1 Eight Thousand Emails
I wrote this book to answer a question that I’ve been asked thousands of times. It takes different forms, but the essence is: “I am dealing with an asshole (or a bunch of them). Help me! What should I do?” Consider a few examples from my daily dose of asshole emails:
From a physician at a “deeply dysfunctional” hospital with “the most insensitive team chief imaginable”:
A Lutheran pastor in Illinois writes:
A retired German manufacturing manager asks:
A Silicon Valley CEO writes:
And from a librarian in Washington, DC:
Someone asks me a version of this question pretty much every day. It arrives in those emails and via Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook too. Students, colleagues, clients, friends, enemies, and relatives ask it at gatherings including classes, faculty meetings, weddings, and funerals. Strangers call my Stanford office about once a week to ask it. I’ve been asked for survival tips from cashiers at Costco and Walgreens, nurses and doctors at the Cleveland Clinic and Stanford Hospital, flight attendants from airlines including Air France and United, construction workers in San Francisco and Idaho, Uber drivers in Dubai and San Francisco, subway riders in New York City and BART riders in San Francisco, U.S. Marines in Afghanistan, a prison guard in Texas, several Catholic priests, a Jewish cantor (and a cantor’s wife), fifty or so lawyers, and at least a dozen CEOs. In recent months, I’ve heard it from a surgeon in New York, the dean of students at a small liberal arts university, a U.S. Army psychologist, a group of undergraduates in a French university (via Skype), a Stanford police sergeant, my barber Woody, and even my mother.
It’s no mystery why they keep asking. It all started when I wrote The No Asshole Rule in 2007 (and a related essay for Harvard Business Review a few years before). I assumed that this asshole stuff would be a brief side trip and, within a year or so, I would return to my work on leadership, innovation, and organizational change. I was wrong. That little book touched a nerve. It took me a few years to accept that—no matter what else I write in my life or any other impact my other work has—I will always be known first and foremost as “The Asshole Guy.” Some eight hundred thousand readers in the United States and dozens of other countries bought a copy of The No Asshole Rule—far more than my other books. The steady stream of emails, social media, traditional press inquiries, and disturbing, weird, or funny conversations about all things asshole have become parts of my life that I expect, (usually) enjoy, and try to handle with compassion and good cheer.
Many readers were drawn to The No Asshole Rule because they were besieged by jerks who left them feeling like dirt—and they sought relief. It does have a chapter on “When Assholes Reign: Tips for Surviving Nasty People and Workplaces.” The main focus of that book, however, was on building civilized workplaces—not on dealing with assholes. The Asshole Survival Guide is devoted to strategies and tips that enable people to escape from, endure, battle, and force out bullies, backstabbers, and arses.
I developed these strategies and tips over the years. No matter what I was “supposed to” be working on during the past decade, I spent an hour or two most days thinking, reading, talking, and writing about assholes and their antidotes and—now and then—observing rude or abusive people in their natural habitats. The result is The Asshole Survival Guide, which provides the best advice I can muster about how to deal with people who leave others feeling oppressed, demeaned, disrespected, or de-energized. I focus on the workplace. But the lessons here are pertinent to asshole problems faced by volunteers at nonprofits and schools; to jerks in churches, temples, and mosques; and to rude behavior in public places such as subways, airports, malls, and sports stadiums.
The strategies and tips here are shaped by scholarly research on demeaning and disrespectful people—which has grown like crazy in recent years. Google Scholar is a specialized search engine for scholarly books and articles; it’s become the gold standard that academics use to find rigorous theory and research. A Google Scholar search on “abusive supervision” between 2008 and 2016 returns 4,910 scholarly articles and books. “Abusive customers” returns 282, “rudeness” 16,000, “incivility” 15,500, “bullying” 140,000, “workplace bullying” 11,800, “mobbing at work” 2,900, “road rage” 6,680, “air rage” 369, “phone rage” 92, “verbal aggression” 16,500, and “microaggression” 2,190. Yet my advice isn’t meant to reflect an exhaustive and unbiased summary of scientific research on how to deal with jerks. These findings are instructive, but far from definitive and complete. Asshole survival remains more of a craft or skill than a science.
