Imagine walking into work and instantly feeling a knot in your stomach.
Not because of the workload, but because of that colleague.
You know the one—the one who can crush your confidence in under five minutes flat.
Robert Sutton gets it.
He’s made it his mission to study these people.
He calls them assholes.
I’ve read his book, No Asshole Rule, at least 15 times, and most of the pages are beaten and battered.
Yes, it is that good.
He doesn’t mince words about the damage these individuals cause.
He breaks down what it means to spot them, deal with them, and most importantly, not become one yourself.
The following quotes are packed with insights that have helped me countless times when dealing with assholes.
And trust me, they can help you too—because let’s face it, assholes are everywhere.
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The mantra:
When you grow up, whatever you do, don't be an asshole and don't work with them and don't work for them.
3D definition:
An asshole is somebody who leaves you feeling demeaned, de-energized and disrespected -- somebody who leaves you feeling like shit…and either denies it or just doesn't care.
The two tests for spotting whether a person is acting like an asshole:
Test One: After talking to the alleged asshole, does the “target” feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled by the person? In particular, does the target feel worse about him or herself?
Test Two: Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful rather than at those people who are more powerful?
Demanding vs demeaning
There's a huge difference between being demanding and being demeaning. Being demanding is having extremely high standards and pretty low tolerance for work that falls below them. Being demeaning is devaluing other people as human beings, treating them with such disrespect that they feel worthless.
Research suggests that leaders who demean their employees have learned to rationalize aggression. They see that it sometimes gets short-term results, while the long-term damage is often invisible to them. So they justify it as necessary to achieve their goals. Which means, if you think you have to be an asshole to be successful, you might be an asshole.
12 common moves - A Dirty Dozen - that assholes use to demean & deflate their victims:
1. Personal insults 2. Invading one’s “personal territory” 3. Uninvited physical contact 4. Threats and intimidation, both verbal and nonverbal 5. “Sarcastic jokes” and “teasing” used as insult delivery systems 6. Withering e-mail flames 7. Status slaps intended to humiliate their victims 8. Public shaming or “status degradation” rituals 9. Rude interruptions 10. Two-faced attacks 11. Dirty looks 12. Treating people as if they are invisible
6 Diagnostic Questions to see how bad it is:
Do you feel as if the alleged asshole is treating you (and perhaps others) like dirt?
During or after interactions with the alleged asshole or assholes, do you feel oppressed, demeaned, disrespected, or de-energized? If so, you better start crafting a survival plan.
How long will the ugliness persist?
If it is just a short episode, then you might be able to put it past you fairly quickly. But if it goes on day after day, or was a brief episode that keeps haunting you and others, then you need to devote greater attention to developing and using protective measures.
Are you dealing with a temporary or certified asshole?
If you are dealing with a temporary asshole, you might just let it pass, and wait until he or she starts acting like a civilized human being again before giving some negative feedback, or perhaps just try a gentle intervention on the spot. But if you and others are besieged by someone who is all asshole all the time, then you need to act with more care and forethought, as you’ve got a more dangerous and damaging problem on your hands.
Is it an individual or a systemic disease?
If you are dealing with one or perhaps two assholes in what is otherwise a sea of civility, then—while you are still at risk—you are most likely surrounded with people who can help and support you. The main risk is that nastiness can spread quickly like a contagious disease. But if you are living in Jerk City, and every day feels like a trip down Asshole Avenue, you not only are taking flak from every direction and likely suffering much harm; you also have fewer potential allies.
How much more power do you have over the asshole?
If you have far more power than the asshole does, then you have a broader set of options—it’s easier to leave or get rid of that jerk, for example. But beware of overconfidence; just because you are the top dog or rich and famous doesn’t mean you can do what you want—or that you have as much power as you imagine. If you have less power, and that bully can hurt you, you are at greater risk. You’ve got to think more deeply about your strategy, and then devote extra effort to recruiting allies around you who can protect you.
How much are you really suffering?
