Robert I. Sutton's Blog, page 14

I had a little piece published today in the Financial Times called "Revenge Can Be Sweet for Smart Workers."  Follow the link if you want to read the article (you need to register, but it is free).  I have been doing a lot of interviews and such lately about Good Boss, Bad Boss and The No Asshole Rule as both books are related to the new comedy Horrible Bosses, but the Financial Times is the only place where I have done an original piece.  I found the editors at the FT to be wonderful, far better than most I work with to be blunt (although no one beats Julia Kirby at Harvard Business Review). Nontheless, given space restrictions, the editors cut several hundred words out of my original piece, so I thought I would put the "uncut" version here.  Like most films that are "director's cuts," the shorter version is probably better.  But I hope you might like the long one too:

The new hit movie, Horrible Bosses, provides a satisfying if rather shallow dose of guilty pleasure for just about anyone who has endured a nasty and incompetent superior.  The three hapless protagonists, played by Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis, hatch a plot to murder their cruel overseers.  Their plans fail miserably, but they (sort of) win in the end anyway.   Horrible Bosses, like any decent comedy, is both logically absurd and emotionally truthful.  Plotting to murder your boss, let alone trying to do it, is immoral, unlawful, and impractical.  And while people may love hearing and telling stories about dramatic acts of revenge short of murder, this approach usually backfires.  The audience in my theatre laughed and laughed when the cruel dentist played by Jennifer Aniston, a heartless sexual harasser, was filmed stripping-off an anesthetized patient's pants by her long-suffering dental assistant – who used the incriminating evidence to force Aniston to pay for his honeymoon.

Unfortunately, real-life victims who live-out their revenge fantasies rarely fare so well.  Since publishing The No Asshole Rule in 2007, I have been told and emailed a steady stream of "getting even" stories from victims of lousy bosses.  My readers especially like the story I heard from a radio producer whose relentlessly demeaning boss kept stealing food off her desk. She got even by cooking brownies that contained Ex-Lax, the chocolate laxative, and placing them prominently on her desk.  Her boss promptly gobbled them down (without asking permission, of course). She waited an hour or so before telling him the ingredients.  Like most dramatic and entertaining revenge stories, it did not end well for the victim in real life.  The boss stopped eating her food, but he turned even nastier in other ways -- browbeating her and giving her time-consuming, boring, and useless assignments. So the producer quit, even though she did not have another job lined up. The problem with revenge, as this story hints, is that all too often it fuels a vicious circle – and because bosses have more power than their underlings, they typically inflict the greater damage.

Yet the impulse to exact revenge that fuels Horrible Bosses is not only a potent and widely felt emotion, it has helped bring down many managers who have fallen prey to power poisoning.   The actions by the three awful bosses in the film were cartoonish, but all suffered symptoms identified by psychologists who study the perils of power: They were self-absorbed, greedy, lacked impulse control, insensitive to subordinates feelings, and acted like the rules applied to everyone but them.  When the Kevin Spacey character gave himself a promotion and knocked down walls to reward himself with an even bigger office, it didn't seem like fiction to me.  It reminded me of real bosses who had done similar things and how, just like the Kevin Spacey character, they were oblivious to the resentment it fueled among employees who felt that the boss already had enough money, power, and related goodies.

Yes, it stinks to work for one of these creeps, as millions of victims of bully bosses can tell you.  Fortunately, although enacting revenge fantasies is a recipe for self-destruction, smart employees who are unable or unwilling to escape such jerks battle back via less dramatic and more effective steps.  They patiently document every cruel word (like the nurse who counted how often a surgeon said she was "chubby"), every hostile move (like the TV producer whose boss flicked a lit cigarette at her during a contentious meeting), and every unethical or incompetent act (like the executive secretary who kept records of every suspect travel expense claimed by her boss).  They band together with fellow victims so the documentation comes from multiple sources.   That way, when they do go to battle, they have a stronger case and can't be portrayed as a single nut case.  Above all, smart victims are patient. They build an iron-clad case and a large group of allies.  And they wait for the right moment to strike back – after stretch of poor job performance by the boss, a widely known ethical lapse, or perhaps best of all, after the boss's superiors have started asking around because they have their own concerns about that boss.   The top management team of one U.S. nonprofit organization did this rather masterfully.  As a member of the team explained to me, the board of directors was initially unresponsive to concerns raised by an individual staff member about their two-faced executive director.  This boss was apparently unusually adept at kissing-up to the board and kicking-down at those she led.  The team members patiently built their case and waited for the right moment – which came after a board member ran into a couple former staff members and was horrified by the stories he heard.  When the board  brought in the full management team (minus the executive director), the team presented extensive documentation against their boss and, as group, threatened to resign unless the bully was fired – which the board voted to do later that day.

