Jerks Need Not Apply

A co-worker sent me this article (registration required) from McKinsey. I hope he wasn’t trying to tell me anything.

The article is a review of Stanford business prof Robert Sutton’s new book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. McKinsey treats the term more gently with the term jerk. Either way, I’m happy to see that there is a measurement for the total cost of jerks in the workplace. Not only are they jerks, but they can be expensive if they're allowed to fester and spread.

I can’t remember where I read it, but I continually repeat that “toxic companies get what they deserve.” Personally, I don’t like jerks. Some folks may like them. However, from a brand identity and corporate culture standpoint, remember your employee culture says a lot about your brand identity.

As the article points out, no jerks doesn’t mean a place free of conflict or tension. It’s how people “fight” in an organization that can be a cause and effect of it’s relative health, toxicity, or Jerk Index.

To paraphrase a primary theme in Karl Weick’s classic book, The Social Psychology of Organizing, this approach means learning to “argue as if you are right and to listen as if you are wrong.”