Bob Sutton explains why people rarely recognize their own toxic behavior at work. He cites Workplace Bullying Institute data on prevalence, then uses Winston Churchill's wife writing to him in 1940 to show how leaders need candid feedback from people they trust to avoid damaging their teams.
Chapters
Let's go back to this notion that if you're a jerk, the odds you're gonna admit it to yourself or others are not high, and there's some good national survey data, it's not great, but it's pretty good, by the Workplace Bullying Institute, they do something with Zagreb about every year or so, and if you look at surveys over the last 10 years, the general pattern is about 0.5% of Americans, so that's 1 out of 200 Americans, will admit to being sort of a consistent, ongoing, doing consistent or ongoing bullying. About 50% of Americans say they've either experienced it, are experiencing it, or witnessed it firsthand. Those numbers don't add up, and there's a whole bunch of other research on self-awareness that suggests the worst person to ask, if you want to figure out if somebody's an asshole, is the asshole him or herself, and that includes you. So, looking in the mirror actually doesn't work that well. What the evidence suggests is the best thing to do, and research on self-awareness says this pretty consistently, is having people in your life who can tell you when you've been a jerk, a temporary one or a certified one, that's the best path to awareness. And one example of this, so it's June 1940, Winston Churchill's in a pretty bad situation, You think about it, they're losing the war, they're being bombed like crazy, the US isn't in the war yet, Dunkirk has happened or is just about to happen, it's just kind of a mess in the UK, and he's getting grouchy. So his wife Clementine writes him a letter. One of the men in your entourage, a devoted friend, has been to me and told me that there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues and subordinates because of your rough, sarcastic, and overbearing manner. And then she goes sort of wifely, but my darling Winston, I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner and you're not as kind as you used to be. I think that's kind of interesting in light of current events, and I would also add, there's 2 or 3 sentences at the end where she sort of lays out a mini-theory that treating the people who work for him bad is not just sort of bad because it makes them feel bad, it's bad because it stifles dissent and drives out the best people. So it's sort of interesting in light of some current events.
