Dr. Bob Sutton, from Stanford University, has written some very significant books including “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense” and “The Knowing-Doing Gap”(both with Jeffrey Pfeffer) as well as “11-1/2 Weird Ideas That Work.” His most recent book is “The No ***hole Rule.”
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DC: Bob, your most recent work is about a “major discovery”—you have discovered a category of humans in the workplace that you call “***holes.”
BS: This whole adventure started in late 2003. An editor named Julia Kirby at the Harvard Business Review called me and said, “We want to do this breakthrough idea section, do you have any ideas?” I said to her, “I’m not sure there are any breakthrough ideas in management, but I’d like to write about the notion that you shouldn’t hire ***holes and shouldn’t allow ***hole behavior in the workplace.”
I, of course, expected them to not publish this dirty word in their respectable magazine, but to my amazement, they published my 800-word essay in 2004. Even more to my amazement was the reaction, which literally continues to this minute. The emails are rolling in right now. The amount of e-mail and strong emotional reactions to this just stuns me.
DC: I guess that reaction pretty much answers my next question, which is what is your sense of the extent of ***holishness in business in North America?
BS: I can give you both quantitative and qualitative data. There is a press release which is just going out from the Employment Law Alliance. They did a national probability sample of American workers and nearly 45% of American workers stated they have been the victims of workplace abuse.
To give you a sense of the number of e-mails I get, I starting counting them for a Time Magazine reporter earlier in the week, and I stopped around a thousand. In the last three days I got an e-mail from a bullied physician, another from a woman who wants to develop a Bible study guide because she believes the no ***hole rule is similar to the golden rule, and I also got somebody who described how when he was in medical school, he and his fellow residents agreed never to be ***holes and they kept the pact.
One of the more bullied victims that I have had was a guy who had leukemia and was bullied by his manager. The thing that is really striking about this is I found he had been the leading salesperson. Once he started having trouble, his boss completely bullied and humiliated him. This guy has recovered and gone off to another company where he is once again the star salesperson. I also had a conversation with an attorney who works in a large law firm. She told me that she displayed the “No ***hole Rule” book prominently on her desk so that her partners don’t act like such jerks around her.
In another early e-mail I got, Robert Hare, who is CEO of Mission Ridge Capital, says that he can work with just about every type of person, with one glaring exception – ***holes.
Typically companies use more polite language to talk about the issue, at least in public. I elected to use this dirty word ‘***hole’ for a couple of reasons. The main one has to do with the emotional reaction that surrounds it. When I see somebody demeaning others I don’t say to myself, “Oh! That person is a jerk,” I say to myself, “Gee, they are being an ***hole.” And when I start talking to people in organizations who have ‘no jerk’ rules I find, in nearly all cases, “***hole” is the word they use informally. There is no other word that carries the emotional tone.
Audience Question: What kind of managers enable ***holes the most - is it the wimps or is it other ***holes?
BS: The worst people are the people who are abusive and nasty themselves. They create a contagious disease that spreads around the organization. Having said that, sometimes managers who do not have the strength to confront nasty people can create the problem as well. The worst situation is a group that's led by an overbearing, strong sort of alpha-male (and that could be women too), and then people in the group start becoming like them. I am not proposing that people become wimps. You should stand up to a constructive confrontation and be strong-minded. We talk about arguing as if you’re right and listening as if you wrong. But there is a difference between that and demeaning people.
DC: How do we test whether or not someone is an ***hole?
BS: It is pretty straightforward. You can look at the behavior, but there are many different ***hole behaviors. In fact, one study done by the Federal Government looked at 60 different behaviors that were used to leave people feeling demeaned, everything from ignoring people to insulting them and the like, and I have a list of the dirty dozen in the book. But the key is this: after talking to the alleged ***holes, do people feel humiliated, de-energized or belittled? I realize this is imperfect, as with all definitions; there are some people who are overly sensitive and other people who are oblivious.
