HR.com's Thought Leaders for March 29, 2007

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."

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?

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