A new study of rudeness in the workplace
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Re: A new study of rudeness in the workplace
#2How do you define being rude? From what I read and experienced in my career the real reason "rude" people get away with what they are doing is simple.
They tend to be top or above average performers who don't like when co-workers who are sub par are treated and rewarded as their equals.
I have met many sub-par workers who love to throw around the word "toxic" to define and attack such people. I have seen such "rude" or "toxic" people work fine along other exceptional and/or capable co-workers and reject those who cant perform.
"He/she is an #@$hole... but he/she is doing most the work and objectively in the end they are not wrong in anything they have said." Are words I have heard echoed across so many different leadership meetings at various companies.
The Pareto principle is very real in terms of workforce and what we should really discuss is how we can focus on honest constructive conversations that allow the successful to succeed and give critical feed back to those who arent.
Re: A new study of rudeness in the workplace
#3How do you define being rude? From what I read and experienced in my career the real reason "rude" people get away with what they are doing is simple. They tend to be top or above average performers who don't like when co-workers who are sub par are treated and rewarded as their equals. I have met many sub-par workers who love to throw around the word "toxic" to define and attack such people. I have seen such "rude"…
This sounds like something a coworker would write. Unfortunately the individual was not actually a top performer—just convinced that he was. He would consistently say things that were objectively wrong (lot of math in our field... pretty easy to verify with certainty whether someone knows what he’s talking about), but the rest of us were polite enough not to point his misunderstandings out very often as he would freak out and throw a fit if we did. He was basically above average, convinced he was several standard deviations above everyone else, and more or less humored by everyone else so we could get work done instead of managing his ego outbursts all day.
Slightly above average and a generally sane, nice person will likely be beloved by all coworkers. Slightly above average with a complex... not really
Re: A new study of rudeness in the workplace
#4How do you define being rude? From what I read and experienced in my career the real reason "rude" people get away with what they are doing is simple. They tend to be top or above average performers who don't like when co-workers who are sub par are treated and rewarded as their equals. I have met many sub-par workers who love to throw around the word "toxic" to define and attack such people. I have seen such "rude"…
My experience is very different. The rudest people I've had to work with are generally incompetent to mediocre at best, often believe themselves to be far more competent than the evidence suggests, and end up significant drains on the company as people go to significant inefficiencies in order to avoid having to deal with aforementioned rude incompetents. The actual best performers tended to be quietly polite and unobtrusively competent, getting on with their work smoothly; given that being rude to people causes problems, being rude isn't just a sign of incompetence - it is incompetence.
Re: A new study of rudeness in the workplace
#5This study falls a bit short. Where does the rudeness come from? They've already identified that rudeness leads to lower engagement and more burn out. But does lower engagement or more burn out lead to mode rudeness? What happens if the leaders themselves know the environment they're creating leads to these things?
Context is key. I've seen fake, high-pressure environments created by management too often. It isn't a life-or-death situation, it's your shitty incentive structure.
I refuse to believe most people are intrinsically rude (in a workplace setting). Because almost nobody is rude directly after you hire them (if they are, your hiring process sucks). No, it's more likely the environment or team is dysfunctional and rudeness is a manifestation/poor coping mechanism.
In that way, it's unsurprising management is unable to gauge the performance of individuals accurately, rude or not. It could even be a root cause.
Re: A new study of rudeness in the workplace
#6This study falls a bit short. Where does the rudeness come from? They've already identified that rudeness leads to lower engagement and more burn out. But does lower engagement or more burn out lead to mode rudeness? What happens if the leaders themselves know the environment they're creating leads to these things? Context is key. I've seen fake, high-pressure environments created by management too often. It isn't a…
> Almost nobody is rude directly after you hire them ... No, it's more likely the environment or team is dysfunctional and rudeness is a manifestation
I think this can be true, but new hires might just behave differently because they are new, and any changes are reversion to the mean. E.g. new hires are excited to start their new job, don't have responsibilities yet, are trying to impress their colleagues, etc.
