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Rudeness and bullying are rife, says Stanford professor Bob Sutton. Wise leaders figure out how to fix their teams and organizations; and they start by taking a long look in the mirror.
There are a lot of jerks in the workplace. I should know. Over the last decade, since I began digging into the effects of incivility, thousands of people have asked me for advice about dealing with bullying bosses, board members, clients, and colleagues. I have, for example, been sent (and saved) some 8,000 emails that detail the range of such disrespect and intimidation, and the resulting distress and destruction. And I’ve tracked pertinent peer-reviewed research, which is growing like crazy. For example, a Google Scholar search on abusive supervision from 2008 to 2016 returns 5,670 scholarly articles and books; rudeness generates 16,300 citations—and bullying a whopping 139,000. My interactions with the targets of such abuse, plus that growing pile of research, prompted me to return to the subject in a new book, The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, September 2017).
The reasons for the persistence and spread of bad behavior are legion: a global economy, with its demands for rapid decisions and around-the-clock interactions, overburdens leaders, employees, suppliers, and customers. In this world, where email, texting, and social media replace face-to-face conversation and the compassion triggered by eye contact, too many jerks feel unfettered by empathy, guilt, and old-fashioned civility. Meantime, some rising executives believe that treating people badly is a path to personal success—a conclusion bolstered by journalists and a few academics, who celebrate demeaning and disrespectful leaders. One CEO I interviewed was worried he wasn’t enough like the late Steve Jobs and that his career and start-up would suffer because he was calm and treated people with dignity.
Bullying bosses impose costs on people and organizations that are manifold—and often hidden. 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 harder and help coworkers. As a senior leader, your job is to build an organization where jerks don’t thrive. In my writings a decade ago, and in the pages of McKinsey Quarterly, I...