Bookshelf: Jerks at Work
Toxic Coworkers and What to Do About Them
The Ars Pandemonium Bookshelf
Thoughts and musings on mainstream business literature through my own prism of managing and leading teams of creative professionals. These are not “book reviews!” See more here.
Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and What to Do About Them
Tessa West; 2022, Portfolio/Penguin
I feel incredibly fortunate that in a thirty year career, I’ve barely had to work with folks like those described in this book. I mean, not never, but it feels pretty rare. Can I think of times I didn’t get along with people? Sure. Have I seen examples of some of the behavior described? Of course.
But, since I have no reason to believe the book is describing people who don’t exist (even if the various categories of jerks are obvious composites), I feel lucky that I just really haven’t had to deal too much with them. Maybe I’m just oblivious?
Or! On the other hand…I’m reminded of the old saying: “Look around the room. If you don’t see the jerk, you’re the jerk.” So. Yeah.
Anyway, on with the book.
“Getting a handle on your jerk at work is a little like profiling a serial killer. In other words, you first need to get into your jerk’s head to learn what makes them tick.”
Author Tessa West proposes a “taxonomy of jerks at work.” These are presented in a table at the beginning, and then the chapter format of the book takes each in turn.
Jerks at Work
Kiss Up/Kick Downers
Credit Stealers
Bulldozers
Free Riders
Micromanagers
Neglectful Bosses
Gaslighters
The book establishes that its goal is to help readers identify toxic workplace behavior, understand something about why it’s happening, and then provide strategies for dealing with it. It’s meant to be “a guide you can return to anytime a new jerk-at-work problem crops up.”
Overall I found it an insightful read in terms of recognizing and understanding this toxic behavior. Being able to put a name on it and see it when it’s happening is valuable! And West is an accomplished social psychologist, author, and professor with tons of research to back up her insights. It’s all quite clear-eyed and perceptive.
Nonetheless, I didn’t personally find it nearly as practical in terms of strategies for dealing with the problems. There’s plenty of good stuff in here, for sure! But some of the advice seems basically to boil down to either confront your tormentor, narc on your tormentor, or avoid your tormentor. It just doesn’t seem that constructive. I didn’t really come away feeling like it was a “guide I could return to,” in that sense.
In the context of other recent Bookshelf entries, this book is less interested in directly exploring, say, gender discrimination (like That’s What She Said, or The Good Boss), or racial bias in the workplace (The Memo).1 That’s not a critique! It’s just not what this book is about.
But, since a lot of it is about how to recognize and handle the same boorish behavior that results from those issues, Jerks at Work ends up covering some of the same ground. That its perspective is a bit different makes it a really interesting companion to titles like those others.
For example, in one passage discussing credit stealers, West points out how diversity itself can be an advantage (besides all the other advantages we already recognize):
“Diversity of thought, experience, and background in teams is important. Diverse teams come up with more creative and feasible ideas than teams made up of similar people. They are also less prone to mistakes. But there’s another perk to diversity that people often overlook.
Because diversity of background breeds diversity of thought, people on diverse teams are less likely to come up with the exact same ideas.”
And this passage (which does actually include a great functional strategy for dealing with bulldozer jerk behavior) could have come straight out of any of those other books:
“If you struggle to assert yourself, make a deal with your coworkers: one of you will intervene if another one of you is interrupted and can’t get the floor back. The first time I heard someone say, ‘Can you please let Tessa finish?’ I could have cried. I was young and in a fragile career stage and not ready to say, ‘Let me finish.’”
A lesson that I’ve learned (the hard way) over the years, is that empathy doesn’t scale indefinitely. As a manager, the empathy flow, while not one-way, can be quite asymmetrical. That is, in most healthy relationships, each party approaches the other with a similar level and kind of empathy.
But in a manager/direct-report relationship, the onus is on the manager to bring the empathy (at least if they’re good at managing). It’s always nice when a report can empathize with their manager, just for, you know, good human relationship conduct, but it’s hardly a job requirement. There’s going to be an imbalance.
There are plenty of ways to deal with this fact, but it has certainly been my experience that it can mean individual interactions “add up” in a way that’s exhausting for the manager, and unfair and inequitable to the team. The scale at which this becomes a problem is different for everybody — hell, it’s been different for me at different points in my career. But at some point, it’s likely to have some negative consequences.
Given all that, this passage really struck me:
“Dylan was the best mentor I knew; he would spend hours with his direct reports giving them useful feedback, teaching them everything from how to approach a power player at a conference to how to handle negative feedback from team members. He was like a gardener with his orchids — spraying them with water twice a day and making sure that they had the exact hours of sunshine they needed to thrive.
Then one day, Dylan got a promotion. Because he was so good at mentoring, his boss expanded his team from five to ten. What Dylan and his boss didn’t realize was that Dylan’s method of mentoring did not scale — not even to five more people. His sweet spot was a team of four or five. Any bigger than that and the whole house came crashing down.”
