Earlier this holiday weekend, I tweeted the link to Bob Sutton's poignant New York Times article How Bad Apples Infect the Tree.
The poignant part was Dr. Sutton's story about the Silicon Valley executive he called Ruth, and how effectively she detached from the prevailing jerk culture in her workplace:
When I asked Ruth how she kept her sanity amid the meanness at the company, she told me about some advice she had received as a teenager from a river rafting guide: If you fall out of the boat, don’t fight the rapids. Just rely on your life vest and float with your feet out in front of you. That way, if you are thrown up against the rocks, you can use your feet to push off, and you’ll protect your head and conserve energy.
The very day she got that advice, Ruth fell overboard while traversing rapids in the “Satan’s Cesspool” section of the American River in California. After a wild trip with her feet stretched out in front of her, Ruth wasn’t hurt and felt exhilarated.
Ruth explained that she used the Satan’s Cesspool strategy to survive those nasty meetings some 30 years later. Verbal barbs bounced off of her, just as the rocks had bounced off her feet long ago. When the personal attacks, dirty looks and finger-pointing commenced, she stretched out her feet in front of her under the table, and told herself, “I just got thrown out of the boat by these jerks, but I know how to survive.
Instead of seeing herself as a victim, Ruth felt strong and in control. She shared her strategy with fellow victims in the office, and it helped them endure the slings and arrows as well.
Ruth’s strategy was effective because it enabled her to reframe the nastiness so she could become emotionally detached — to “prevent the poison from touching my soul,” as she put it.
I love the method, visualization and metaphor of resiliency and maintaining personal power of being thrown out of the boat by jerks yet knowing how to survive in the face of the ebb and flow of workplace threats. Dealing effectively with and detaching from workplace jerks is the first important step towards building a jerk-free workplace: very similar to the 12-step program process of dealing effectively with and detaching from active and dry alcoholics who have yet to take responsibility for their own sobriety / recovery. Truth be told, workplace jerks and dry drunks are fairly interchangeable, and usually end up being one in the same.
Amen also to Dr. Sutton's assertion that one jerk can bring a whole workplace down a negative spiral. Sutton further asserts that such jerks need to be reformed, and if necessary, expelled.
However, nothing can beat the time-suck oxymoron of attempting to lead / manage workplace jerks at any organizational level: and listening to the lame defense that the jerk makes the organization a lot of money and we should work together to heal them - praise the Lord and pass the ammunition! Okay, then let's talk about the jerk's impact on employee, vendor and customer recruitment, retention, productivity, reputation and morale: are they still making us a boatload of cash after those factors are added to their net cost-benefit? Been there, done that.
It truly is a game of organizational idiot's poker: everyone loses and we all look like morons, including, last but not least, the problematic jerk. It's not the first conversation to attempt to heal the jerk that's frustrating; it's the 6th conversation. (Oh dear, that anger management class didn't work: shall we have another <undocumented> come-to-Jesus meeting with them?) All that time wasted on a jerk who won't or can't change, when we could have used our meeting time instead to achieve our organizational goals.
What do I mean? Only rarely can a workplace jerk be reformed / coached -- I have seen it happen, but in my experience, it is absolutely the rare exception. A workplace jerk only gets better if they have a personal epiphany (e.g. hitting a bottom) which motivates them to change their ways on their own. Or if the jerk's ass is soundly kicked by a bigger organizational alpha dog. Usually it's only the former that institutes real change and reforms a workplace jerk. The latter almost always gets you a temporary cease-fire of lip-service, white-knuckling and empty promises. It's like a time-bomb ticking: I can usually predict when the explosion of pent-up dysfunction will take place: when the jerk will screech like a strangled banshee in a team meeting, finger-pointing over an imagined affront. No one wins in this particular game of idiot's poker.
Instead, consider managing jerks through a well-documented and consistent progressive disciplinary / performance process: verbal; written; final written; performance improvement plan (if for some reason the organizational torture needs to be prolonged); termination.
If they don't get better, promote them to customers, as we used to say in one of my organizations. You will be on the side of the angels, the numbers, and most importantly, your customers and employees.
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