141–150 of 197 posts
You can train people technically, but it's hard to unasshole someone.
I dunno, seems easy enough to give a set of rules to follow in the workplace but as someone who's worked as a college tutor, it can be hard to impossible to get some people up to speed technically.
Hello, my name is Cole and I can be an asshole. The definition posted of an asshole casts a very wide net making discussion difficult. Diversity is important and it isn't just about sex and skin color. People act differently, people have different priorities, confidence varies, life situations outside of work alters behavior as do medical conditions and treatments. Different cultures even in this country value vastly…
This is why i really dislike the diversity-crowd (straw-man here...). The only result were some laws obligating people to explicitly name the minorities of the month. The only proponent of this is the HR department. Nah, not really, but they have to. The diversity crowds achievement was to give corporations more power. If I were belong to a minority, I wouldn't dislike the diversity crowd, I would hate them with unre…
Your asking for diversity of behavior, but you seem to expect everyone to respond like they had your experiences and background.
Naive. The author has no concept of how psychologically damaging these ideas can be in the hands of a passive aggressive HR team. Put the genie back in the bottle. Values are good; they can rally a team. Feedback is good. What's missing is that feedback is never a two way street; there is always part of the company which is effectively immune from critique, by virtue of their position and rank. And this is where the…
Careful there.
This article is overly fixated on overt assholery. Much of the worst asshole behavior I've encountered has been done by people who are outwardly polite and high functioning and have often never had a cross word for anyone. I would much rather get a tersely worded group email (ooo) than have to do someone else's job for them. Let's be frank. The #1 asshole thing not mentioned here is (shouting and swearing alert) NOT…
"not doing your job" is incompetence, there might be many reasons for that ranging from being promoted too quickly without enough support, life-hardships that occlude performance, or just NOT UNDERSTANDING what one's job actually is (yes, it happens). Sure, it sometimes happens that someone feels so entitled that they can justify loafing and pretend-work, that's definitely a-hole behavior, but those other explanation…
Never attribute to incompetence that which is obviously malice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I linked to as much hard evidence as I could but I'll agree that it's a little light. My hunch, just based on my own observation doing this for 20 years, is that an asshole is like a black hole of productivity, draining it from everyone else to such an extent that they're simply not worth having around, and that no matter how Brilliant they are, the rest of the team can figure out their areas of expertise with the mo…
I have seen that a couple times, mostly in startups: a highly functioning brilliant jerk was doing a pretty good job leading teams, but they had no patience towards poor performers and that caused morale issues. Eventually the person got managed out (not fired, just isolated from the teams) and upper management thought the team would just eventually thrive after some short loss of productivity, but that never happene…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh and the other thing I didn't see anyone address is teaching "victims" the right Ju-Jitsu for dealing with (intentional) assholes / bullying - the mindset of don't let anyone make you a victim. I had the "good fortune" of having an internship years ago with a tyrant. This person loved publicly shaming the interns, among a whole bunch of other toxic behaviour, continual needling etc. etc. Their life was a mess, marr…
> ...the most effective solution is very simple... No, definitely not simple. These people have intrinsic deep-seated personality defects. Sure, personality changes do occur in life but they take A LONG TIME, and barring trauma, aren't precipitated by any single event, especially something as as simple as people creating humiliation in a workplace. In other words, you can't "change" an assh*le or force them to curb t…
1. Benign lack of social skills (terse emails etc.). These people are not a major problem in my experience, and are sometimes even under-appreciated because they don't (successfully at least) sell themselves or play politics. They don't really have bad intentions and can often improve their behavior.
2. Narcissism (belittling others, must always be right, etc.) This is a _huge_ problem that in severe cases can destroy an organization. Such people are basically incurable because this is a deep seated psychological problem (really a personality disorder) and nothing a manager can fix. You must get rid of such people at all costs.
Hello, my name is Cole and I can be an asshole. The definition posted of an asshole casts a very wide net making discussion difficult. Diversity is important and it isn't just about sex and skin color. People act differently, people have different priorities, confidence varies, life situations outside of work alters behavior as do medical conditions and treatments. Different cultures even in this country value vastly…
> Not everyone is perfect just how they are but everyone doesn't have to act the same way to be acceptable. This undermines the very concept of "law and order". There "must" be restrictions on behaviour if it is intrusive, offensive, inflamatory, indecent etc. I think it is okay to have an enforced "code of conduct" to prevent assholery.
Here we are getting work done and this asshole starts making a federal case out of someone wearing shorts on a Thursday?
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> the root of the situation is that (a) someone isn't doing their actual job in a remotely competent way Not really. I've worked with several assholes. They were all extremely assertive, and usually also very competent (but I've found also the utterly incompetent ones). The problem is that even if they're right 95% of the time, the 5% of the times they're wrong they force everybody along the wrong path, because their…
Sounds like their bias is that they're right (regardless of ego), and if they're right 95% of the time, I'd say that bias is pretty accurate...
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"not doing your job" is incompetence, there might be many reasons for that ranging from being promoted too quickly without enough support, life-hardships that occlude performance, or just NOT UNDERSTANDING what one's job actually is (yes, it happens). Sure, it sometimes happens that someone feels so entitled that they can justify loafing and pretend-work, that's definitely a-hole behavior, but those other explanation…
In my experience its entitlement not incompetence that's identified as asshole behavior. Oh this person did half the work and bypassed all code review and automated testing and merged their code using admin privileges. Now somethings not working, can you take a look? I'm sorry, are you not capable of handling this? Why are you being so uncooperative? Never attribute to incompetence that which is obviously malice.