Treating a pattern of misbehavior as if it’s a personal issue perpetuates harm
Q: Your last post, Go Your Own Way, was quite the word about harmful people in our midst. But, what happens when we can’t avoid a “This Week” type of person? I mean, yes, you can shut him out of your life, personally. But what if he’s on your team, is your business partner, or what if you absolutely need to rely on this person to get it done.
Dear Can’t Avoid,
You raise such a good, if difficult, question: what to do about asshattery.
And for the answer, I lean on the key ideas of Bob Sutton, the Stanford management professor who wrote the quintessential book, The No Asshole Rule. His body of work around this topic asks and answers why we put up with inexcusable behavior in the workplace. He talks of how business leaders think it’s “just a part” of doing business. How we collectively act as if it’s no big deal when it is a big ass toll on organizational performance. He helps us size the impact as the “total cost of an asshole” or TCA.
And to sum up what he says? End it.
So, that’s the short answer.
But despite this evidence-based research that Bob first started exploring in 2004, most people still ask what you are asking, isn’t it just unavoidable?
So let’s explore why the question remains a question.
IT’S NOT SO MUCH UNAVOIDABLE AS ALLOWED
You might recall that This Week and I weren’t working alone. There was a third party to our exchange. The guy who created (storyboarded, mixed, edited) their podcast. When it was getting super clear the project wasn’t going anywhere, and I was being yanked around, he had said, very quietly mind you… that he had “wondered about that.” And by his tone and such, he suggested that he had seen this trainwreck coming. By the time he said, “I know who he is,” I did too. Ugly as that was to see.
But, the reveal came after many, many wasted hours of effort later. After harm.
That guy, the business partner, could just cut off his professional services to ThisWeek, and then the problem wouldn’t be allowed to perpetuate. More importantly, he could also say why he was ending it: “a history of making promises with no actual commitment or capacity to honor those promises harms people who deserve none of this asshattery. So, I won’t be a party to this, anymore.”
But, he likely won’t. (Cause he hasn’t so far.)
So it’s not that the issue is unavoidable, it’s that it’s accepted. Allowed. The people who can very much hold This Week accountable choose not to. To say anything otherwise is to deny the very agency each of us has, and what this column addresses.
WHOSE INTERESTS ARE BEING SERVED?
It’s not an issue of clarity but an issue of whose problem is it.
When one sees a pattern of asshattery happening, most of us act as if the challenge is to know how problematic the person is, and just act accordingly. Move them, or ourselves to another group. Don’t respond to their emails. Push the call to voicemail.
But all these approaches suggest the issue is personal, even private.
But, is it?
Is it personal if a person in NYC says they don’t “want” to rent their place to a particular person, even if they are always “not wanting” to rent it to Black people? Is it personal how Amy Cooper in Central Park called the police and changed her voice to suggest she was the victim? Or part of a larger systemic issue of harm? Is it a private matter as GSA administrator Emily Murphy suggests (and the media repeats) that she’s “struggling with this no-win situation” as if it’s somehow an issue of personal priorities, rather than a threat to how democracy works? Or how Judge Persky personally found that “a prison sentence would have a severe impact” on rapist Brock Turner rather than centering the harm done to Chanel Miller.
If there is a pattern of harm, is it still personal?
Of course not, it’s systemic. Because it affects our commons, it affects us.
Yet, note how keeping it “personal” protects the harmer. Even if they are told they have created harm, they can say how they feel bad about that. As if their discomfort is equal to the harm done.
And, funny enough, keeping it “personal” also protects those who are privileged enough to be able to protect themselves. They can say “hey I can see that person coming, and I just manage accordingly.”
If it’s personal, the issue is about boundaries. And not about how it affects the commons, our work, our collective social spaces.
Yet, this topic of asshattery is entirely about the commons. We cannot do great big things until there is an “us” organized around a shared interest. This means, as I wrote in Part II of the Onlyness, that relationships are central to scaling ideas born of onlyness. So the management of asshattery is what gives us assurance that (a) we can lean on one another and (b) unite around a shared goal not just in principle, but also in practice, and ( c) because we can trust each other. These three elements? They are the steps that connect us so we can do the work of change-making.
Perhaps it’s not surprising I started that chapter on trust with a quote from Dante, “Hell is a place where nothing connects with nothing.” Because without us, there is nothing of value to be had.