This is the bottom line. What drives one person crazy may not bother another at all. You may be especially thin-skinned. But if you are dealing with people who leave you feeling deeply oppressed, demeaned, disrespected, or de-energized, then you’ve got to start doing something now—and something that is fairly time-consuming and drastic—in order to survive.
Temporary Assholes vs Certified Assholes
It can help you distinguish between those colleagues and customers you simply don’t like from those who deserve the label. It can help you distinguish people who are having a bad day or a bad moment (“temporary assholes”) from persistently nasty and destructive jerks (“certified assholes”)… It isn’t fair to call someone a certified asshole based on a single episode; we can only call the person a temporary asshole.
Nearly all of us act like assholes at times:
If you have never acted like an asshole even once in your life, please contact me immediately. I want to know how you’ve accomplished this superhuman feat.
We all have the potential to act like assholes under the wrong conditions, when we are placed under pressure or, especially, when our workplace encourages everyone—especially the “best” and “most powerful” people—to act that way.
The difference between how a person treats the powerless versus the powerful is as good a measure of human character as I know.
Abuse does seem to roll downhill:
It's pretty tough to be an asshole to the people above you. Being an asshole has to do with how you treat the people across from you and especially below you. In about 80 percent of the cases, the person who was named as the asshole in their life was their immediate boss.
Don’t replace assholes with wimps and polite clones:
Organizations that are too narrow and rigid about whom they let in the door stifle creativity and become dreary places populated by dull clones. The right kind of friction can help any organization. To take a famous example, Intel cofounder and retired CEO Andy Grove can be a strong-willed and argumentative person. But Grove is renowned for sticking to the facts and for inviting anyone—from brand-new Intel engineers to Stanford students whom he teaches about business strategy to senior Intel executives—to challenge his ideas. For Grove, the focus has always been on finding the truth, not on putting people down.
When teams engage in conflict over ideas in an atmosphere of mutual respect, they develop better ideas and perform better. That is why Intel teaches employees how to fight, requiring all new hires to take classes in “constructive confrontation.”
The effects of assholes are devastating:
They sap people of their energy and esteem mostly through the accumulated effects of small, demeaning acts, not so much through one or two dramatic episodes.
Every organization needs the no asshole rule because mean-spirited people do massive damage to victims, bystanders who suffer the ripple effects, organizational performance, and themselves.
Assholes make us all less productive:
One notable experiment was done with medical teams in Israel. Each team had a physician and two nurses from the newborn intensive care unit, and they were brought in to work with a visiting expert. Some teams were randomly assigned to be berated by the expert. He told them he wasn't impressed with the quality of medicine there, and they wouldn't last a week in his department. After being insulted like this, the accuracy of the team's diagnoses was almost 20 percent lower. And the procedures they did were 15 percent less effective. I'm guessing you wouldn't want a 15-percent-less-effective heart transplant.
Assholes make us dumber & undermine our ability to think clearly & creatively:
And if getting demotivated isn't bad enough, get this: working with an asshole literally makes you dumber. One experiment is especially revealing. Students showed up for a study, only to learn that they were in the wrong room and had entered a professor's office. For some students, the professor just directed them to the right room. The other half of the time, the students got this:
Professor: Excuse me, can't you read? There's a sign on the door that tells you the experiment will be in room 123, but you didn't even bother to look at the door, did you? Instead you prefer to disturb me and ask for directions, when you can clearly see that I'm busy. I'm not a secretary here, I'm a busy professor.
The poor students who were randomly assigned to that treatment were then asked to solve some anagrams. And theysolved a quarter fewer anagrams correctly. Then the students saw someone drop a bunch of books. The ones who had just been verbally abused were nine times less likely to help.
What seems absolutely damning is that they also leave us with more negative attitudes toward others:
There's research from fast-food restaurants that when people have an abusive supervisor running the restaurant that employees are more likely to steal.
An asshole creates an environment of fear, where people stay silent to avoid rocking the boat:
More than one-third of witnesses wanted to intervene to help victims but were afraid to do so. Bullies drive witnesses and bystanders out of their jobs, just as they do to “firsthand” victims.
Asshole virus:
If you join a group filled with jerks, odds are that you will catch their disease.
