Why you should get rid of the jerks @ work

If possible, you coach a person from negative to positive attitudes. 

If that doesn't work, you really need to clean house.  I know that sounds harsh, coming from the Lovecat, but jerks at work drive down the quality of the business.  In every way imaginable. 

- A mean boss creates regrettable turnover.  Gallup's research point to consider: Most people don't quit a bad company or product, they quit a bad boss. 

- Mean bosses or co-workers create a cortisol ridden work experience, which drives down our ability to reason and solve problems.  They also nurture more of that behavior in the future by shaping the culture by example.  There is a direct tie between mood state and engagement.  

- Rude customers are usually the least profitable and can also scare off your talent, or demoralize them.  (Read Angel Customers and Demon Customers for more on this.)  Same goes for negative acting partners or suppliers.  In my experience, I've seen the employership-experience go south because the talent is forced to work with unpeoplelike people. 

Think about it this way: What if you were able to tell potential talent that your company follow's Bob Sutton's No A-Hole rule?  What a value-add that might be, that you are likely to work with friendly and thoughtful people.  That's another form of compensation!  

So, besides reading Sutton's book on this, here are a few ways you can weed out the jerks at work: 

1 - Put personality and attitude at the top of the list for hiring, bonus rewards, succession and annual review.  It starts here.  

2 - Fire demon customers.  You have them, owners and managers, buck up and get rid of them.  Yesterday, I saw a tweet from @Tk where he announced that, for the first time, he disabled a customer's account because he was rude to the team mates.  Bravo!  I'm sure many of the team mates are also getting his tweets, and that must have been a mood booster.  At Southwest Airlines (read Nuts for more), Herb Kelleher is notorious for telling rude passengers that "they are no longer invited to fly the friendly skies."  He says that when it comes to rude behavior towards his people, he always sticks up for them.  

3 - Open your eyes at work to spot the high-performing jerks.  They are the most dangerous because they have management's respect and use it against your people later as leverage.  It creates horizontal turnover, where the jerk stays and all his/her team mates quit.  When you see a high-performing jerk, call him out in front of the team or if you can afford to - dismiss him from the team like a bad case of Randy Moss.  Sometimes spirit is more important than the leader board.  

   -- Here's an edgy thing you can do if you want to rehabilitate a jerk, because you want to keep him on the team: Make a short video with comments from his co-workers, talking about how his behavior makes him feel.  Show the video to him in a one-on-one meeting (OK, with your HR generalist there too, just in case.)  That has worked wonders on rock-stars at work that needed an attitude adjustment.

Face it, your people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.  In my view, they should be loved and taken care of.   While the above advice may seem unconventional, it's very people=centric.

 

Comments

[Tim]

John - This blog post is targeted at leaders/owners/managers and not the front line service staff. My argument is that negative customers often decrease productivity in talent, talk poorly about the service (whether you keep them or fire them) and ultimately infect an organization (or call center) with a bad mood.

We call it work because we are accountable to the rules of the company and it's model - not because we have to deal with tyrants and bullies.

[John M.]

I dunno. There are entire divisions within some companies (customer service, quality, IT), who's entire purpose is pretty much to absorb the complaints of others. People in these divisions HAVE to put up with everybody they come in contact with essentially behaving like a jerk. If they take articles like this to heart, they'll soon stop serving their customers and be next in line for a major restructuring or downsizing.

There are reasons they call it "work" and not "play".

[Frank Kendrick]

Incredible, I thought I was the only one that thought like that. People with bad attitudes can change an entire company's culture if management allows their attitudes to go unchecked. Employees who looked forward to coming to work everyday, can be turned into clock watchers, when they are subjected to these jerks at work!

[Gabriele Maidecchi]

Familiar words here. I have to deal with jerks in the past, and I agree with you: a poisoned work environment can seriously harm the productivity and efficiency of even the brightest of businesses. I am all for positive people working in my team, and when the positivity is harmed in any way, it's my strongest will to do whatever I can to restore it.