How did it work out? Was it as wonderful as it sounds? Inquiring minds want to know.
Not per se, but much like here, at my company, being a jerk is frowned upon, can result in negative feedback, and if not corrected, can lead to dismissal.
I have a feeling an explicit “no assholes” rule would have to be backed up by some pretty astute and non-assholish management in order to actually be effective.
The assholes end up in management in most places, because once one asshole gets promoted to a certain point, he’s usually willing to screw everyone below him to look good, and consequently looks better than his non-asshole peers. And the assholes below him look better to him for the same reasons. So you end up with a sort of asshole/douchebag promotion pipeline in a lot of places. It’s why all your managers above a certain level live in the same part of town, play golf, dress the same, etc… Birds of a feather and all that.
It would take company founders or higher level managers to actually realize that some guy is a hairy bunghole and somehow penalize him or not reward/promote him for that, even if he’s extremely effective in terms of the company’s goals. Which is extremely unlikely; most companies are more than willing to overlook the screwing of the subordinates and personal assholery if it results in better performance.
That said, pretty much everywhere I’ve worked has more or less ostracized the people who are clearly gunning for promotions, as they’re breaking the unwritten no-assholes rules in their eagerness to be promoted.
Define “no asshole rule.” How you do define an asshole? IS it just something you don’t like, or is it a specific, identifiable behavior? If you decide “asshole” is just “a person with whom I don’t get along/disagree” then terminating someone for being an asshole is going to result in learning more than you ever wanted to about labor law.
My previous employer as well as my current one have pretty strong rules and cultural traits against abusive behavior. There is no formal rule saying “we will automatically fire anyone who is an asshole” but there are rules about harassment, abuse, raising one’s voice, etc. If I suddenly yelled abuse at a co-worker, I would - at best - be invited into the general manager’s office to explain why I should be permitted to continue working here. The idea of being openly abusive would be unheard of here and would have been unthinkable at the place I just left.
Does that count?
Well, Bump described one good example of it. I was also thinking of small-time asshole behavior. For example, the documentation review meeting that I had to do a few months ago where my work got savaged for no better reason than I did it differently from what the reviewers would have (in other words, not really wrong, just not the same words they would have used, etc.). They also spent the entire meeting arguing vociferously with each other until our time was up. The next day one of them apologized to me, saying “sometimes we get carried away” and another one apologized (at a different time), saying “we like to argue too much”.
So not fireable, but should have been corrected. Other examples are where it seems like coworkers make things harder for you for no apparent reason. Constantly asking you to rework stuff one word at a time, etc. and management doesn’t step in and put a stop to it until you complain. (And sometimes not even then.)
I started a co-op of local merchants about 30 years ago that was very successful. We had monthly brainstorming meetings. A sign on the door read " Check your asshole at the door and pick up when you leave" . We had a pamplet we handed out explaining the logic behind it. I felt it was very effective, not 100% but the sessions all went very well.
Steve Jobs was by most accounts an a’hole at least a lot of the time, certainly a non-genius who acted like him would have been considered one.
A simplistic idea of this type seems most applicable to work setting where top performance doesn’t matter, where adequate is enough, government workplaces or perhaps regulated monopolies.
In work settings where top performance does matter, there’s no simple rule unfortunately. It’s a matter of corporate culture to weed out people who are actually destructively unpleasant to other people. Saying a manager shouldn’t make subordinates do something over again multiple times for example isn’t a workable rule. Maybe it’s an under performing department that needs that kind of a manager to get its act together.
I guess my questions for you are:
-Was there any merit to their changes (i.e more compelling statements, better use of grammar and vocabulary, more in line with corporate branding and tone) or was it just useless nitpicking and wordsmithing?
-If not “management”, are these peers? And is the expectation you should be defending your work?
-Who facilitates these meetings?
-Is politely excusing yourself from their argument an option? i.e. “Guys, I have a hard stop. When you finish your discussion, just send me a redlined copy of your changes.”