The lesson for victims of nasty and incompetent bosses is that, if you can't or won't flee from your vile overseers, and want to get even, having revenge fantasies is probably inevitable.  But acting on such fantasies is probably a bad idea for you -- even though doing so (sort of) worked for the three underlings in Horrible Bosses.  Your boss has a lot more power than you do.  So you've got to build your case, develop allies, and wait to fight back when your boss turns vulnerable.  

Nonetheless, putting all the silliness and impracticalities aside, Horrible Bosses offers a useful cautionary tale for every manager and executive.  If you treat your people like dirt, just because they comply with your absurd requests and smile sweetly through your insults and tantrums does not mean that all is well.  Your charges just might be waiting oh-so-patiently for you to slip-up or for your past sins to catch-up with you.  Then your followers will pounce and you will be in a world of hurt.   Certainly, there are plenty of nasty and incompetent bosses out there who escape unscathed – the world is not perfectly just place.  But if you are a horrible boss, and you lead some smart and patient people, the revenge the exact against you may, in the end, be just as sweet for them as any Hollywood fantasy.

The New York Times reports that the school system has abandoned their teacher bonus system because it is ineffective. I quote:

A New York City program that distributed $56 million in performance bonuses to teachers and other school staff members over the last three years will be permanently discontinued, the city Department of Education said on Sunday. The decision was made in light of a study that found the bonuses had no positive effect on either student performance or teachers' attitudes toward their jobs.

The research appears to be quite careful and the RAND Foundation is highly respected:

The study, commissioned by the city, is to be published Monday by the RAND Corporation, the public policy research institution. It compared the performance of the approximately 200 city schools that participated in the bonus program with that of a control group of schools. Weighing surveys, interviews and statistics, the study found that the bonus program had no effect on students' test scores, on grades on the city's controversial A to F school report cards, or on the way teachers did their jobs.  "We did not find improvements in student achievement at any of the grade levels," said Julie A. Marsh, the report's lead researcher and a visiting professor at the University of Southern California. "A lot of the principals and teachers saw the bonuses as a recognition and reward, as icing on the cake. But it's not necessarily something that motivated them to change."

Are you surprised? I am not, and if the people running the New York City school system had actually read a large body of existing research, they would never have wasted all this money in the first place. In our opening chapter of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense, Jeff Pfeffer and I reviewed the extensive literature on the links between incentives and teacher performance, and it turns out that although there always have been people with great faith in pay for performance systems for teachers -- going back to at least 1918 -- careful studies show over and over again that they do not improve student performance.  The New York Times article suggests that despite the ideology supporting pay for performance systems, there is growing evidence that the current round of incentive-based teacher pay isn't working -- just as it never had worked:

The results add to a growing body of evidence nationally that so-called pay-for-performance bonuses for teachers that consist only of financial incentives have no effect on student achievement, the researchers wrote. Even so, federal education policy champions the concept, and spending on performance-based pay for teachers grew to $439 million nationally last year from $99 million in 2006, the study said.

To be clear, pay for performance schemes do appear to have some effects in schools -- most of which are bad. One of the most well-documented (see this post on findings in Freakomomics and related research) is that some teachers and administrators start cheating when their pay is linked to performance on student's standardized tests.  Their are strong hints that this is exactly what happened in Washington, D.C. and other cities where financial incentives for teachers and administrators are linked to student test scores. 

Note that I am not arguing against pay for performance systems in general.  They work in other settings --sports, sales, lots of other places,as we show in Hard Facts.  But they don't work for teachers for a host of reasons, perhaps paramount among them are that teachers rarely have enough control over key student behaviors before, during, and outside of class, over class composition (and when they do, they sometimes use it to cheat the tests.. such as by sending poor perfomers to special education classes), and over other resources they need to have a strong enough impact on student learning.   Also, giving students a test once a year probably isn't a very good way to measure what students are learning.  As The New York Times report argues, another problem with pay for performance schemes is that it turns teachers' attention away from intrinsic rewards (the reason most go into the profession in the first place) and toward extrinsic rewards (See Dan Pink's Drive to learn more about the trouble with extrinsic rewards). 