So lessons from these studies are blended with stories and solutions from less scholarly sources. The Asshole Survival Guide draws on assorted corners of the world and the World Wide Web—ranging from the New York Times to David Kendrick’s superb post on online behavior, “What Makes a Fuckhead?” I also weave in lessons from my observations and original interviews—including work as a consultant and speaker at varied organizations (e.g., Amazon, Wal-Mart, Gallup, Google, luxury goods purveyor LVMH, KIPP schools, McKinsey, Microsoft, the Cleveland Clinic, Pixar, software firm SAP, Twitter, and a Stanford program for National Football League executives) and fifty or so interviews (and less formal discussions) with people including social workers, baristas at Philz Coffee, nurses at the Stanford Hospital, Disney executives, human resources executives (notably Patty McCord, who was at Netflix for its first fourteen years), and researchers including Professor Katy DeCelles of the University of Toronto—who studies the causes of air rage, how prison guards deal with inmates, and the effects of temper tantrums by basketball coaches on players.
This book is also shaped by all those emails about assholes that people send me. I try to save each bit of correspondence in my rather disorganized system of three email folders (“NA Stories,” “Bosses,” “Asshole Survival Guide”) and some sixty subfolders (e.g., “Asshole Bosses,” “Asshole Underlings,” “Brits,” “Clients,” “Asshole Companies,” “Bystanders,” “Public Life,” “Sound Crazy,” “Italian,” “Online Assholes,” “Fighting Back,” “Got Out,” “Wrong Way to Fight,” “Success Stories”). I’ve kept about eight thousand such emails; most contain some variation of the question that this book tackles. Many of my correspondents also tell me about (successful and unsuccessful) survival methods that they’ve tried. And The Asshole Survival Guide also draws upon the 1,500 or so responses I wrote back to these emails, which include encouragement, advice, and follow-up questions.
THE DAMAGE DONE
In 2010, I talked with a young CEO who worried he wasn’t enough like the late Steve Jobs—that his career and his little start-up would suffer because he was calm and he treated people with respect. I’ve had a lot of conversations like this over the years. As I did with this CEO, I always point to pundits and researchers who argue that Assholes Finish First—that’s what (now-retired) “professional asshole” Tucker Max titled his book for “dudes and bros.” Or, in recent years, I point to articles such as Jerry Useem’s 2015 Atlantic piece on “Why It Pays to Be a Jerk.”
My Stanford colleague Jeff Pfeffer argues that treating people like dirt can be a path to personal success because, as he explained it to Jerry Useem, when you put a python and chicken in a cage together, the “python eats the chicken.” I agree that there are circumstances where leaving others feeling oppressed, demeaned, disrespected, or de-energized can help adept jerks vanquish competitors and attract allies (who kiss up, in part, because they hope to be spared the asshole’s wrath, backstabbing, or dirty looks). Treating others like dirt and being selfish can also help people triumph in pure “I win, you lose” situations—where there is no incentive to cooperate with others now or in the future. And chapter 6 of this book considers when and why giving assholes a taste of their own medicine is an effective way to fight back (I do warn, however, as my wife Marina puts it, “When you throw shit at other people, it often gets all over you too”).
That said, my reading of that big pile of research indicates that pundits and professors who celebrate bullies, takers, and narcissists are exaggerating the spoils and downplaying the harm that assholes inflict on themselves (especially in the long run). This conclusion dovetails with numerous other academics, including Wharton’s Adam Grant (he studies the fate of “givers” versus “takers”), the University of Southern California’s Christine Porath (she studies incivility), and the University of California’s Dacher Keltner (he studies emotion and power dynamics). As work by these professors and many other researchers would predict, there is a long list of winners who have succeeded without treating people like dirt: this includes Apple CEO Tim Cook, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Berkshire Hathaway CEO and investment icon Warren Buffett, the late comedian and actor Robin Williams, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, television producer Jenji Kohan (creator of Orange Is the New Black), and executive producer and writer Shonda Rhimes (of Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal fame)—the list goes on and on. And, in 2015, I talked again with that CEO who fretted back in 2010 because he wasn’t loud, overbearing, and selfish enough. I can’t tell you his name, but he still isn’t an asshole, and his company now has more than a thousand employees, and he is a billionaire.
