The “No jerks rule”
One of my rules in life that I had to learn the hard way is the “No jerks rule”. Following the excellent book by Bob Sutton of Stanford with a title that I cannot reprint here, I put a lot of emphasis on not having to work with jerks.
I guess we all know co-workers and bosses who would qualify as jerks, but what I am talking about are people that score so high on the “dark triad” of socially harmful personality traits that they might be suspected to have antisocial personality disorder. Of course, I am not a doctor and am in no way qualified to diagnose anyone, but let me explain what the dark triad is and the impact people with high scores on it have at the workplace.
The dark triad of personality traits is the combination of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. Psychopathy in the psychological literature is defined as a lack of empathy and remorse, high impulsivity and interpersonal hostility. We are not talking about clinical psychopaths here, but your everyday abrasive co-worker. Narcissism includes feelings of self-importance and dominance, entitlement and grandiosity. Machiavellianism, finally, includes deceitful social behaviour designed to undermine others and a reliance on manipulation to achieve their objectives. If you are interested, you can take a short test on the dark triad here, but I wonder, how much of a psychopath one has to be to score highly on these scales that so obviously relate to the three dimensions of the dark triad? In any case, I score amongst the lowest 10% in all three dimensions, which might explain why I am really averse to anyone exhibiting these behavioural traits.
You see, the people who score very highly on all three dimensions of the dark triad are potentially suffering from antisocial personality disorder. On average, researchers estimate that about 1% to 2% of the total population fall into that category, but the empirical evidence is mounting that these certifiable jerks are particularly prevalent in management, finance and politics. Antisocial behaviour tends to get rewarded in business because these people push competitors to the side or throw them under the bus to achieve their goals (e.g. a promotion).
But, people who score high on the dark triad also have lower job performance. CEOs who score high on the three dimensions of the dark triad consistently performed worse than other CEOs and this has led to lower firm performance. US Senators who scored high on the dark triad dimensions were less likely to form alliances and less effective in achieving their political goals. And most recently, a new study showed that hedge fund managers who score high on the dark triad dimensions have consistently lower fund performance.
In other words, jerks not only make life at work harder for everyone else and erode morale, they also damage the business they work in. Which is why I am so adamant to not work with them. And which is why the empirical evidence is mounting that bosses who want to improve business performance should weed out jerks from the get-go. Fire people who may be qualified but are jerks and if you hire new employees, make sure that you have a “jerk test” as part of the hiring process. Companies as diverse as Barclays Capital, JetBlue or IDEO all have successfully introduced such tests as part of their hiring process, as you can read in Bob Sutton’s book.
My personal guess from experience is that about 5% of the people who work in finance qualify as jerks. One simple way to recognise them in practice is their willingness, or lack thereof, to apologize when they have made a mistake. During the financial crisis, I worked at UBS and my view back then was that the company, in order to gain back the trust of its clients, should publicly apologize for the mistakes it made in the run-up to the global financial crisis. As we all know, the company did not apologize for its mistakes and it took years to recover lost trust. But what shocked me the most were the people in my office who honestly declared that the bank should not apologise because that would be seen as a weakness.
What antisocial people do not recognise is that owning up to your mistakes instead of trying to blame someone else will make you stronger because it builds trust. And trust is the key ingredient in social behaviour and to success in social networks. In fact, I have been so frustrated with jerks’ inability to understand the basic concept of trust that I started to write an academic paper on the subject for the Journal of Wealth Management back in 2008. The empirical research into trust has been a hobby of mine ever since and there is lots to learn for all of us if we want to become more effective at our job and more successful in business. But that is a story for another time.