Next, if a bully keeps spewing venom at you, limit your contact with the creep as much as possible. Try to avoid any meetings you can with him or her and try to talk by phone rather than in person. Keep conversations short; be polite, but don’t provide a lot of personal information during meetings of any kind, including e-mail exchanges. If the bully says or writes something nasty, try to avoid snapping back, as that can fuel a vicious cycle of asshole poisoning. Also, recent research suggests that stand-up meetings are just as effective as sit-down meetings, but are shorter. So if you have to meet with jerks, try to meet in places without chairs and avoid sitting down whenever possible. This will limit your exposure to their abuse.
I also recommend keeping an “asshole diary,” in which you carefully document what the jerk does and when it happens. A government employee wrote me a detailed e-mail about how she used a diary to get rid of a nasty, racist coworker:
I documented the many harmful things she did with dates and times. I encouraged her other victims to do so too and these written and signed statements were presented to our supervisors. Our supervisors knew this worker was an asshole but didn’t really seem to be doing anything to stop her harmful behaviors until they received these statements. The jerk went on a mysterious leave that no supervisor was permitted to discuss, and she never returned.
If all else fails, try to practice indifference. Management gurus and executives are constantly ranting about the importance of commitment, passion, and giving all you have to a job. That is good advice when your bosses and peers treat you with dignity. But if you work with people who treat you like dirt, they have not earned your passion and commitment. Don’t let their vicious words and deeds touch your souclass="underline" learn to be comfortably numb until the day comes when you find a workplace that deserves your full commitment. Until then, direct your passion elsewhere, like your family, your hobbies, or perhaps a volunteer organization.
ASSHOLES ARE US
I want to stress again that being an asshole isn’t just something that only happens to others and can’t possibly happen to wonderful people like you and me. All of us are at risk. As I like to say, assholes are us.
But I have identified some strategies for handling the jerk within. One way to do that, as I’ve mentioned, is to stay away from assholes as much as possible and thus avoid asshole poisoning. But, especially if you take a position of power, there are several additional things you can do to stop yourself from turning into an asshole.
One is to eliminate as many unnecessary power differences between yourself and others. For instance, when Frank Blake became CEO of Home Depot last year, he eliminated the executive dining room, cut his own pay, and, according to the New York Times, distributed an image called the inverted pyramid, which places customers and employees above the chief executive.
Pay is an especially vivid sign of power differences, and many studies suggest that when the difference between the highest-and lowest-paid people in a company or team is reduced, a host of good things happen, including improved financial performance, better product quality, enhanced research productivity, and, for baseball teams, a better won-lost record.
In the United States and other Western countries, we are always pressing to create bigger differences between winners and losers. To be sure, some people are more important to an organization than others because they are more difficult to replace or have more essential skills. Status differences will always be with us. But Frank Blake and other like-minded leaders build organizations with fewer assholes and spark better performance by embracing what I call the “power-performance paradox.” They realize that their company has and should have a pecking order, but they do everything they can to downplay and reduce status and power differences among members.
Another step you can take to avoid becoming an asshole is to get some friends and colleagues who will tell you when you are acting like one. Better yet, hold others responsible for telling you when you’re being an asshole—make it safe for them to do so. And when they tell you, listen to them. Remember, power will blind you to all the ways you are acting like a jerk and hurting other people. If people tell you that you’re acting like an asshole and your reaction is that they’re wrong, odds are that you’re fooling yourself.
I’ve learned that competition breeds assholes, so it’s essential to try not to foster an overly competitive workplace. Many organizations constantly rate and rank people, giving the spoils to a few stars and treating the rest as second-and third-class citizens. The unfortunate result is that people who ought to be friends become enemies—ruthless jerks who run wild as they scramble to push themselves up the ladder and push their rivals down. They act on the dangerous and widespread assumption that professional life requires cutthroat competition. In truth, it is nearly always a blend of cooperation and competition, and organizations that forbid extreme internal competition not only are more civilized but perform better as well, despite societal myths to the contrary.
Research on “framing” by social psychologists suggests a few tricks you can use to avoid being overly competitive. The assumptions and language we use—the lenses through which we see the world—can have big effects on how we treat others. Even seemingly small differences in language that we hear and use can determine whether we cooperate or compete. Stanford researcher Lee Ross and his colleagues have run experiments in which they had pairs of students play a game. If the students cooperated, they’d share a reward equally, but if they competed, one player would take the lion’s share of the goodies.
Ross and his colleagues told some players that the game was called the “Community Game” (conjuring up images of shared fate and collaboration); they told others they’d be playing the “Wall Street Game” (conjuring up images of a dog-eat-dog world). People who played the Community Game were dramatically more cooperative and honest about their intentions than those who believed they were playing the Wall Street Game. These findings were later replicated with U.S. Air Force Academy cadets. Related experiments show that when people are first exposed to words like enemy, battle, inconsiderate, vicious, lawyer, and capitalist, they are far less likely to cooperate than when first exposed to words like helped, fair, warm, mutual, and share.
The implication is that if you want to quell your inner jerk, use ideas and language that frame life in ways that will make you focus on cooperation. For instance, make a conscious effort to use the word we rather than I and me. Tape-record and listen to yourself and colleagues at a couple of meetings; if they are nearly all about “me, myself, and I” and “us versus them,” it might be time to start changing the way you talk.
Taken together, these steps can help you enforce a No Asshole rule. If you manage your organization so that you address the disturbing influences of power and manage yourself to avoid catching and spreading asshole poisoning, you can fuel a virtuous cycle and help sustain a civilized workplace.