Probably everyone has worked with an asshole before. That person with awful behavior who somehow - whether it’s loyalty, specialization, or bad luck remains (or grows) in their position despite being absolutely horrible to work with.
Culture and Accountability
Bob Sutton wrote a whole book on this subject - kind of. Sutton’s book is more about building a culture absent of assholes than it is about identifying assholes. Most of the book is Sutton advocating for the straight up elimination of mean-spirited jerks from the workplace. In some cases, you can “fix” assholes, but the book is written for leaders - and is a call to action to pay attention to the environment they create…which is a point worth diving into.
When people behave poorly in the workplace - and aren’t held accountable via feedback or correction by someone whom they will listen to, in a way, it’s no longer their fault. If the culture allows (or encourages) people to behave poorly, and they never get any feedback about it - why would they change? That’s a rhetorical question, because in my epxerience, they don’t - they keep behaving the same way, causing the same problems…and affecting and harming more people.
A Rose By Any Other Name…
If you’re lucky, you don’t have to deal with an all-out jerk in the workplace. But even if you don’t, chances are extremely high that you still deal with people who don’t behave well, albeit at a lesser extent. Maybe there’s a co-worker who always interrupts people; or another one who doesn’t come on time - or show up to meetings; or someone who comes off just a little abasive in slack messages.
If they never get feedback about these things, they’re never going to change.
If you’re a manager, and these folks work for you, it is your job to give them this feedback. If they are a peer of yours, it is your job to give them this feedback. In a healthy organization, I’d go as far to say that any time you see behavior that isn’t helpful that it is your job to give that feedback - but I admit in some cases that you may need to give the feedback to someone else - which leads to a whole other set of problems.
“Carl”
Many years ago, I had a conversation with an employee in a different part of our organization. They told me that Carl, who was a direct report of mine, had been a jerk in a few meetings over the past few weeks. I told them that Carl had a lot going on, including some personal stuff, and that it should get better soon - that Carl’s behavior was wrong, but “not to worry about it”, because Carl knew better.
To my (small) credit, I did mention the interaction to Carl, who deflected, and we both went on our way.
To nobody’s surprise but mine, a week later, another employee took the time to tell me that Carl was being a jerk in meetings. This time I listened more carefully, took notes, and had a more direct conversation with Carl, talked about the reasons, and worked with Carl on his “human skills”. I say this a lot - “Behavior comes from motivation”. When someone behaves poorly, there’s a reason. The sad part about the story with Carl is that some of his motivation came from him being frustrated with a project and trying to move it forward, but some came because he was modeling his behavior after someone he admired - someone else who was being a jerk at work.
The Vent and the Task
In the story above, those folks felt more comfortable coming to me, Carl’s manager rather than giving that feedback to Carl directly - which I think is normal for most organizations. I’ve also had people come to me to share feedback about my peers, managers, vendors I’ve worked with, or people I just happen to know. I don’t know if it’s because people feel safe venting to me, my fancy title, or if I’m just in the right place at the right time, but I’ve learned a lot from these conversations over the years.
First, listen. Sometimes people just want to vent. I’ll ask clarifying questions and repeat back things I’ve heard. At some point, I’ll usually ask, “what would you like me to do with this information?” Most of the time, people will tell me that they just want to vent and have someone listen. Regardless of what they say, I offer to talk to the person that’s causing them some stress - sometimes to give direct feedback, but often to find the motivation behind their behavior. Oddly, while I spent years as a “debugging expert” on operating systems, these days, I enjoy debugging people more.
I’ve also learned a few things not to do that are worth thinking about.
Don’t Make Excuses. If you come to me to tell me about your frustrations with a peer of mine, the last thing I will do is make excuses about their behavior (as I did with Carl many years ago). My job is to listen, acknowledge the impact that this person’s behavior is having, and then ask how I can help.
Don’t Minimize The Impact. If you tell me that an employee on my team is acting in a way that is causing you to lose n days of work, I believe you. I can never know how things impact you - but I’ve seen people being told that they’re over-reacting, over-estimating, or crying wolf when explaining the impact of a jerk. I’d argue that failing to listen and minimizing a valid concern is itself, and example of being a jerk.
Don’t Defer or Deflect. Perhaps the most frustrating for me is when I take the time to explain to someone-who-matters how someone’s behavior is affecting me or my team…and they shut it down - either because they just don’t want to deal with it - or they don’t want to deal with the conflict.
It makes me wonder how much can actually get done in a culture largely, or entirely absent of feedback.
If they never get feedback about these things, they’re never going to change.
Just Work
I read Just Work by Kim Scott soon after it was released. I bought it because I liked Radical Candor so much, but didn’t know much about it before I read it. After finally getting through it, I said this about it on the platform-formerly-known-as-twitter.
The ever gracious Kim Scott took time to reply and ackowledge my dilemma.
Scott goes deep into identifying and dealing with bias, prejudice, and bullying (which to me are the most severe forms of jerk-dom), and discusses at length some of the roles I’ve talked about above - the person harmed, the person who causes harm, and the upstander (Scott states that a bystander just watches passively (or deflects, delegates, minimizes, or excuses), while an upstander does something about the injustice. The book reminded me that my jobs as a leader is to never be a bystander if I see or hear of actions that affect my teams ability to do their best work.
I also just found out in the last week or so that Scott has done a re-write/release of Just work as Radical Respect. I hope this quote survived the re-edit.
For me, the chief joy in being a leader is creating an environment in which people on a team love their job and love working together.
The Motive
In my frequent quest to discover the motivations behind behaviors, I find a lot of the same conclusions that Sutton and Scott come to in their books - Culture and Lack of Feedback (or consequences) ensures that people who cause harm will continue to cause harm. Stress (both job and personal) come up quite often as well, but when I saw that, I thought of this quote from Adam Grant’s Hidden Potential that I’ll use to close this week’s post.
If personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on a hard day.
-A 0:1