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Sutton: Calculate Your "Total Cost of Jerks"

  • Sutton: Calculate Your The Find: If you really want to motivate yourself and your company to root out jerks and their productivity and creativity sucking behavior, one business guru suggest you calculate your TCJ: total cost of jerks.
  • The Source: An article entitled "Building the Civilized Workplace" by No Asshole Rule author Bob Sutton in the McKinsey Quarterly (free registration required).
The Takeaway: It is easy enough to get behind Bob Sutton's no asshole rule. Most people have worked with a jerk and know it's no fun, but Sutton uses this classic McKinsey Quarterly article to float a more quantitative rationale for weeding out bullies: TCJ, or "total cost of jerks." What do all those savage emails and two-faced office politics plays actually cost your business? Sutton suggests you tally up these jerk-induced costs:
  1. Damage to victims and witnesses: this includes the cost of distraction, stress and loss of motivation
  2. Cost to management: including time spent mediating disputes and reorganizing departments damaged by jerks and the expense and effort of hiring replacements for those driven from the organization by jerks
  3. Legal costs: really high level jerks can bring on litigation which brings on legal fees, or alternatively firing a jerk can result in costly disputes or pay outs
  4. Negative organization-wide effects: dysfunctional internal competition and reduced cooperation between teams among other costs
If looking at this list while considering a few choice individuals in your organization makes you a little queasy that might be a good thing. By contemplating your TCJ you've taken your head out of the sand, faced the problem and gotten some motivation to stamp out uncivilized behavior. So how do you root out jerks? The obvious first step is to publicly proclaim a zero tolerance policy towards jerks. But that's not enough. You also need to walk the walk:
When someone acts like a jerk. If people don't feel comfortable blowing the whistle on the offender, your company will both be seen as hypocritical and fill up with jerks, so don't adopt the rule unless you mean it.
And don't be afraid to make hiring and firing decisions based in part on attitude. Despite these efforts, however, conflict is natural, healthy and bound to occur. Just make sure it doesn't get ugly. Intel, Sutton points out, trains employees in "constructive confrontation" and your company can too. The full article is well worth the free registration and is jammed packed with jerk inhibiting tips, plus a useful list of twelve tell-tale signs of jerk behavior.

The Question: Does your company do enough to create a jerk free workplace?

(Image of Keith Jerk by shearforce, CC 2.0)

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