That hits close to home, I must say. Now, this appears in the section dedicated to neglectful bosses, and the point is that Dylan here became a neglectful boss, as he was overwhelmed with his new responsibilities.
But I don’t know; reading this I kind of feel like Dylan’s boss was the neglectful one. That his boss didn’t recognize and understand that Dylan’s empathic approach wouldn’t scale seems like a miss. If they’d wanted to promote him, they might have ramped it more slowly, and added training and mentoring for Dylan to help him grow into it, developing new habits and approaches that might work on a larger scale. That they didn’t do that strikes me as the neglectful action here.
Dylan bears responsibility for essentially collapsing and ghosting the team (as it’s described here), but for sure his boss did not set him up to succeed.
“Bad behavior at work is contagious.”
As an example of the disconnect between the book’s insight into the jerky behavior but disappointing prescriptions, this passage about recognizing work and crediting team members really stood out to me. It seems out of sync with most other modern management techniques that I’ve seen, and certainly with my own experience. From the chapter dealing with credit stealers:
“Most of us dole out credit after we see how successful a team product is. In most jobs, it’s not wise to completely eliminate the relationship between quality of work and quality of reward. But when the only way to get rewarded is to work on the team that outperforms all the other teams, you wind up with a hearty combination of credit overclaimers and bulldozers who will do anything to ensure that their ideas are the ones that rise to the top. Tie credit to the amount of work people put in, not just the success of the team’s outcome.” [emphasis mine]
I mean…I really, really think it’s a bad idea to credit “amount of work.” I get the point — we can’t all be on the high-profile, shiny project. A lot of time we’ve got to chop wood and carry water, and that doesn’t mean we should be ineligible for recognition. And there are people (in this figuration “credit overclaimers and bulldozers”) who might swoop in to claim more credit than they’re due, or engineer for themselves a role on a higher-profile team. That definitely needs to be addressed.
But just tying credit to amount of work incentivizes quantity in a way that seems incredibly counter productive to me. Surely a team has goals it’s trying to achieve, and unless those goals are “total number of widgets produced” or something, quantity is unlikely to be the most valuable metric to reward.
Besides, tying credit to “amount of work people put in” also creates incentive for “crunch” (working insane hours) and fosters an environment likely pretty hostile to work/life balance and builds in some foundational inequity. Yeah, I don’t like this one.
“Let the gossip take care of the bulldozer.”
Citing a study published in Psychological Science in 2014, West notes:
“Gossip is a powerful tool — one of the best policing mechanisms we have at work. For some, the threat alone that their reputation will be tarnished is enough to get them to cooperate.”
I don’t doubt for a second that this is true (painfully so, in fact), but it also seems like an awfully risky way to try and manage behavior. This advice — to just let the gossip take care of a problematic person — comes in the context of trusting that negative chatter about an individual will make it to leadership, and then they will get their comeuppance.
Sure, that might work. But it means allowing some pretty dangerous behavior to proliferate — metastasize, even — along the way. One or another individual may not have much other recourse, I get that, but reading this as a manager really took me aback.
I’m personally very intrigued by insights that reveal where desirable traits and behaviors have mirrors or echoes with undesirable results. I feel like these really get at some of the rich complexity of human interaction, and they can be some of the thorniest issues in management. Regarding the emergence of free rider jerks on a team:
“In fact, many of the same traits that make teams work well together also make them vulnerable to free riding. I call these the ‘Three C’s’: conscientiousness, cohesion, and collective rewarding. You aren’t destined to have a free-riding problem if your group has one (or more) of the Three C’s, but you are at risk.”
On the other hand, the analysis that free riders can get away with it because credit is difficult to correctly assign strikes me as something that good management should be able to catch.
“But what happens when you can’t tell who did what? You lose what social scientists call evaluation potential: the ability to sort out what each person contributed to a group’s final product. Low evaluation potential is one of the strongest, most consistent predictors of social loafing — or free riding — in teams.”
Once you know, as a manager, that your team is at risk of developing free riders (for instance, by identifying the “Three C’s”), you ought to be able to put in place more robust mechanisms to understand how to credit individuals.
Of course, as managers we also have to be careful of micromanaging, a behavior specifically called out in a chapter as a type of jerk-at-work. Micromanaging is bad! Agreed!
One micromanager was described as “like a broken carbon monoxide detector stuck too high on the ceiling to reach. You think you’ll get used to the beep, but you never do.” That’s a great metaphor, and it works on both sides, too. What I mean is, as a manager if you feel yourself slipping into micromanaging behavior, you probably feel like that detector!
Some micromanagers end up that way because they are perfectionists and fear mistakes.
“From their perspective, the best way to prevent mistakes from happening is to personally make sure that everyone who works for them dots their i’s and crosses their t’s. The irony of this approach, of course, is that by focusing on the little things, they wind up making the biggest mistake of all: neglecting the people (and projects) that matter the most.”
I like this insight, and agree with it. I think there’s another critical point, too: those micromanagers aren’t usually the actual experts. That is, not only do they miss big-picture stuff, but they can make the work product worse, not better, by their involvement.