It takes numerous encounters with positive people to offset the energy and happiness sapped by a single episode with one asshole.
Assholes suffer, too:
Demeaning assholes are victims of their own actions. They suffer career setbacks and, at times, humiliation.
Sometimes assholes aren't aware of the impact of their own behavior.
Although most assholes succeed despite rather than because of their vile ways, they erroneously conclude that their nastiness is crucial to their success.
The damage that assholes do to their organizations is seen in the costs of increased turnover, absenteeism, decreased commitment to work, and the distraction and impaired individual performance
A hallmark of teams and organizations that are led by assholes, or where swarms of assholes run rampant, is that they are riddled with fear, loathing, and retaliation. In a fear-based organization, employees constantly look over their shoulders and constantly try to avoid the finger of blame and humiliation; even when they know how to help the organization, they are often afraid to do it.
If word leaks out that your organization seems to be led by mean-spirited jerks, the damage to its reputation can drive away potential employees and shake investor confidence.
Every time assholes demean someone—say, with a nasty glare, a mean-spirited joke or tease, treating a person as if he or she were invisible, or exaggerating their self-importance yet one more time—their list of enemies grows longer day after day. Fear compels most of their enemies to stay silent, at least for a while. But as their enemies’ number and power grows, the enemies can lie in wait until something happens to weaken the bully’s position, such as organizational performance problems or a small scandal. Then they pounce.
Organizations that don't hire people who treat others like dirt and who call out one another when they act nasty, they're more effective places and they're more humane places to work.
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
Don’t join the jerks—Leonardo Da Vinci got it right:
You ought to do your homework before taking a job. Find out if you are about to enter a den of assholes, and if you are, don’t give in to the temptation to join them in the first place. This philosophy means that when you’ve entered a den of assholes, you do everything possible to get out as fast as you can—or, better yet, to figure out how to avoid that lair in the first place. Leonardo da Vinci said, “It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end,” which is sound social psychology. The more time and effort that people put into anything—no matter how useless, dysfunctional, or downright stupid it might be—the harder it is for them to walk away, be it a bad investment, a destructive relationship, an exploitive job, or a workplace filled with browbeaters, bullies, and bastards.
If you can’t or won’t quit your job, do everything you can to limit your contact with the worst people. Go to as few meetings with known assholes as possible, answer inquires from them as slowly and rarely as you can, and when you can’t avoid them, keep the meetings short.
No asshole rule:
The first things that you need to do are screen out, reform, and expel all the assholes in your workplace. It will then become easier to focus on helping people become warmer and more supportive.
Talking about the rule is nice, but following up on it is what really matters. Announcing a no jerks allowed rule, talking about being “warm and friendly,” or displaying a “no bozos” poster is nice. But all those words are meaningless—or worse—if they don’t truly guide people in changing their behavior.
The lesson is that the no asshole rule works best when everyone involved in the organization steps in to enforce it when necessary.
Be slow to label others as assholes— but quick to label yourself
Ironically, telling people they are assholes can, itself, be an asshole move.
We are all given only so many hours here on earth. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could travel through our lives without encountering people who bring us down with their demeaning remarks and actions? This book is aimed at weeding out those folks and at teaching them when they have stripped others of their esteem and dignity. If you are truly tired of living in Jerk City—if you don’t want every day to feel like a walk down Asshole Avenue—well, it’s your job to help build and shape a civilized workplace. Sure, you already know that. But isn’t it time to do something about it?
Look in the mirror:
Take a look in the mirror—are you part of the problem? “Every group has an asshole. If you look around and don’t see one, that means it is you.”
When have you been an asshole? When have you caught and spread this contagious disease? What can you do, or what have you done, to keep your inner asshole from firing away at others?
Hiring & firing assholes:
Our societal standard appears to be: If you are a really big winner, you can get away with being a really big asshole. Yes, there are people at Google who might fit my definition of an asshole, but the company works to screen them out in hiring, and nasty people suffer during performance evaluations and aren’t promoted to management positions.
