The Office Jerk
One of this year’s pleasant surprises has been renewing my friendship with my high school buddy Aloysius “No Sweat” Kosinski after our chance meeting at Chicago O’Hare in January. Since then, we’ve carried on a steady stream of conversations via email, text messaging and phone. And I’ve used some of those conversations as a basis for blogs I’ve posted.
I’ve gotten quite a few comments from my group members and two coaching clients since I posted “Prepare to Squirm,” in which No Sweat commented on Edwin Friedman’s “Universal Law of Leadership.” This week, No Sweat is stirring the pot again with his musings about passages from Friedman’s book A Failure of Nerve. He shared his thoughts about the challenges leaders face in dealing with those people Friedman calls “the most dependent” or “the most recalcitrant” people in an organization. In terms consistent with his South Side of Chicago roots, No Sweat calls these people “assh*les” or “the office jerks.” Here’s what he has to say:
Mikey,
How many times have you wondered why your coaching clients tolerate the office jerk? Do you know the person I mean? They’re the assh*les who continually aggravate their colleagues. They are the ones who, despite the productive things they may do, consistently cause problems due to their disruptive behavior. They consistently get away with bad behavior and cause the leader to look weak by failing to address the problem.
I’ve been going over passages I highlighted in “A Failure of Nerve” wondering what Friedman would say to leaders about dealing with jerks. Here are two quotes on the subject. As you read them, remember that Friedman was a family therapist who made his mark by highlighting the similarities between the disruptive behaviors found in families and in organizations.
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- “…the most dependent members of any organization set the agendas … and adaption is constantly toward weakness rather than strength thus leveraging power to the recalcitrant, the passive aggressive and the most anxious members of an institution …”
- “… leaders assume that toxic forces can be regulated through reasonableness, love, insight, role-modeling, inculcation of values, and striving for consensus. (All this) prevents leaders from taking the kind of stands that limit the invasiveness of those who lack self-regulation.”
Regards,
No Sweat
There is a lot of food for thought in the quotes from Friedman’s book that No Sweat highlighted. An organization is like an ecosystem, and the office jerk is its least emotionally mature member. He or she is a hardy species capable of surviving and holding that ecosystem hostage, causing drama and reducing productivity. Jerks survive because leaders persist in having an unreasonable faith in being reasonable. They are unable to take a stand at the risk of offending the jerk. The longer the leader puts off dealing with the office jerk, the more his/her reputation suffers. Leadership guru Lee Thayer nailed it when he said, “You are what you tolerate.”
Jack Welch calls office jerks “disrupters.” Here’s his recommendation for dealing with them:
A company that manages people well takes disrupters head-on. First they give them very tough evaluations, naming their bad behavior and demanding it change. Usually it won’t. Disrupters are a personality type. They’re poison. If that’s the case, get them out of the way of people trying to do their jobs.
This is the second time in a month that No Sweat has used quotes from Friedman’s book to make me squirm. The only time I was president of a company, I lost the job largely because I failed to deal with the office jerk. I was a textbook case, doing the very things Friedman wrote about. I coddled him, humored him, talked about the company’s mission with him and looked the other way when he screwed up and blamed others. I wouldn’t get rid of him so my board got rid of me.