To be clear, I am NOT a general supporter of the policies of teacher's unions.  Although I do think that way too much blame and way too little credit is given to teachers, I do have an evidence-based pet peeve against how vehemently teacher's union's defend the jobs of bad apples, the rotten and incompetent teachers.  This argument is consistent with the work on "Bad is stronger than good" that I've discussed here before... while it is tough for even a good teacher to overcome a lousy system and have strong positive impact on students, it is pretty clear that really lousy teachers can make a bad system worse, and dampen the positive effects of a good one.   I believe that if unions changed policy here and became even more vehement about reforming and removing bad teachers than their critics it would improve their reputations and the quality of education -- and earn them political capital to battle lousy policies such as tying teacher pay to student test performance.  (See this great discussion and debate at The New York Times).

To return the dismal record of pay for performance systems in schools, some years back, I had an interesting conversation with Tony Bryk, a prestigious educational researcher who is now heads the Carnegie Foundation.  We were were at a think tank, a place called the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and I asked Tony why -- even though there is so much evidence against practices like pay for performance for teachers -- they remain popular and come back in waves... until overwhelming evidence emerges again that in fact they are bad.  Tony suggested two reasons.  The first has to do with ideology -- that people hold some assumptions so strongly (like economics and business minded folks who believe that incentives are the best answer to changing any kind of human behavior) that they refuse to accept any evidence that runs counter to their beliefs -- no matter how strong those findings might be.  The second reason was what Tony called "collective amnesia."  He argued that, in the history of educational policy, the same bad ideas seem to come around every 10 or 20 years, and policy makers and their staffs either don't remember or make no effort to dig-up relevant research to guide their decisions, regardless of their ideologies.  In the case of pay for performance, it appears that both of these factors are operating. 

Practicing evidence-based management isn't easy given our various human flaws.  But we sure could save a lot of money, a lot of heartache, and make people's lives a lot better if we all tried a lot harder to do it.  There are plenty of outcomes in life that are impossible to predict.  Unfortunately, what happened in New York was completely predictable, even if people with blind faith in linking test scores to financial rewards for schools and teachers remain unwilling to believe this well-established truth now. 

The film Horrible Bosses  opens on July 8th.  The basic plot, as I understand it, is that three guys who hate their bosses, played by  , and , conspire to murder them.  I don't recommend that way of dealing with a bosshole, and have been suggesting more constructive approaches (see this ABC interview).  As part of the film's release, I have been getting quite a few media calls about bosses. This reminded me of a checklist that I worked on with the folks at LinkedIn and Guy Kawasaki a few years back to help  assesses if a prospective boss is likely to be an asshole.   The list builds on the ideas in The No Asshole Rule and some ideas that appeared in Good Boss, Bad Boss.   

We developed ten "reference check"  questions that you can ask people who have worked with and for your prospective boss -- or perhaps had him or her as a client -- to help determine if you are at risk of going to work for an asshole.

Discovering the answers to these questions before you take a job can save you a lot of heartache. One of the key points in The No Asshole Rule is that one of the most effective ways to avoid being harmed by assholes -- and becoming one yourself -- is (to steal a phrase from Leonardo da Vinci) "to resist at the beginning," to avoid working for an asshole boss (or joining an asshole invested workplace) in the first place.  Here is our 10 point checklist:

1. Kisses-up and kicks-down: "How does the prospective boss respond to feedback from people higher in rank and lower in rank?" "Can you provide examples from experience?" One characteristic of certified assholes is that they tend to demean those who are less powerful while brown-nosing their superiors.

2. Can't take it: "Does the prospective boss accept criticism or blame when the going gets tough?" Be wary of people who constantly dish out criticism but can't take a healthy dose themselves.        

3. Short fuse: "In what situations have you seen the prospective boss lose his temper?" Sometimes anger is justified or even effective when used sparingly, but someone who "shoots-the-messenger" too often can breed a climate of fear in the workplace. Are co-workers scared of getting in an elevator with this person?  

4. Bad credit: "Which style best describes the prospective boss: gives out gratuitous credit, assigns credit where credit is due, or believes everyone should be their own champion?" This question opens the door to discuss whether or not someone tends to take a lot of credit while not recognizing the work of his or her team.

5. Canker sore: "What do past collaborators say about working with the prospective boss?" Assholes usually have a history of infecting teams with nasty and dysfunctional conflict. The world seems willing to tolerate talented assholes, but that doesn't mean you have to.              

6. Flamer: What kind of email sender is the prospective boss? Most assholes cannot contain themselves when it comes to email: flaming people, carbon-copying the world, blind carbon copying to cover his own buttocks. Email etiquette is a window into one's soul.