The second thing is to look at the power dynamics in an organization. If somebody is a kiss up, kick down sort of person, that’s a bad sign.
One thing that I would like to emphasize is that it’s not like there are a few mean people out there and the rest of us are good people. We are all capable of being jerks under the wrong situations.
DC: Can you name any famous ***holes?
BS: The Wall Street Journal published an article called "Bossilla." Scott Rudin, who is quite effective and a famous producer, is famous for being demeaning. My favorite example is that over a five-year period, he estimated he had 119 assistants, and the Wall Street Journal estimated he had 250 assistants, but Rudin did admit that his 119 numbers did not include assistants who had lasted less than two weeks. Talk about an HR cost. One was fired for bringing him the wrong breakfast muffin. When they asked Rudin if this was true, he said he could not remember but it was entirely possible. This is somebody who qualifies as being certified across the range of situations.
We have a test online that is called the arse test, where you can see if you are in fact a certified ***hole (http://electricpulp.com/guykawasaki/arse).
Audience Question: Is it only men who are rascals or are women catching up?
BS: The best evidence from this comes from a whole bunch of studies done in the UK and some in the US as well. Research suggests that men do it to men and women do it to women, in terms of abusive supervision in particular. One reason that it probably happens is ghettoization of occupation: women tend to work with women and men tend to work with men. There is a little bit of evidence that when the occupations are mixed men tend to be a little bit worse, but there are a lot of women out there who are being nasty.
DC: Do you notice differences in male ***hole behaviors versus female ***hole behaviors?
BS: Gender would determine the different ways men and women are aggressive Women tend to be more subtle and treat people as if they are invisible and men tend to just be overtly nasty and insulting. But typically if you look at differences between men and women, the differences are not as strong as you would expect.
DC: Let’s move on to the damage done.
BS: There are a lot of surveys indicating that ***holes do a lot of damage. As I said, maybe the best one I have seen is just coming out from the new Employment Law Alliance and that shows that 45% of US workers say they have been the victim of an abusive boss. A Michigan survey done by Loraleigh Keashly and others showed that one out of six workers report at least weekly abuse.
Maybe the worst occupation, in terms of the evidence we have, is medicine. Both nurses and medical school students are abused at an incredibly high rate compared to other occupations. I have been shocked by how nasty surgeons are. So, in fact, surgeons might be the occupation that seems to be the nastiest based on the evidence we have. It’s just something about their socialization.
Let us move on to some specific examples. Bernard Tepper ran an early sample in a large mid-western city using some measures of abusive supervision. He found abused employees quit their jobs at higher rates and those that stayed, were less committed, suffered mental health effects, and the like.
There is something in my book called the TCA, the Total Cost of ***holes. When I was in the process of putting the TCA together with a Silicon Valley executive, he told me that it was not just a theory in his firm. There was an especially abusive star salesman named Ethan. The HR folks got so upset with him that they spent two days compiling all the extra costs that Ethan had piled on the organization due to his nastiness. The time spent by Ethan's manager was 250 hours, HR professionals 50 hours (and that excludes the two days they spent doing the report), senior executive 15 hours, plus they had to get an employment lawyer involved, there was the cost of the new secretary to support Ethan (although there were plenty of other secretaries and assistants who needed work in the firm, none of them would work with Ethan). Ethan went through a secretary or two a year. Ethan made a lot of money each year but at one point he put so much pressure on the benefits people just to get $7 back, and they spent about 20 hours just getting his $7. That is the kind of thing that causes resentment. He also had anger management training. The total cost of this one ***hole for one year was $160,000, and this is probably underestimated if you talk to the people of the organization. They deducted about $100,000 from his bonus, and he got a little better but apparently has reverted.
Audience Question: Have you heard about any work done to discover whether people who have ***hole characteristics in the workplace had an abusive relationship with parents or other things like that?