One interesting consequence of this book being from the After Times™ is that it is able to incorporate some learnings and workplace changes that have taken place since the pandemic.
For instance, this passage describes a change that surely we’ve all seen (though, interestingly changing again now in 2024, maybe). Nonetheless, in 2022 when this book was published, seeing this as actual data was worth noting:
“One thing that has changed dramatically over the past few years is the flexible work schedule. People want to be able to work from anywhere, at any time. In fact, 51% of people would change jobs to have more flexibility. Millennials are willing to move anywhere in the world to get it.”
But so was this depressing nugget:
“Burnout is at the highest it’s ever been among all employees, and it’s particularly high among managers, who are often expected to juggle numerous tasks at once, often without clear expectations of what they should focus on most. One study found that 72% of managers felt more pressure to deliver during the pandemic than before it, despite having less time to get things done; more than half are currently experiencing routine burnout.”
Which may have something to do with this, even more depressing one:
“89% of bosses think people quit because they want more money, but only 12% of people actually quit for this reason; most people quit because they don’t like how they’re managed.”
As a manager, let me say — oof.
“Some gaslighters are sociopaths, others are victims of the situation, but in the end all play the protagonist in their own rich false reality.”
Unfortunately, the section on jerks of the gaslighter type was somehow the least convincing to me — which was a bummer, because I think it’s often the most difficult to deal with, and the one most in need of insight and advice. West as much as admits this will be the case: “Gaslighting lies outside the realm of typical jerks-at-work behavior; understanding why someone does it should be left to the clinical psychologists.”
As an eminent, professional psychologist, her word on that is enough for me! But my issue has more to do with the case-study examples. They just don’t seem that much like gaslighting. They certainly describe jerks, that’s for sure, but they don’t seem to really align with the chapter’s own descriptions of what gaslighting really is.
West points out that “lying at work is common. We tell altruistic lies to make social interactions go smoothly and self-protecting lies to bolster our image and cover up our small indiscretions.” And she notes that this isn’t really gaslighting.
But she does then boil workplace gaslighting behavior down into two primary techniques that we can recognize and try to steer clear of (there’s not much offered in the way of fixing this behavior).
“At work, gaslighters typically use one of two social isolation techniques, both of which exploit a basic human need: the need to belong.”
“The first technique gaslighters use is they make their victims feel special, one of the chosen ones.”
“The second technique that gaslighters use is stripping away their victims self-worth. Victims are told that no one at work wants them or values them but the gaslighter.”
That’s all terrific stuff. I can think of a few other gaslighting techniques to look out for at work too (see my essay “Manager Judo,” for example), but I don’t disagree with these at all.
Unfortunately, the “case study” material just doesn’t seem to really back this insight up. West obviously has an advanced understanding of the psychology behind the behavior, but I just didn’t get the on-the-ground sense of how to recognize it in the real world.
A couple other little odds and ends. I was really surprised, and not in a good way, to read an endorsement of the “critique sandwich” approach to giving feedback. Describing an apparently healthy communication pattern between two people, West writes, “they sandwiched criticisms between compliments, which softened the blow.”
Deliver me. I thought we were done with that? I mean, once everyone knows the technique, doesn’t it just seem terribly disingenuous? And hasn’t everyone known that technique for…like, years?
On the other hand, I was thrilled for one more voice in the chorus explaining that “multitasking” is a myth! “We know from research [multitasking is] the worst thing we can do with our time — it’s quite impossible to concentrate on two things at once.” Yes! I really need more of this shouted more often and more loudly.
There has been tons of research that multitasking simply isn’t a thing. It’s not how our brains work. None of which is to say we can’t work on multiple things at the same time in a larger sense (i.e. in a longer time-scale), but moment-to-moment, we’re not multitasking — we’re just rapidly flipping between tasks, and incurring all the context switching costs all the time.
There was an absolutely delightful turn of phrase in the chapter on bulldozers. Referring to a particular coworker who would tend to “bulldoze” meetings by talking constantly, West writes, “despite talking a lot, our coworker Stacey made only a handful of actual points. It was just a lot of word-shaped air coming out of her mouth.” Word-shaped air! I love it. I’ll be using that.
The book actually ends with a pair of quite elaborate quizzes for readers to take: “Am I a Jerk at Work?” and “Am I an Effective Ally?” These are fascinating. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve done just absolutely tons of “manager training” (seminars, offsites, online courses, etc.). These quizzes feel a lot like that kind of work. They’re kind of cool; I’m not sure how useful they actually are — they’re easy to ace. But I love the idea, and for someone who hasn’t covered this ground before, they might very well help.
Finally, as I took That’s What She Said to task for this, I’ll mention it here too: I just hate the way citations are handled in this book (and so many other books! It’s rampant!). No footnotes, no endnotes, just a big dump of notes at the end — no way to know what passages even have a citation until you get back there. Why is this popular? It’s objectively terrible and I hate it. I will die on this hill. Get off my lawn.
Bookshelf entry for The Memo coming soon!