Temporary assholes are dealt with immediately: they quickly realize (or are told) that they have blown it, apologize, reflect on their nastiness, ask for forgiveness, and work to change—rather than justify or glorify—their actions. Certified assholes aren’t ignored or forgiven again and again; they change or are sent packing.
A core company value is “respect for the individual, no assholes—it’s okay to have one, just don’t be one.”
When you start hiring more and more people. At first, you can hire people who you either directly know or you know somebody that knows them. Eventually, you start hiring randos off the internet that apply to work at your company. And it's much harder to know whether they're an asshole or not. It is rare that anybody will tell you, "Do not hire this person, they're an asshole." That is rare. That almost never happens.
The hiring process (unwittingly) causes most organizations to “bring in the clones.” The implication is that assholes will breed like rabbits.
A really great question when checking references is, "Do they work well with others?" Nobody tells you, "No, they don't work well with others." That's rare. The answer you want is, "Oh, my God, yes, they're great at working with others." That's the answer you want. The one you don't want is, "Yeah, um ... for most people, they are." Like, that -- that means, "Nah, they're actually not good at working with others, and they've had trouble."
I've found that you can get references to be more honest by forcing them to choose between two negative qualities. What's more likely: that this applicant will be a total pushover or maybe a little manipulative?
If you want to stop the assholes in your office, you have to address the thing that lets them get away with it—the reward system. It's a mistake to just incentivize individual achievement. You have to reward and promote people who elevate others, rather than undermining them. Which means paying special attention to how those in power treat those who lack it.
Assholes thrive in certain kinds of workplaces -- places where leaders say they want teamwork, but only pay and promote on individual results. The classic term for it is "the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B.
One of my favorite diagnostic questions that I like to ask in organizations is, "Who is a superstar here?"
if the superstars are pretty consistently people who are jerks, people who are takers, that's a sign to me that the game is that those people are getting rewarded, despite the rhetoric. It means that they're forgiven, and to me, that's the real test.
There are workplaces where there's very few or maybe no certified assholes, but there's always going to be some temporary jerk behavior…we're going to be tired, we're going to be grouchy, in a hurry, somebody's going to yell at us —it's going to happen. But the difference is, what happens when there's a transgression?
When the belief that it's necessary to be an asshole doesn't get challenged, behavior often becomes normalized, not only by the perpetrators, but also by victims and witnesses.
Costs of hiring an asshole:
Where you hire a person that you shouldn't have hired, are significantly more costly than the other way around, which is, you didn't hire somebody you should have hired. Those are mistakes, too, but they're not very costly.
Here's a question: in your team, what's more productive: replacing an average performer with a star or replacing a toxic worker with an average one? One study looked at the performance and turnover of more than 50,000 employees. It turned out that just replacing a toxic worker with an average one can be twice as profitable as upgrading an average one to a star.
I think every leader has a responsibility to strive for a no-asshole culture. It's the smart thing to do if you want to attract, motivate and retain talented people. But more importantly, it's the right thing to do. We spend so many hours at work, and we have a right to be treated with dignity during those hours.
The art of having a hard conversation with an asshole:
The worst thing you can do, in many ways, is to do nothing over time. But the second worst thing that you can do is to fight back in the moment. They've been playing that game, if they're a certified asshole, for a very long time, and so you are agreeing to basically play the game on their turf. But as soon as you are able, whether that's an hour later or the next morning, you come back to them to have a conversation.
When you've had to deal with an asshole at work, what have you done? If you don't have the power to get rid of them, what should you do? Sometimes, you just have to learn how to have a hard conversation.
Another tip for talking to office assholes is to make sure you don't put them on the defensive. What you're going to want to say to them is something like, "I don't know why you feel the need to undermine me or demean me. I don't know why you feel the need to humiliate everybody and control everything." That's what you want to say to them. You can say it in your head. And you can say it in front of the mirror, if it will make you feel better. But what you're doing is, you're telling them something about their intentions and their character, and you can bet that they're going to argue with you about that. What they can't argue with is about the impact that it's had on you. So, the most important thing is to separate intentions and impact.
