “Rotten Apple” Effect Happens in Herds of Cows Too

     

       4008662655_37977ffbf4

    Thanks to Jason, I learned of some weird but unsurprising research that brings together the bad apple studies described in Good Boss, Bad Boss and work on emotional contagion in The No Asshole Rule.  A five-year study led by Mississippi State University Associate Professor Rhonda Vann found that cows that were "very aggressive, excitable, and out of control" not only got sick more often, weighed less, and wrecked farm equipment, these bad things "rub-off" on the rest of the herd.   Here is the story from Delta Farm Press, called "Calm Cattle More Valuable."  Of course, human groups are different from farm animals in many ways, but the parallel between this and Will Felps' research on bad apples, and related work on "bad is stronger than good"  is striking (See this HBR post).