I also had a revealing conversation with Pixar’s founder and president Ed Catmull (who worked closely with Steve Jobs for twenty-five years) about the widespread belief that Jobs succeeded, in part, because he was overbearing, temperamental, and insensitive—the myth that enticed that young CEO to wonder if he ought to behave the same way. Catmull agreed that Jobs had a well-earned reputation “for poor behavior early in his career.” Catmull emphasized, however, that many writers, biographers, and filmmakers miss a crucial part of the story: that Jobs changed for the better after he was “kicked out” of Apple and suffered a slew of setbacks at his high-end computer company NeXT and at Pixar in the early years. As Catmull put it, Jobs “wandered in the wilderness” for a decade. Catmull explained that “in the course of working through and understanding these failures, and then succeeding at Pixar, Jobs changed; he became more empathetic, a better listener, a better leader, a better partner.” Catmull said that the “more thoughtful and caring” Steve Jobs was the one “who created the incredibly successful Apple.” Jobs remained a tough negotiator, a challenging person to argue with, and a perfectionist; but Catmull observed that Jobs’s greatest successes came only after he abandoned the notorious mistreatment of others that plagued his early years.
Yet, even if the asshole lovers are right, and being all asshole all (or most) of the time is a path to personal success, treating others like dirt does so much damage that even if you are a winner and an asshole, you are still a loser as a human being in my book.
I am not just saying this because I am The Asshole Guy. Although evidence about how to best deal with assholes is murky and incomplete, the negative impact of demeaning and disrespectful people on their victims is crystal clear. Thousands of studies in diverse disciplines confirm how high the total cost of assholes (TCA) is to groups, organizations, and society—and especially to targeted individuals. Consider just a taste of this damning pile of data.
Hundreds of experiments show that encounters with rude, insulting, and demeaning people undermine others’ performance—including their decision-making skills, productivity, creativity, and willingness to work a little harder and stay a little later to finish projects and to help coworkers who need their advice, skills, or emotional support. For example, an experiment with doctors and nurses in Israeli neonatal intensive care units entailed creating encounters with a rude American health-care expert. This ugly American insulted the skills and intelligence of the Israeli doctors and nurses; he told them that he was “not impressed with the quality of medicine in Israel” and said the medical staff that he observed in Israel “wouldn’t last a week” in his American department. The belittled doctors and nurses performed far worse (compared to a control group) on tasks including diagnosing a medical mannequin’s physical deterioration, perforated bowel, and cardiac problems.
In other words, that American asshole rattled the Israeli health-care professionals so much that it undermined their ability to treat sick babies. Rude patients have similar effects on physicians; research conducted in the Netherlands suggests that doctors make more errors when they diagnose demanding and aggressive patients who question their competence compared to when they diagnose more civilized patients.
In 2011, renowned science fiction writer William Gibson retweeted a thought by “Notorious d.e.b.” (@debihope on Twitter) that went viral: “Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.” Much evidence supports @debihope’s advice. Studies of rudeness and incivility—on air rage by loud, obnoxious, and insulting airplane passengers, phone rage, road rage, and “pedestrian aggressiveness syndrome”—show that such nastiness is contagious and can undermine a victim’s mental and physical health for days or weeks. Thousands of studies of bullied children show that the psychological damage includes weaker academic performance, along with mental and physical health problems. And children who were bullied by peers may be haunted the rest of their lives—they are prone to adult problems including higher arrest rates, financial struggles, depression, and heavy smoking.
Research on workplace assholes (where this book focuses) reveals that demeaning and disrespectful peers, underlings, customers and clients, and, especially, bosses (or “bossholes”) can damage performance and well-being. To illustrate, assembly-line workers react to verbal abuse with emotional detachment and lower productivity. New nurses bullied by veteran nurses and doctors put forth less effort and develop less empathy for patients. Service employees who are subjected to customer aggression (e.g., rude gestures, yelling, swearing, glaring) report more mental and physical health problems and are less committed to their jobs. Similarly, service employees who observe customers abusing their colleagues (rather than experiencing it firsthand) suffer a similar fate.
And treating others like dirt is contagious—so if you work with a jerk (or, worse, a bunch of them), you are likely to become one too. A 2012 study documented how such shit rolled downhill: abusive senior leaders were prone to selecting or breeding abusive team leaders, who in turn, ignited destructive conflict in their teams, which stifled team members’ creativity.