MANAGE THE COMMONS OR ELSE
A former friend, let’s call her Susan, is deeply problematic. Whether we’re in a room of 3 people or 300 people, and regardless of why we were gathered, from game-changing strategic kind of stuff to social stuff, she can turn any conversation into a therapy/sympathy session for her.
It took me a while to notice the pattern and even more time to name it. But, even after I did, I also excused it. Thinking, well, she needs support, and who amongst us doesn’t? So, isn’t it kind, or graceful, and a loving thing to let her work through her shit?
That is, until I noticed this “kindness” was actually enabling harm.
Which happened to a common friend, let’s call her Jessica. Jess managed to get her idea published in Harvard Business Review on the topic/cause that Susan also cares about. Instead of celebrating the advancement of the cause. Instead of seeing Jessica as an ally in change-making. Instead of maybe using the newly published article as part of a toolkit used to re-engage the topic to her client base… Susan actually shat on this person in front of many others. She stunned me as she shared that many-years-earlier she had a similar HBR article as if to scream to everyone, “I was here first”.
I saw this as “just” insecurity on display. Pathetic, yes. But, predictable.
Behind the scenes, I along with many others checked in with Jessica, to make sure she didn’t feel defeated or alone. I know that I and others asked the group leader in charge to say something, do something. But when that person declined due to expediency, none of us insisted. A bunch of us tried to still get Jessica’s work known but we have nowhere near the influence that Susan has in that space. Which meant the idea didn’t advance.
No one addressed Susan’s atrocious behavior towards someone who was working to make a difference.
So, Susan got to continue on, as if her behavior was okay.
Another time, Susan showed up at an author’s event, supposedly to celebrate that thinker and her ideas. The event venue happened to be some public historical building, and she had brought her dog, which wasn’t allowed inside. Instead of following the rules, taking her dog to her nearby home, and then returning in a few minutes, she got upset at the building staff. Very upset. Loud enough for everyone to hear. Then, she texted everyone she could to get attention. Including the person who was interviewing the author. Interrupting the needed, strategic conversation that happens backstage just before going on stage to make ideas pop. The pre-event planning got halted while Susan’s supposed victimization got centered.
Yet again, no one said anything to Susan, not the owners of the building whose staff were verbally terrorized, not anyone else who witnessed it.
So, Susan got to continue on, as if her behavior was okay.
The thing is, her behavior hurts the least amongst us, for those young people of color, working minimum wage in the public building, do not deserve to get yelled at. And her behavior is halting progress on important ideas, like Jessica’s, who is both younger and a woman of color.
When you give asshattery a pass, you pass along harm to those who have less power.
No one who knows Susan doesn’t know of her asshattery, just like no one in Hollywood didn’t know of Weinstein’s violence towards women. Yet all sorts of people give Susan a pass. They focus on the good she does. And how generous she is with her Rolodex, which continues to grow in prominence because no one halts her asshattery. (As the operating leader Sarah Milstein recently wrote, harassers are nice to those they need to be nice to; it’s what enables their asshattery.)
I failed to end it. Despite a group intervention, despite a call on leadership, despite a plea to someone who was very much in a privileged position, enough to do something.
People treated these conversations as if I was reporting a personal issue. As if I was crappy at boundaries. Which might very well be true, but also misses the point.
Even as I was saying our commons is being destroyed by enabling this behavior, they treated it as if it was a personality conflict. Because then they could make it my problem without facing the problem. The very same people who would roll their eyes at the enablers of Weinstein can’t or won’t see that they do the VERY SAME THING.
So, I finally left. And blocked the person. Because I knew that by letting people think we were “friends,” then my association itself would enable harm. And I want to end it.
WE CAN TOTALLY AVOID THIS
Asshattery continues because those who can do something about it choose not to. And until we care to make choices to protect and serve our commons, our shared interests, it will continue.
But, piece by piece, we can restore the social spaces we inhabit. Piece by piece, we can create the cultures that let each of us count. Piece by piece, we can collect each other off the ground. Piece by piece, we can fill the holes left by asshattery with love. Because we are each worthy of this, it’s work worth doing. So that, piece by piece, we can collectively build what we each deserve.
Asshattery is sadly, entirely, avoidable, dear one. I hate to say that. Because it means, unfortunately, that we make the tough choices, and do the work.
Will it be you? Let’s do it, together.
