The Care & Feeding of 800 Pound Gorillas

We've all encountered the jerks and a**holes in our firms, preferably as a co-equal partner who at least has a prayer of fighting back, but more often the real damage is done to associates or staff whose motivation is sapped, whose degree of loyalty to the firm is eroded, or even whose careers are derailed.

Yet we as a profession, by and large, continue to tolerate them.  Progress has been made, to be sure, but we're not there yet.

We have to get there. 

Jerks do real and lasting damage:

• Wreak havoc on retention, if not in recruitment—especially among your best and brightest, who actually have other options ;
• Damage your firm's reputation among potential laterals and even clients;
• Stifle innovation and creativity; and
• Nip collaboration and openness in the bud.

We all know these things in our hearts, but now McKinsey has a report on the new book by Stanford University professor Robert Sutton, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't   (New York: Warner Business Books, 2007) and confirmed our worst fears. 

Do any of these caustic syndromes ring a bell?  (And the list does go on.)

• Damage to those on the receiving end
  • distraction from real work; time and energy devoted to coping or avoiding
  • honesty becomes not the best policy; a climate of fear, psychological safety undermined
  • motivation and energy knee-capped
  • absenteeism, slacking, turnover
  • and worst of all, a prolonged exposure to bullying can turn one into a bully
• Damage to the jerks
  • retaliation, if possible
  • humiliation if confronted
  • job loss
  • even long-term career damage
• Black hole for management
  • time spent appeasing, calming, counseling jerks
  • time spent cooling, reinforcing, nurturing victims
  • time spent reorganizing to get people out of the jerk's line of fire
• Litigation and HR costs
  • speak for themselves
• Overall impact of condoning jerks
  • stifles creativity and innovation
  • channels internal competition into evil routes
  • zero "discretionary" effort
  • external "suppliers" (technology vendors, expert witnesses, trial consultants) charge "combat pay" premiums

Lest this all sound rather soft and mushy, descriptive rather than quantitative, I've got some quanta for you.  According to this report* cited by McKinsey, 41 employees of a manufacturing firm in the Midwest carried PDA's for a few weeks and, at four random intervals, each was "pinged" to report their most recent interaction with a supervisor or a coworker, whether it was positive or negative, and their mood at the time.  The bottom line: Negative interactions hurt the moods of these employees five times more strongly than positive interactions helped their moods.

OK, let's pretend you've got religion.  Swell. So how do you actually do something about it at your firm?   For starters, realize that "no jerks" means no jerks. You cannot speak of "effective bastards," or "obnoxious superstars."

Publicize the rule by word and especially by deed

As the head of Barclays Capital puts it, “Hotshots who alienate colleagues are told to change or leave.”  Only when people feel safe calling a jerk on his bad behavior do you know you've achieved your goal here.

Live by it in hiring and firing

Perkins Coie, a Fortune "100 Best Places to Work" in 2007, for the 4th year in a row, reject rainmakers for just this "no jerk" reason.  As senior partners Bob Giles and Mike Reynvaan report, "We looked at each other and said, 'What a jerk.' Only we didn't use that word.”

Teach people to fight back

No, this doesn't mean descending into the Lord of the Flies war of all against all; it means "constructive confrontation."  When bullies win, well, then, bullies win.  Here we could all learn lessons from the military, where the fundamental understanding of the command and control  hierarchy is not really all about command and control; it's about "disagree, then commit."  Or, as the theme of Karl Weick, The Social Psychology of Organizing (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), has it, "argue as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong."

This also goes for clients

Don't let your people be abused from the outside or from the inside.  Even consider this:  Fire clients who are abusive.  Joe Gold, founder of Gold's Gym (550 locations in 43 countries) did this from the very start, in his first gym on Muscle Beach in Venice, California, where Arnold Schwarzenegger was an early customer.

Is being a jerk contagious?

Yes.

Which is why a jerk-free workplace begins with you.  And this only makes sense.  If I'm attacked, my first, albeit basest, instinct is to counter-attack.  If I lack the organizational status to counter-attack directly, I'll counter-attack obliquely, by becoming disenchanted, losing faith in the firm, giving less than my best effort (or certainly not going the extra mile on nights and weekends). 

Is it easier to have a race to the bottom than a race to the top?  

That's a metaphysical question I'm insufficiently qualified, spiritually, to answer.  But I do know merely from watching the syndrome of negative political attack ads during election season (I could come up with other examples, but this is a uniquely public one), that negativity dumbs down the surrounding environment. 

People who act angrily make you angrier.  These two quotes sum it up, for me:  First, the Arab proverb that "A wise man associating with the vicious becomes an idiot," and second that "a swarm of jerks creates a civility vacuum."

Don't let this happen to you.

* Andrew G. Miner, Theresa M. Glomb, and Charles Hulin, “Experience sampling mood and its correlates at work: Diary studies in work psychology,” Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology , June 2005, Volume 78, Number 2, pp. 171–93.

Update 12 April 2007:

A lawyer at an AmLaw 10 firm, but who requested anonymity (which I scrupulously honor), writes today:

I saw your post about the Care & Feeding of 800 Pound Gorillas, and ordered a copy of " The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't."  I just randomly opened up to page 127, and saw this statistic:  "Researchers Charlotte Rayner and Loraleigh Keashy estimate that 25% of victims and 20% of witnesses of bullying leave their jobs, compared to a typical rate of about 5%.  But these numbers also show that most of the afflicted hunker down and take it.  Many people are stuck in vile workplaces for financial reasons -- they have no escape route to another job, at least to one that pays well."

That statistic and subsequent description sound eerily familiar to associate retention (or reasons why many associates I know still stay).  If this statistic is true and can be applied to biglaw life, then I shudder to think what this means for the profession -- in particular, the characteristics of those who tough it out to make partner (given that even an eighth year associate should have their pressing financial constraints eliminated by that point).

"What it means for the profession", if you ask me (Bruce), is that firms that tolerate, or worse reward, abusive 800 pound gorillas will end up selecting for them and against any "good citizens" who might have randomly begun their careers at the firm. Indeed, if the good citizens haven't decamped by their 8th year, they are either dense or insensitive, neither a desirable characteristic of a partner.