Recently, Emma Goldberg wrote an article in the New York Times entitled: “No More Working for Jerks.” The problem is that the issue of managers who are jerks is really nothing new. What the pandemic and technology have increasingly exposed is that jerks are more frequently being caught out in the open. The exposure is often because people are working from home and management has come to rely on e-mails, zoom and other social media to communicate with employees. Over several years now I have been researching what makes good managers, only to find unfortunately that there are clearly a number who fit the mould of being crazy bosses, bad bosses, jerks or just plain assholes. Whichever descriptive terms you prefer to use, their attributes include everything from bullying, harassment, insensitivity, incivility, sexism, racism, ageism, narcissism, etc., etc.
Several books have been written about managers displaying such attributes. Stanley Bing wrote “Crazy Bosses” in 2007. That same year, Robert I. Sutton wrote what has become a business classic: “The No Asshole Rule — Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t.” This book became a runaway bestseller, selling well over 800,000 copies and sparking translations into languages including Polish and Japanese. In 2017, Sutton wrote a follow-up book entitled “Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal With People Who Treat You Like Dirt.” The book offers ways of spotting and coping with the various kinds of jerks we encounter at work and pulls no punches.
Emma Goldberg notes in her article that, for some, the past year has rebalanced the power seesaw between worker and boss. She suggests that it might partly be because of the surge of people quitting, noting a record high 4.5 million Americans who voluntarily left their jobs in November. With about 1 out of 7 employees now working from home (compared to pre-pandemic 1 out of 67 persons), there is a lot of discussion about return to office plans of corporations and the preferences of workers vis-à-vis work-life balance. Goldberg believes that, whatever the change, more workers are now feeling empowered to call out their managers than ever before, particularly those who are real jerks.
The fact of the matter is that studies have shown that companies that adopt a no-jerks or no asshole policy simply perform better. In many cases, the problem starts with how workers are promoted and trained in management skills. In today’s high-tech economy, persons with good technical skills may not necessarily have good soft-skills needed to manage knowledge workers. Over the last couple of decades, companies have not invested as much time and resources in developing leadership and management skills. Given the greater competition for gifted knowledge workers, having the right management skills and personal attributes is more important than ever. When jerks are in charge, their actions quickly become known within the industry, often through social media exposure. Subsequently, such corporate culture becomes a major obstacle to attracting new talent or retaining existing talent.
Increasingly, employees are informed during their orientation of the company’s “no asshole rule”, and it’s often even written into training material. Failure to comply with the rule can lead to corporate punishment, including being fired. Obviously, the same rule should apply to midlevel and senior managers. Unfortunately, given the power and influence of senior executives, enforcing the rule and penalizing them for violations is not always easy. Where Boards of Directors exist, it would certainly appear to be part of their responsibility to ensure accountability among senior management. Over many years, there has been a lot written about actual examples of bad bosses and their impact on the workplace and workers. Given the lack of management training and overview in both the private and public sectors, one can only conclude that jerks will continue to surface within organizations in the future. The real question becomes whether these organizations will be able to retain and recruit scarce talent in this highly competitive era?
FROLITICKS 