The list of damages done by workplace assholes goes on and on: reduced trust, motivation, innovation, and less willingness to make suggestions; increased waste, theft, absenteeism, and surliness. Professor Bennett Tepper of Ohio State University and his colleagues estimated that abusive supervision costs U.S. corporations $23.8 billion a year (based on absenteeism, health-care costs, and lost productivity). That was in 2006; the estimate would be far higher now. Workplace jerks also wreck their target’s physical and mental health—triggering anxiety, depression, sleep problems, high blood pressure, and poor relationships with their families and partners. Long-term studies in Europe show that working for a bosshole increases the risk of heart disease and premature death. For example, a twenty-year study that tracked six thousand British civil servants found that when their bosses criticized them unfairly, didn’t listen to their problems, and rarely praised them, employees suffered more angina, heart attacks, and deaths from heart disease.
You get the idea. It doesn’t matter whether the assholes around you are getting ahead or (more likely) screwing up their lives, careers, and companies. They pose a danger to you and others. I wrote this book to help you protect and defend yourself and the friends, colleagues, customers, teams, and organizations that you hold dear from these mean-spirited people and their vile words and deeds.
WHAT’S AHEAD
The next six chapters consider how to assess, escape, endure, fight, and force out bullies, backstabbers, and arses. Chapter 2 on “Asshole Assessment: How Bad Is the Problem?” provides six diagnostic questions to help you to assess how dangerous, difficult to deal with, and damaging a given asshole problem is—if it requires minimal, modest, or major protective measures. The next four chapters consider the pros, cons, and nuances of different survival strategies: Chapter 3 shows how and when to “Make a Clean Getaway.” Chapter 4 provides “Asshole Avoidance Techniques,” methods for reducing your exposure to assholes that you can’t escape from—at least for now. Chapter 5 is about “Mind Tricks That Protect Your Soul,” or ways of thinking about and reacting to assholes that reduce the damage to you and others. Chapter 6 digs into tactics for “Fighting Back.” It spells out effective and sometimes mischievous means for reforming, repelling, and removing assholes—and for bringing jerks down a notch or rendering them powerless paper tigers.
This book ends with chapter 7 on “Be Part of the Solution, Not the Problem.” I show what it means to embrace the no asshole rule as a personal philosophy, a theme that runs through and glues this book together. The rule isn’t just for teams and organizations. It is a personal commitment that shapes how you judge people, the kind of individuals you hang out with and work with, and your determination to detect, dampen, and defeat disrespectful actions made by yourself and others.
A BIAS-BUSTING MANTRA
Keeping this mantra in mind primes you to avoid falling prey to your knee-jerk reactions—to slow, stop, and reverse the initial judgments that you make about suspected jerks. It prepares you to get more from this book. Saying it and living it can help you—and those you support, teach, or coach—do a better job of understanding when bullies and backstabbers are (and are not) rearing their ugly heads, why they are doing their dirty work, and how to deal with them. It’s among the most crucial lessons that I’ve learned over the years about how to think about and deal with possible assholes.
Bending your judgments in this direction counteracts biases that are baked into us human beings—even the most wonderful, caring, and unselfish of us. As you will see in chapter 7, research by psychologists shows that we are often clueless about or downplay our weaknesses and mistakes, develop inflated opinions of our skills and abilities (especially in areas where we are least competent), and are prone to blame others for our problems (even when it’s our own damn fault). This research suggests that if you act like an asshole, or protect or enable others’ demeaning and disrespectful behavior, you aren’t likely to admit these unflattering facts to yourself or anyone else. So it is no surprise that national surveys by the Workplace Bullying Institute between 2007 and 2014 found that over 50% of Americans report they’ve experienced or witnessed ongoing episodes of bullying—but less than 1% admit to subjecting others to such repeated mistreatment. One reason for this big gap is that some people are mighty thin-skinned and even downright paranoid—so they overreact to repeated small or imagined slights and attribute evil intent to people who don’t intend to hurt them (and who may even be trying to help them). The main reason, however, is that people who act like assholes are often blind to their bad behavior and how others experience it.
This mantra isn’t a cure-all for limited self-awareness. But it is a counterforce to the automatic and often flawed interpretations that we are all prone to make. Being slow to label others as assholes gives you time to consider other explanations and develop empathy for the alleged assholes—rather than reacting with instant and sometimes unnecessary hurt and anger. Being quick to label yourself as a jerk, or at least pausing to consider that you could be part of the problem, can counteract the oh-so-human predilection to deny and downplay our imperfections and sins. And this mantra helps you avoid fueling vicious circles where you and your alleged tormentor both feel wronged, and perhaps yell at each other, “I am not the asshole, you are.”
