It’s a sign of the times when a well-known Stanford professor and best-selling author publishes a book titled The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t (Warner Business Books, 2007).
Certainly, everyone knows what Robert I. Sutton is talking about. We’ve all experienced the nastiness of a tormentor or unconstrained egomaniac who abuses power and intimidates others.
Jerks do not go undetected for long. Raging maniacs are easy to catch and discipline. More often, however, real damage occurs after covert backstabbing and hypocrisy.
Jerk Behaviors
According to Sutton, everyday jerk behaviors include:
1. Personal insults and innuendoes
2. Invading one’s personal space or territory
3. Uninvited physical contact
4. Threats and intimidation, verbal and nonverbal
5. Sarcastic jokes, teasing and disguised insults
6. Email flames
7. Status slaps intended to humiliate
8. Rude interruptions
9. Two-faced attacks
10. Dirty looks, grimaces, eye-rolling
11. Treating people as though they’re invisible, keeping them out of the loop
To qualify as a true jerk, one must display a persistent pattern and a history of episodes that lead others to feel humiliated and disrespected. And a boss who’s a jerk often causes anger, frustration, high turnover, absenteeism and, in extreme cases, violence.
A jerk poisons more than one victim. The damage spreads to coworkers, family members and friends who watch or hear about attacks, creating a larger pool of secondhand sufferers. The result is devastating, zapping people’s energy and causing absenteeism, loss of productivity, high turnover, depression and disengagement.
Organizations may inadvertently shelter jerks and, in some cases, promote and forgive them. The message: It’s OK to be a jerk, as long as you produce results. These individuals may be considered eccentric or artistic in temperament.
But organizations that shelter jerks risk greater legal costs because of victims’ claims of sexual harassment and discrimination. While there is no law prohibiting equal-opportunity jerk behaviors, companies that fail to discipline or weed out bullies find themselves vulnerable to expensive and difficult employment litigation.
The Costs of Harboring a Jerk
Sutton lists factors to consider when calculating the cost of protecting versus firing an abusive jerk. The consequences of failing to discipline an offender or sever employment include:
1. Distraction from tasks
2. Reduced productivity
3. Reduced psychological safety, more fear, less creativity
4. Loss of motivation and energy—disengagement
5. Stress-induced illness
6. Impaired mental functioning
7. Absenteeism
8. High turnover
9. Higher-than-average theft or loss rates
10. Loss of focus on strategically important goals
Also consider these additional management chores, with time spent:
1. Appeasing, calming, counseling or disciplining
2. Cooling out victims
3. Managing dissatisfied customers, suppliers and other key outsiders
4. Reorganizing teams and departments
5. Interviewing, recruiting and training replacements
6. Managing your own burnout and stress
Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely
Some workplaces encourage everyone to act competitively. Enron, for example, was an organizational culture in which winning and making the numbers counted more than interpersonal relationships.
Leaders in most organizations not only get paid more than others; they also enjoy constant deference and false flattery. A huge body of research shows that when people are put in positions of power, they:
• Start talking more
• Take what they want for themselves
• Ignore what other people say or want
• Start ignoring how less powerful people react to their behavior
• Start acting more rudely
• Generally treat any situation or person as a means for satisfying their own needs
Studies show power corrupts people and causes them to act as though they’re above rules meant for others—and this is widely accepted. Even trivial power advantages can change how people think and act, and usually for the worse.
This doesn’t, however, mean you can eliminate the pecking order. Some people are more important to the organization than others because they are more difficult to replace or have more essential skills. This is the power-performance paradox.
Top 10 Rules for Enforcing a “No Jerks at Work” Rule
Having all of the right business philosophies and management practices in place to support the “no jerks at work” rule is meaningless unless you treat the person right in front of you, right now, in the right way. It’s the little things that make the big differences:
1. Say the rule, write it down, and act on it. If you have a policy, make sure you act on it.
2. Jerks will hire other jerks. Don’t include them in hiring decisions.
3. Get rid of jerks fast. Organizations generally wait too long to fire jerks.
4. Treat certified jerks as incompetent employees. Even if people perform extraordinarily well and achieve great results, persistent meanness should be equated with incompetence.
5. Power breeds nastiness. Giving people even a little bit of power can turn them into big jerks.
6. Embrace the power-performance paradox. Downplay and reduce unnecessary status differences.
7. Manage moments, not just practices, policies and systems. Change the little things, and big things will follow.
8. Model and teach constructive confrontation. Make sure people know when and how to argue respectfully.
9. Adopt a one-jerk rule. If you permit one jerk to stay, use a reverse role-model approach to remind people of what not to do.
10. The bottom line: Link big policies to small decencies. When people talk to one another and work together with respect, managing jerk behaviors is natural.
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