Are You Being Handcuffed?
Last year I got an all-too-familiar call from Trevor, the head of HR at a mid-sized accounting firm in Virginia. He’d been recruited into the role six months earlier and, shortly after starting work, found what he called, “a culture of disrespect.”
“The senior managers have been playing favorites for years,” Trevor told me, “And everyone knows it.”
When I asked him about how this was impacting the firm’s work, he mentioned that people had squared off into silos, “mini fiefdoms” where people stuck to themselves and made little effort to collaborate, or even help, anyone outside of their group. This was generating mistakes, conflict and missed business opportunities.
But Trevor’s biggest challenge was the Office Manager, a woman who quite openly admitted to being a “hard ass” and deliberately difficult to work with.
“It’s her way or the highway,” he said, “and plenty of good employees have hit the road after a run in with her. And judging by how she treats people, I can’t say I blame them.”
Trevor’s goal was to either change the office manager’s behavior or move her out of the firm, permanently. But he felt handcuffed from taking action.
First, she’d been working there for so long that most employees had given up trying to work with her and had developed complex avoidance techniques. Many felt that there was nothing the HR person could do to make things better. “Why beat your head against the wall?” they said.
Secondly, she was being protected by one of the senior partners – an expert in conflict avoidance – who refused to let the new head of HR hold her accountable for her behavior.
Trevor, who’d moved his entire family back east just so he could take the role, was at his wit’s end, “I’m being prevented from actually doing the job I was hired for.”
If you’ve worked in HR long enough, it’s very likely that you’ve heard this story before, or lived through it yourself. I’ve certainly heard it a few times and I know of at least two good HR leaders who’ve quit because they too had been handcuffed just like Trevor.
Is there a viable solution here?
Dr. Robert Sutton, a professor of management at Stanford University and the author of the New York Times bestseller The No Asshole Rule argues that there is: terminate the individual, no matter what.
Decades of research makes it abundantly clear that people who generate toxic work environments – like the office manager at Trevor’s firm – and who are either unaware, don’t care, or doing it deliberately, can cost their employers dearly in many ways, such as significantly reduced productivity, teamwork and revenues, and increased conflict, complaints, dysfunction, and turnover.
Additionally, employers who tolerate and make excuses for “assholes” in leadership roles, (Dr. Sutton uses this word because he feels that the words “jerk” and “bully” do not fully convey the awfulness of the behavior), are allowing a culture of disrespect to grow around this person and infect the entire organization. The employer is saying, in effect, that they simply don’t care.
If you’ve ever worked for a company where leadership doesn’t seem to care about the culture, you know how difficult it can be. You can have the best plans for growth and innovation, you can target new markets, and develop brilliant advertising and sales campaigns, but if you have a toxic culture, you will struggle to meet your goals. As Dr. Peter Drucker, the so-called “father of management thinking,” famously said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
So even though this article seems to be focusing on the challenges that heads of HR face when dealing with extremely disrespectful behavior, it’s really directed at leadership in the C-Suite.
Dear C-Suite Leaders: If you’ve got a proven asshole in a key role, don’t handcuff your HR folks. Let HR do the job of getting rid of them, permanently. Your employees will thank you, your culture and business outcomes will improve, and even though it may cause significant disruption at the time of termination, in the long run, you’ll be happy you did. Highly successful companies like Baird Financial are effectively deploying the No Asshole Rule, and so can you.
If you’d like help in creating a respectful culture, reach out to us at collective@respectfulleadership.org