Re: A new study of rudeness in the workplace
#7How do you define being rude? From what I read and experienced in my career the real reason "rude" people get away with what they are doing is simple. They tend to be top or above average performers who don't like when co-workers who are sub par are treated and rewarded as their equals. I have met many sub-par workers who love to throw around the word "toxic" to define and attack such people. I have seen such "rude"…
My experience is very different. The rudest people I've had to work with are generally incompetent to mediocre at best, often believe themselves to be far more competent than the evidence suggests, and end up significant drains on the company as people go to significant inefficiencies in order to avoid having to deal with aforementioned rude incompetents. The actual best performers tended to be quietly polite and uno…
> people go to significant inefficiencies in order to avoid having to deal with aforementioned rude incompetents
This can also make them seem more competent. E.g. if one rude person is an obstruction that everyone else has to work around, the rude individual is the only one working unimpeded. Unless the difference in competency is large enough to account for that, the manager might consider the rude person more competent.
Re: A new study of rudeness in the workplace
#8How do you define being rude? From what I read and experienced in my career the real reason "rude" people get away with what they are doing is simple. They tend to be top or above average performers who don't like when co-workers who are sub par are treated and rewarded as their equals. I have met many sub-par workers who love to throw around the word "toxic" to define and attack such people. I have seen such "rude"…
My experience is very different. The rudest people I've had to work with are generally incompetent to mediocre at best, often believe themselves to be far more competent than the evidence suggests, and end up significant drains on the company as people go to significant inefficiencies in order to avoid having to deal with aforementioned rude incompetents. The actual best performers tended to be quietly polite and uno…
If this is the case, your hiring and evaluating process has a deficiency, which should be an easy fix.
However, assuming a decent hiring process, people generally aren't rude from the get-go. The bigger question the study doesn't even tackle is how does rudeness evolve over time, and - again assuming rudeness isn't some intrinsic attribute - what factors lead to an increase in rudeness.
If somebody is truly incompetent, sure, fire them. But incompetence is rarely so cut and dried, and points to a failure to invest in a person's or team's abilities.
I don't think it's a stretch to see the proliferation of incompetence as a management failure in any case. If percieved incompetence leads to a lack of respect and therefore rudeness, it should come as no surprise why leaders who allowed such an environment to be created would be unable/unwilling to assess it accurately.
Re: A new study of rudeness in the workplace
#9How do you define being rude? From what I read and experienced in my career the real reason "rude" people get away with what they are doing is simple. They tend to be top or above average performers who don't like when co-workers who are sub par are treated and rewarded as their equals. I have met many sub-par workers who love to throw around the word "toxic" to define and attack such people. I have seen such "rude"…
My experience is very different. The rudest people I've had to work with are generally incompetent to mediocre at best, often believe themselves to be far more competent than the evidence suggests, and end up significant drains on the company as people go to significant inefficiencies in order to avoid having to deal with aforementioned rude incompetents. The actual best performers tended to be quietly polite and uno…
From my experience rude + under-performing = termination, if those people who you work with are not performing why does your companies management keep the around?
I didn't put it in my original post but incompetent managers who use "boasting" as a success metric instead of objective metrics can lead to such an issue as well.
Re: A new study of rudeness in the workplace
#10This study falls a bit short. Where does the rudeness come from? They've already identified that rudeness leads to lower engagement and more burn out. But does lower engagement or more burn out lead to mode rudeness? What happens if the leaders themselves know the environment they're creating leads to these things? Context is key. I've seen fake, high-pressure environments created by management too often. It isn't a…
> Almost nobody is rude directly after you hire them ... No, it's more likely the environment or team is dysfunctional and rudeness is a manifestation I think this can be true, but new hires might just behave differently because they are new, and any changes are reversion to the mean. E.g. new hires are excited to start their new job, don't have responsibilities yet, are trying to impress their colleagues, etc.
What stops anybody from fostering that attitude further into their careers? People should be given opportunities for new project and be excited to do the work... unless they already know it's going to be a shit show (impossible deadlines, clueless management, etc). If switching jobs induces such good behaviours initially, what does that say about the previous job?
Again, not trying to defend people who are truly rude. But I'd like to think the vast majority of people aren't like that.