Sometimes the conflict happens because one person is just an asshole. How often is that the case in your experience as a mediator?
It is true 100 percent of the time that each side would say that the other side is being an asshole.
Give the other person the benefit of the doubt. People will say, "You know, you just have to assume good intentions." And I think that often that's true. But I think assume good intentions is just a little too strong. I think instead it should be: assume you don't know. And that's the conversation that we need to have, because I don't know what was up with you, but whatever it was, it's a problem. So let's figure that out and see if we can fix it…because that motivates me then to go and find out whatever I'm missing.…now you actually have a little bit of curiosity. And so the conversation isn't about, you know, letting her have it and straightening her out and letting her know she shouldn't be an asshole next time. The conversation is about, "Now I'm just curious what was going on with you, because I was surprised by it, and we should address it so that we just won't have this problem next time." That's an orientation that is much more likely to produce a better conversation and to solve the problem, if it's solvable.
10 lies that people tell themselves:
1. Denial about the present: “It’s really not that bad.” It actually is a terrible situation—you are living in a fool’s paradise.
2. Imaginary improvement: “It’s really getting better.” This is wishful thinking; things are as bad as, or worse than, ever.
3. False hope: “Things are going to get much better soon.” You keep hoping—after all, you are an optimist. But the brighter tomorrow that you keep wishing and hoping for hasn’t happened. And there is no good reason to believe it ever will.
4. Tomorrow never comes: “I will leave for something better right after I finish this one important thing.” Then there will be one more thing, then another, then another. Life is messy. If you are waiting to tie a neat and pretty bow on it, and to leave at the perfect moment, you may wait forever.
5. It hurts so good: “I am learning so much and making such great connections that the abuse is worthwhile.” But is all the damage you and those around you are suffering really worth it? And aren’t you worried about turning into an asshole too (or perhaps it is too late)?
6. The savior complex: “Only I can make things better. No one else can replace me.” So if that’s true, why are things so bad in the first place? Is it possible that not only are you suffering, but you are powerless to fix things? Or that you are unwittingly fueling the asshole problem and someone else would be better equipped to deal with it?
7. I am not a wimp: “Sure, it’s bad. But I am tough. It’s not affecting me.” Hmm. I wonder if the people around you would agree.
8. I can turn it on and off: “Sure, it’s bad. But I am adept at ‘compartmentalizing’ so it doesn’t really affect my friends or family.” What do friends and family say behind your back?
9. Self-righteous suffering: “Sure, it is bad for me, but it is so much worse for others, I have no right complain.” Anything could always be worse. Martyrdom is a lousy excuse for staying in a terrible situation. The grass will be even browner:
10.“It’s bad here, but it would be even worse for me elsewhere.” Sure, no place is perfect. And some places might be worse. But have you really checked out your other options? This smells like a lame excuse.
Just leave town:
Getting out can provide sweet relief from a certified jerk or from a place where jerks rule the roost. Unfortunately, too many people with serious asshole troubles who can and ought to escape engage in self-deception. They delude themselves into believing that things aren’t really so bad or they are trapped when they really aren’t—and thus doom themselves.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast:
When an asshole problem turns ugly, you may feel agitated and have a burning urge to take down that jerk RIGHT NOW. Yet it’s usually smart to squelch your desire for immediate gratification, chill out, and prepare a battle plan. Your instant judgments are likely to be flawed.
Before quitting abruptly, doing it in reckless ways that burn bridges, or both, ask “What are your other options?” The second question is “How much risk are you willing to take?”
The bottom line:
It's better to have a hole than an asshole. If there's an asshole, it's really better to just not have the person there. That basically means, don't hire assholes or you should fire assholes.
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You really need to grab this book — like, right now.
It’s a steal, and trust me, this blog barely scratches the surface.
Think of these quotes as the trailer.
Get the movie, it's better.
Goes well with popcorn, maybe rum.
Okay, definitely rum.
But I digress…
PS. Do you struggle to set yourself apart from your competitors? Does your tone of voice lack a little personality? Either way, get in touch and I’ll help you become remarkable. Or get more communication advice that doesn't suck here.
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