-What is the culture of your company? Companies like Amazon and Neflix encourage their employees to constantly challenge each other. Other places, an actually meeting to discuss edits would seem absurd (again…just email your changes).
Depends what you mean by “asshole”. As a manager, I’ve found that certain types of workplaces view management as “assholes” simply because they are in a position of authority. The workers don’t like being told what to do and typically only respond to sticks for motivation.
Many of the places I’ve worked at, the relationship between management and staff is fuzzier and more collegial. Even in the Big-4 accounting / consulting firms, managers or partners who treat their employees badly aren’t tolerated.
Speaking of Big-4 accounting / consulting, a lot of times managers are considered “assholes” for making their staff work late or weekends. Unfortunately that is the nature of the business. And there are ways of doing it that are less assholish.
That sounds like a good career move. Because I’m sure they will forget who were jerks to them after they get promoted. Or the place you work has a culture of mediocrity.
If someone is so busy gunning for promotion that what they don’t do is their job, then I for one wouldn’t want them promoted. As one of the things those people tend to do is steal other people’s medals, I’d do my best to keep mine away from their hands.
One place. For us working there it was great but it drove HR/Management nuts trying to document what amounts to behavior more than action. And it also caused (according to HR) most terminations to be litigated to one level or another. The track record was 100% for the company but it still took time and cost money.
My nephew did not survive his probation period with a state agency because, even though he had 25+ years experience in the private sector and could do the job in his sleep, he wanted to do his work his own way, and as far as he was concerned, it didn’t matter whether he did Step A before writing Form B as long as everything ended up with Outcome Z.
So depending on how you look at it, the bureaucrats could’ve been assholes for insisting on blindly following procedure, or my nephew could have been the asshole for not following procedure.
I don’t know if your nephew is an asshole, but asking employees to follow procedure is not being an asshole.
It may simply be that it wasn’t the right job for him, but, seriously, telling a new employee “please do this task in the manner described in procedure” is a perfectly reasonable request and I would be very leery of a person who won’t follow directions. It’s well and fine that Bill thinks he doesn’t have to do A before B, and maybe in this case it’s not super important, but what about the times it IS important? What does that say about his willingness to follow other procedures that are more important?
You at least wait until you’ve been in the job awhile to start recommending changes to procedure.
This is a nebulous concept. There are places whose recruiters don’t bother to screen for personality and culture fit. They will probably have more “assholes” than most. There are places whose culture strongly promotes competition, which can bring out assholish behavior in people. There are other places that don’t care about employee morale enough to act on reports of assholish behavior, so entrenched assholes stick around.
Even though a “no assholes” tone can be set by upper management, it’s a difficult thing to enforce. In the end, each individual manager needs to care enough to work at it and promote a harmonious environment within their sphere of influence. However, promoting a “no assholes” culture is much more difficult to enforce than a safety culture or green culture. How do you handle metrics? If you go by employee complaints, how do you ensure accurate reporting without accidentally promoting a culture of complaining? I think all you can reasonably do is set the tone, and seriously investigate any complaints that come up.
IME, most places want their employees to be getting work done instead of fighting amongst themselves. Some places have better HR than others, and assholes might have a shorter lifespan. But in the end, I think it comes down to your boss, their boss, and the people you work with directly. I haven’t worked at a place with a “no assholes” policy, but I have seen massive morale differences between different groups in the same company.
That’s really what I was getting at; it’s not people being promoted who are shunned, it’s people whose primary goal is to get promoted, and the actual aspects of their current job, like being a team player, doing a good job, not hoarding information and not self-promoting at others’ expense/taking undue credit are the ones that get shunned.
Basically the ones who view their current position as a train stop on their way to the top, not their actual JOB.