BS: The studies that seem to be the best are longitudinal studies of bullying in Norway, and there is some evidence, especially from the amount of jail time that people are serving when they became adults, that bullies have had abusive parents, which leads to bullying in school and then it leads to bullying in the workplace. There is a fellow named Dan Olweus who has followed Norwegian kids now for about 20 years, so that is the best study that I have seen.
DC: You gave one example of a TCA calculation. Do you have any other turnover costs associated with ***holes?
BS: In England they have a lot of research on that. It looks like people who are bullied tend to turn over at about two or three times the rate of people who are not bullied. Another thing which some of the English studies show is something called “by-stander effects.” These are people who aren’t bullied themselves, but are in an environment where it happens a lot. They tend to turn over too about twice the rate of people who haven’t witnessed a lot of bullying.
Rob Krauss has done really interesting surveys on career success and one question he asks about people is, “after you talk to this person, do you have more or less energy?” –which to me is a test of being an ***hole. He compares this to all the supposedly more rational things like someone’s education, expertise, and how important their skills are to the organization. And this question of leaving people de-energized, which to me is related to being an ***hole, has an impact on people careers. So even if firms aren’t doing anything formal to weed out ***holes the informal factor in your career can still be pretty big.
DC: Tell me more about the no-***hole rule itself.
BS: To me the centerpiece and most important part of the book, is the question of how you enforce the no ***hole rule and keep it alive.
In American culture, the bigger winner you are, the more you can get away with being a jerk. Bob Knight, who is the winningest coach in basketball history, is my poster boy for this. People who are loyal to him don’t seem to like me saying this, but you can go on the Internet, and see what looks to me like a film of him choking a player. I am saying that very carefully because that is my opinion. He did that sort of thing, and the administration knew it, and they still didn’t fire him for a long time, although they did get rid of him eventually.
So if you want higher standards, what do you do? SuccessFactors is an amazing company headquartered in Summerdale, California, and the CEO is Lars Daalgard. It is an HR software company that has grown from 100 to 400 employees in the last year or so. Lars is so entertaining and a great leader. He told me, “We have respect for the individual, no ***holes…it’s OK to have one, just don’t be one.” All employees sign a contract committing not becoming an ***hole because ***holes stifle performance. In particular, they don’t just screen out ***holes at SuccessFactors, they have 14 rules of engagement.
There are three things that really feel critical to me from what I have learned so far about SuccessFactor’s culture. One is that you cannot be a jerk, and the second is, it is one of the most transparent places I have ever seen, so you don’t say things behind people’s back, you have to tell them directly, they don’t allow any blind copies on e-mails. But they are also performance driven. It is not like there is a lack of toughness in the culture, but part of it is you have to be tough but not nasty to each other.
There is another firm, Perkins Coie, which is the one of the best places to work, which provides a cautionary tale. I won’t go into a lot of detail, but if you have a no-jerk rule, and then you violate it, it is really bad. There was a law firm, Holland and Knight, that got into incredible PR problems because they had marketing people talking about the no-jerk rule but there were leaks in the press where it looked like they violated the rule.
In terms of screening, Southwest Airline is especially famous for this. Herb Kelleher’s quote is, “if the pilot’s nasty to the receptionist, that is the sign that you are gone.” I believe in being slow to label anyone an ***hole, that it is very important, but when somebody is consistently demeaning, it is important to get rid of them. Another airline, JetBlue, has got plenty of problems, but one of the reasons that they got out of the crisis is that people actually were focused on being civilized with each other, despite the hell they were going through with all the problems a few weeks ago.
Ann Rhoades was head of HR in Southwest and was founding head of JetBlue, and she said every place she ever worked they had somebody who was difficult and demeaning, that they waited too long to get rid of them, and as soon as they got rid of them, they would say, “Now, why did wait so long?”
