Intro
I enjoy reading books with attention grabbing titles and interesting subject matter. The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by Maarten Troost, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg, and Freakanomics by The Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner are a few of my favorite reads. Then along came a book with a title that caught me eye called the No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t written by Stanford professor Robert Sutton. This book was born out of an essay Sutton wrote for the Harvard Business Review about assholes, published in the breakthrough ideas for 2004. Following the essay, Sutton received more than a thousand emails and testimonies from people about actual assholes they encountered at work and his resulting book sold over 115,000 copies and won the Quill Award for best business book in 2007.
Certified Total Asshole
The reason why I really liked this book is that I totally related to the subject matter, because I was in a twilight zone of a project being managed by a bona fide asshole. I found Sutton’s book at the airport while traveling for work. Correction. This book found me. I read it over one weekend and came to work better prepared to deal with that asshole. There’s a big difference between someone having a bad day (temporary asshole) and being a CTA (Certified Total Asshole). This guy that I worked with was a CTA and ran the whole gamut of what Sutton describes as the “Dirty Dozen”.
- Personal insults
- Invading one’s “personal territory”
- Uninvited physical contact
- Threats and intimidation, both verbal and nonverbal
- “Sarcastic jokes” and “teasing” used as insult delivery systems
- Withering e-mail flames
- Status slaps intended to humiliate their victims
- Public shaming or “status degradation” rituals
- Rude interruptions
- Two-faced attacks
- Dirty looks
- Treating people as if they are invisible
In regards to this asshole, you could add misogyny, racism, and bigotry to the above list. False equivalence was a big part of his modus operandi making what he said the law of the land through a false equivalence that left me scratching my head trying to figure out what one thing had to do with the other. Without warning, he would seek any opening in a meeting or conversation to spew his politics and go off on long tangents about “Libtards.” I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing. It was like watching a dog play a piano.
Facts
Assholes make the workplace unbearable. According to Sutton, the cost and damage an asshole wreaks on companies is staggering. Workers with abusive bosses quit their jobs at accelerated rates, and those still trapped in their jobs suffered from less work and life satisfaction, reduced commitment to employers, and heightened depression, anxiety, and burnout. HR departments are taxed with having to train, retrain, and deal with these assholes. Consider this statistic: 25 percent of bullying ‘targets’ and 20 percent of ‘witnesses’ leave their jobs. This means if 25% of victims leave a company of 1,000 people, the total replacement cost is $30,000 and the annual replacement cost is $750,000. If 20% of victims leave and there is an average of two witnesses for each victim, the replacement cost is $1.2 million, and the total replacement cost is just shy of $2 million.
Working Remotely
Due to the pandemic, we have been working remotely making up the rules as we move forward. This arrangement is less than ideal for a lot of people, but I believe nobody suffered more under this new normal than the workplace asshole. The assholes were stripped of their platform: the physical workplace. The physical workplace is the Serengeti for the asshole where the asshole is the predator and anyone in the office is its prey. The asshole can corner its prey at the water cooler or silently stalk them at their work station while emitting a creepy vibe. He can split the herd in a meeting and go after the weak ones. There’s no escaping the asshole at work. You might be able to avoid the asshole for a day, but you have to go back to work in the morning where the asshole returns back on the prowl.
The good thing about remote working and Zoom meetings is they don’t provide the necessary environment for an asshole to deliver insults with the same impact as they would in a traditional office setting. With Zoom, you can simply log in to the meeting with your web cam turned off which eliminates the asshole’s ability to get satisfaction from seeing someone’s reaction. The asshole can send a nasty email, but it just does not have the same punch as when that asshole asks to speak with you in private so they can press every button and pull every lever until they find a threat that resonates and hurts. The asshole can also “CC: ALL” on that nasty email, but it doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi as humiliating you in front of your coworkers in the open. My favorite asshole move of all time was getting snubbed. I remember that asshole excluding me from a meeting with the team to discuss some issues with the project. This made me feel pretty shitty since I worked so hard on the project and I was a member of the team. Guess what? After this past year, everyone is so burned out from Zoom meetings that being snubbed from a meeting is actually welcomed.
Only Time Will Tell
When we get back to normal, I’m curious to know what are all these assholes going to do after being repressed for so long? Have they been spending this time sharpening their tongues, working on their condescending gaze in front of a mirror, perfecting their derogatory tones, directing sarcasm at the television, and fine tuning their schtick on some unsuspecting clerk at the supermarket checkout? The concern that I have with everyone returning to work is that I read an article about how workers have the upper hand and are in the best position to make demands to employers. With workers having the upper hand, employers are trying to lure them into the workforce by offering higher wages and more benefits, as well as loosening up the stringent requirements for potential applicants. Is this going to result in more assholes in the workplace? Have we been incubating a new breed of assholes?
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