7. Downer: "What types of people find it difficult to work with the prospective boss? What type of people seem to work very well with the prospective boss?" Pay attention to responses that suggest "strong-willed" or "self-motivated" people tend to work best with the prospective boss because assholes tend to leave people around them feeling de-energized and deflated.

8. Card shark: "Does the prospective boss share information for everyone's benefit?" A tendency to hold cards close to one's chest—i.e., a reluctance to share information—is a sign that this person treats co-workers as competitors who must be defeated so he or she can get ahead.                    

9. Army of one: "Would people pick the prospective boss for their team?" Sometimes there is upside to having an asshole on your team, but that won't matter if the coworkers refuse to work with that person. Use this question to help determine if the benefit of having the prospective boss on your team outweighs any asshole behaviors.

10. Open architecture: "How would the prospective boss respond if a copy of The No Asshole Rule appeared on her desk?" Be careful if the answer is, "Duck!"

Those are our 10 questions. I would love to hear other tips about what has helped you avoid taking a job with an asshole boss -- or warning signs that you wish you would have noticed before going to work for a demeaning creep.   

I have been reading a lot about group and organizational size lately because it is a key issue for understanding the "scaling problem" that Huggy Rao and I are currently tackling.  After all, if you want to grow a large organization or network, it is crucial to understand how large "the building blocks" should be, how many people a leader can lead, and the the upper limits of organization and network size.   You will likely see other posts on this issue here as I am fretting over this question a lot.  But I couldn't resist a quick post drawn from J. Richard Hackman's fantastic book Leading Teams. 

Richard reports an astounding solution to a disagreement between United Airlines and the pilots union when United was making its first big purchase of the 737 aircraft.  Boeing designed the cockpit so that it could be flown by either a two or three person crew.  Of course, United wanted two pilots because of the enormous savings in labor expenses; the union wanted three pilots because they argued that, since the planes would be flown in busy air spaces, it would be better to have a third person on board to help with demanding work and to keep an eye out for problems.   Well, this kind of disagreement didn't surprise me and I am sure it doesn't surprise me.  But what shocked me as that United and the union jointly sponsored an independent group to study the differences between two and three person crews during actual flight operations.  The study found no consistent differences between two and three-pilot crews.  As Hackman reports on page 119 of Leading Teams:

"Members of the three-person crews did leave the cockpit more frequently to visit the cabin, which may have helped strengthen the work relationship between pilots and flight attendants. But they caught no more potentially conflicting traffic called to their attention by air traffic control than did the two-person crews."

Chalk-up one for management on this one; as Richard points out, 737s are now exclusively flown by pairs of pilots, not trios.  I love this story because it appears to be an actual evidence-based decision. Unfortunately, this happens far less than it should.  As a process, it fascinates me because asking an objective third party to study problem when two parties have conflicting ideologies, goals, or incentives --and agreeing in advance to a decision that fits the evidence -- seems like the right way to go about things.  I am not even sure if that is what happened in this case, but I fancy the notion.  I know that it usually won't be feasible in real life because we human-beings aren't that cooperative and rational, but it would lead to more effective and safer organizations.

Yesterday, I did an interview for the BAM network on Good Boss, Bad Boss.  The content expert on line was Justin Snider, who teaches at Columbia and has in-depth knowledge about K-12 schools, as that was the focus of the conversation.  Justin had great questions and comments about bosses in general (see this recent post) and about school principals in particular.  I thought he made especially good comments about how the best principals are PRESENT, constantly interacting with teachers, students, and parents. He especially suggested that school principals think about where their offices are located.. are they in a place that essentially requires them to keep bumping into teachers and parents, or are they in some corner of campus that reduces the amount of interaction.

I like Justin's point about the office because it reminds me of the design for Pixar's building in Emeryville, which was inspired by Steve Jobs' assertion that they needed to make sure that everyone was basically forced to bump into each other as a result of the placement of the food and bathrooms.  At one point, Jobs half-seriously suggested that there be just one central bathroom so that everyone had to run into everyone else and there would be a lot of random encounters as people walked to and from that crucial location. The ultimate design resulted in more than one bathroom , but the food and bathrooms were located so that people need to walk through this central area constantly -- one of those little things that has helped fuel Pixar's creativity over the years.

After the interview, Justin and I exchanged emails,  I told him a story about how I saw the difference between the impact of a good versus a bad principal at my daughter's middle school, how there was a great principal who seemed to know every students name and was widely loved.   He retired and was replaced by a bad one who seemed to not know any student's name and was so out of touch that his lack of soul and other more objective acts of incompetence provoked widespread despair among students and parents, and quite a few teachers complained about his lousy leadership openly.    I was reminded of this difference between the two principals just a few weeks ago when, even though it is has been a few years since the good boss last saw my daughter, he greeted her by name in a local restaurant. In contrast, my daughter is still annoyed that the bad one mispronounced so many student names, including hers, at graduation (Her name is "Eve," he called her something that sounded like "Ev.")