There are organizations that actually apply the rule to customers too. Ann Rhoades told me when she was at Southwest that there was a customer who was being extremely abusive to an employee at the gate. She was traveling with a fellow Southwest executive and that executive gently guided this ***hole customer over to another airline stand and brought him a ticket, because he didn’t want his people being treated that way. When senior management does stuff like that, they can have a huge effect on the cultural norms about how people are treated.
If you look at all the research about norm violations or deviance, you’ll know it is impossible for human beings to be perfect all the time. To me, the main thing is what happens when somebody breaks a rule—since all rules get broken. There are two parts of this. One is, does that violation get noticed and discussed? The other thing is that even if you have less power than somebody else you allowed to call them on the norm violation. Max Goldman at SuccessFactors put up this amazing post on his blog that when his boss was a jerk, he called him a jerk, and his boss thanked him for it. And to me if this is what happens at SuccessFactors, that is the sign that those norms are working. Most people aren’t in the situation where they could call their boss a jerk, but this to me is an ideal.
Labeling somebody an ***hole is a dangerous thing. In the IT world they say, “There are some people who have good hearts but a bad user interface.” So the point here is that you should be slow to label people.
One point to remember is that anybody can be an ***hole and in fact it is a contagious disease. We have got lots of evidence that when you put people in an environment where there is nastiness, that we all get that behavior. When my Stanford undergraduates ask me about what kind of job they are should take, I tell them to look at the people who they are going to work with. If those people are nasty, the odds are that they will become like them. So this is one of those things that you have really got to be careful about. The other thing that I especially emphasize is that it is very important that if you want to keep your inner jerk in check, get safe feedback from other people.
DC: Is there an upside to being an ***hole?
BS: When I was writing this book I kept hearing arguments that there are virtues to being an ***hole, especially for the advancement of an individual's career. Since I am in the Stanford Engineering School I kept hearing Steve Jobs’ name. Literally in the Stanford Engineering School if I mention I am writing a book on ***holes, somebody will come up and tell me a Steve Jobs’ story. But one thing I heard from a local executive who went to a lot of meetings with Jobs is that although he is nasty and has a history of making people cry, the problem is that he is often right. So that does create a problem. There is also some evidence that being intimidating is the path to power. There is some evidence that fear is a motivator, although it is not as good as rewards.
Audience Question: What would you recommend to someone who has a co-worker who is a real ***hole but the boss isn’t doing anything?
BS: In my blog we had a lot of discussion about that, and there was a great example of a government employee who had this exact situation. She and her co-workers rallied to keep what they called “***hole diaries,” and they kept a fairly careful track of this nasty co-worker's behavior. They sent the documentation to her boss who hadn’t done anything before, and at that point, although you do not quite know what happened, the person mysteriously disappeared. If you have a documented case, legal or not, you are in much better shape for dealing with somebody than if just somebody does a random complaint.
Audience Question: To what extent is ***holism a reflection of Fred Taylor's ideas about people being simply a means to an end in a mechanical world?
BS: If you just view people as instruments to an end, that is how you are going to treat them. The other effect which we haven’t touched on but Pfeffer and I have written a lot about is that if you create a world where dysfunctional competition happens, where the only way you get ahead is by stomping on people, it is going to lead to pretty nasty behavior. That is one of the things that makes me nervous about ranking systems, especially if ranking means that you get ahead no matter how nastily you treat your coworkers.
Audience Question: Can ***holes be rehabilitated?
BS: Yes. I think 80% of ***hole behavior is situational. Lars Dalgaard has told me that he has hired salesmen who have a reputation of being ***holes but when they get in the SuccessFactors culture, they can change their behavior pretty dramatically.
Audience Comment: If we notice an ***hole, we will confront them and the people are often shocked to find out that they are ***holes, even to the point of tears.
BS: My wife, who is a lawyer, has the theory that there are two kinds of ***holes. There is a kind who thinks it helps them get ahead, and there is a kind who is completely oblivious to how they are acting.