And as for the management being assholes; not all of them are, or have been where I’ve worked. But again, there’s a sort of… status conscious(?) crowd whose whole motivation for working is based on their own status, as perceived by others. Assholes, to a person, because they’re not the kind who actually sacrifice on behalf of their workers- they’ll agree to unrealistic deadlines, grind their staff down to get it done, and then sell out their underlings when things go pear-shaped, all the while talking a good game about things.
My current boss is actually awesome. He’s a great guy (one of the very few overt Christians I’ve met who does his damnedest to walk the talk), and very honest, and I feel like he goes to bat for us more than we know. But previous managers who sat at his desk were exactly what I describe in the paragraph above- people who were in it to make themselves good, at our expense.
My experience aligns with everything but the bolded bit. I’m really hoping that my little caldera of hell has been unique. I’ve seen company after company cherish the asshole, reward the asshole, promote the asshole, all while publishing training after training about our culture of ethics and morality.
The most famous example of “no asshole” management I think would be the Gooogle “Don’t be a jerk” style, which started out almost whimsically by one of the early team members, but was taken very, very seriously as company culture for a long time.
A very opposite example of management style would be Amazon, who has been in the news in the last year or so for doing things like encouraging employees to narc on each other for not working on weekends, or not answering their phones in the middle of the night.
In the example I cited, it was useless nitpicking and wordsmithing. We talk openly about it as just sort of the culture here. The joke is “we’re a company of editors”. In that particular meeting, they were peers. It was a document review meeting so I guess I was supposed to defend my work but they slapped me down hard (and when I shut up they continued to argue vigorously amongst themselves). I sat there fuming and feeling that it was a complete waste of time, and it’s interesting that the apologizers the next day admitted it was kind of a sport. (And I had to rewrite the entire thing and re-submit it for review and another meeting. So yes, time wasted.)
This has been my experience too in multiple companies. People who stomp all over others, are rude and hard to work with tend to get promoted.
What’s wrong with just being polite and respectful of each other? Am I a saint that I when I need to criticize a coworker’s stuff, I do it tactfully and gently?
15 replies and no-one’s come in to say “well, it certainly saves money on toilet paper”? Standards are slipping.
I don’t really see how this could be implemented as a policy, but I’m lucky enough to work for an employer that doesn’t reward bad behaviour. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with assholes. Maybe I’m the asshole.
Technically, no. They always seem to impose one right after I leave.
That reminds me of the time when, as an office manager, I was looking to hire a new clerical person for the front office. A woman came in to apply and handed her resume to the receptionist, who then handed the woman a clipboard with an application on it and asked her to fill it out (this was before the days of applying for jobs electronically or online).
Moments later, the receptionist came to me and told me that the woman wanted to see me. It seemed she didn’t think it was necessary for her to fill out the application, since the resume already had a list of her previous jobs on it. I told her that the application asked for information that typically didn’t appear on resumes, and that was why we asked for it. After she continued to argue, I believe I said that she didn’t have to fill out anything she didn’t want to, but that without an application, she wouldn’t be considered for the job. She begrudgingly sat back down in the front office and filled out the application as requested.
And then she handed it back to me. I honestly can’t remember what I did, but it was one of these two things: 1) Wrote “DO NOT HIRE” on it in big letters, or 2) Simply turned around in my seat and fed it into the shredder. I’m really not sure after all these years, but I think it was the latter. The last thing I needed was a clerical worker who was going to argue with me about following simple instructions.
I once worked at an Italian restaurant owned by a family of Italians that were pretty much the stereotypical embodiment of every mafia movie you’ve ever seen.
The owner made it very clear to me that if a customer ever gets rude with me to let them (one of the family members) know, because “We don’t put up with that shit.”.
I never had to report a customer myself, but I did see more than a couple of customers get ejected from the restaurant in a very unfriendly fashion because the customer failed to show respect for the waitstaff.
I was young and impressionable at the time. Still though, it felt good working for people like that.
Also, the restaurant was very successful judging by the list of celebrities hanging on the wall. That, and the place was packed every night.