Justin had an interesting reaction to my little story:

Actually, right after our call concluded, I realized I should have said that a great back-of-the-envelope measure of whether a principal is generally doing a good job is how many students' names he or she knows.  In my experience, there's a strong correlation between principals who know almost all students by name and those who are respected (and seen as effective) by students, parents and teachers.  It's not a perfect measure, of course, but I think it's probably a fairly good indicator of a school's climate and a leader's effectiveness.

I like Justin's observation.  Of course, some us are better at remembering names than others and we all have cognitive limits. But Justin's argument is compelling to me because knowing people's names seems like a good sign that a boss is directing attention to those he or she leads and is responsible for helping and is not overly focused on him or herself, or on kissing-up to the superintendent, board of education, or other superiors.

What do you think of this metric?  Is it right for schools? What about other workplaces?

I had a meeting today with my colleague Huggy Rao where we were batting around various ideas about systems that are effective versus ineffective at scaling good ideas. Huggy brought up this cool quite from Indira Gandhi:

My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.

He then went on to argue that systems that bring-in, develop, and reward people in the first group  -- and that expel, reform, and punish people in the second group -- are likely to be more effective at spreading and implementing constructive action. Sounds right to me.

Apple has proposed a most inventive new campus in Cupertino. The folks as joyoftech.com had good fun imagining the "hidden features." I especially like the empty part of the building where no one is allowed to go -- and is meant to create mystery.  That is VERY Apple.  Thanks to Alistair Davidson for sending this my way:

I will be interviewed on BNET's new webcast show, "The Live One" today at 10AM pacific.  I plan to talk about Good Boss, Bad Boss and related stuff including Google's recent research differentiating their best and worst managers (technical skills didn't matter nearly as much as people skills, which surprised a lot of people at Google), a cool new study that shows having more women on your team will make it act smarter (in fact, it is more important than having people with higher IQ's), and the recent appearance of The No Asshole Rule in Doonesbury.  At least that is what I am planning on talking about.  It will be a fairly informal conversation, so who knows exactly what will happen.  I hope you can tune in.  Again, the URL is here -- check out the past interviews, with people including Peter Sims and Penelope Trunk.

I will be interviewed on BNET's new webcast show, "The Live One" on Monday, June 13th at 10AM pacific.  I plan to talk about Good Boss, Bad Boss and related stuff including Google's recent research differentiating their best and worst managers (technical skills didn't matter nearly as much as people skills, which surprised a lot of people at Google), a cool new study that shows having more women on your team will make it act smarter (in fact, it is more important than having people with higher IQ's), and the recent appearance of The No Asshole Rule in Doonesbury.  At least that is what I am planning on talking about.  It will be a fairly informal conversation, so who knows exactly what will happen.  I hope you can tune in.  Again, the URL is here -- check out the past interviews, with people including Peter Sims and Penelope Trunk.

Just as I feared!  BPS Research reports a recent article containing a series of small studies that shows "retail therapy" does work -- at least in a sample of young American consumers.  And they found little evidence of regret or guilt after the purchases.  Here is the description of the third and most compelling of the studies:

"Lastly the researchers had 69 undergrads complete two retrospective consumption diaries, two weeks apart, documenting their purchasing behaviour, mood and regrets. All the participants admitted in the first diary to having bought themselves a treat (mostly clothes, but also food, electronics, entertainment products and so on). Sixty-two per cent of these purchases had been motivated by low mood, 28 per cent as a form of celebration. Surprisingly perhaps, treats bought as a form of mood repair were generally about half the value of treats bought for celebration, reinforcing the notion that retail therapy is constrained, not out of control. Moreover, according to the diaries, the retail therapy purchases were overwhelmingly beneficial, leading to mood boosts and no regrets or guilt, even when they were unplanned. Only one participant who'd made a retail therapy purchase said that she would return it, given the opportunity."

I better not show this study to my teenage daughters.  They love retail therapy and I have never seen a hint of guilt from them... only the motivation to do more in the future!

The citation is: Atalay, A., and Meloy, M. (2011). Retail therapy: A strategic effort to improve mood. Psychology and Marketing, 28 (6), 638-659 DOI: 10.1002/mar.20404.

P.S. As I have said before, BPS Research Digest is one of my favorite places on the web.  Check it out.