When it comes to work, there's plenty of things to annoy us, the open office plan, long commutes, too many emails. But for a lot of people, the most annoying part of the workplace is other people. But we all have to get along. So how do you deal with people you hate at work? This is game plan. Hi. I'm francesco Leavie and I'm Rebecca Greenfield. And this week we are going to talk about everyone we hate at the office.
Just kidding, we're not, but we are. We are going to talk about some of the types of people that it's easy to become enemies with at work. Um. And before we get into it, I have a disclaimer. We uh interview a guest this week whose book title has a profane word in it, and we can't really talk about the book without using the words, so we're going to use it a lot. So maybe this isn't want to listen to with kids. Let's start with why we end up hating people at work. I think work as
a microcosm for society as a whole. You know, you have a group of people thrown together and we all have to exist together, and inevitably their only conflict. Yeah, and I think though in other parts of your life you do have a little bit more choice in who you're in that society with. So, like I mean, I mentioned at the very top the open office, but that's like a little powder keg in its own way, because
everybody's sort of really in each other's face. You can see everyone, you can hear everyone, and then it's the people that you're around there. Ideally they're selected for how good they are at their jobs, not necessarily how well they get along with you. Yeah, it almost seems like the workplace is designed for maximum annoyance with people. Yeah. Yeah, and then you throw in, you know, some work stress.
Sometimes you have long hours, you might have to work on a project with when and it's just like too much contact, stressful situations and people who are all different personality types and might not get along, or you're competing interests and agendas that might contradict someone else's. Yeah, that goes to your like microcosm of society theory. It's like a little feudal land where everyone's trying to advance their
own kingdom. That reminds me of like the Leviathan or something I was going to say, a Game of Thrones, but yeah, no, no, no, literary I like it. So you develop coping strategies for dealing with people you don't like, or you should. I mean, I don't know how good I am at it, but one thing I tend to do is vent. Do you find venting helpful? I am a master ventor? Yeah? I mean do you vent to people in your personal life or just like other people at work about the people that you both don't like?
Or it's hard because to vent to people at work, you have to know where their allegiances are. You know, you have to feel out if it's okay to gossip with them about the person near you who you think is evil. But once you what, Once you do do that and you've like caught their you know, I roll at the meeting and you feel like it's kind of safe to talk to them. I feel like often for me venting at work, it starts out good because it's like, oh, finally I found somebody who agrees with me that this
person is really annoying in meetings. But then you can go so far with it that it becomes like that becomes your whole relationship with that person that all you ever do is complain about people and then suddenly there's like a negative tinge to it. Yes. Um. And of course there's research on gossiping at work and it's kind of mixed. Um. Some of it has found that gossiping can be good for the workplace, which makes me feel a lot better because like I'm really you know, participating
in work and making it a better place. But one of those studies looked at how gossiping can be good if it's a way to increase information flow in an organization where there isn't very much so like your manager isn't doing a good job communicating things to you. If the underlings gossip about it, it can make it a better workplace. Oh that sounds sort of sad. Yeah, it's
like it's good in bad workplaces. The places where the gossip is bad is where employees are so cynical about work that all they do is gossip and it can harm their productivity, which I also feel. Yeah, I feel like the first kind of gossiping, where it's like information sharing, can can maybe lead to the second kind, like the good kind can become of that kind. So gossiping is not a catch all solution. Um. And also you probably need different strategies for dealing with different types of enemies
at work. The worst person to not get along with at work, I think is your boss, So you can be a bad boss in a few ways. I find it's really hard to deal with absentee managers. Like this is something that sounds like it should be kind of nice because it's like, oh, the cats away. You know, your boss doesn't care what you do, but actually it can get in the way of projects getting done. It
can end up making you look bad. And it's like when you have a boss who supposed to be helping you understand what your job is and how well you're doing, and they're not there for you in that way. It just for me, it just makes me so frustrated and kind of depressed. Yeah, I think having an absentee boss makes you good at being an absentee employee, which is could be nice sometimes, like if you want to take a long weekend and not have anyone noticed, but it
doesn't make you good at work now. And most people I think, like want to make something of their time when they're at work. But then there's the complete opposite of the absentee manager, and that's the micro manager um which I don't think anybody likes like I've never heard anybody say, like my ideal work environment to be micro managed. Um. But to me, when people micro manage, when people just like get in your business about every single thing you're doing,
it's a sign they don't trust you. And they also it's a weird attitude to go into work with that, Like all of the people who report to you are kind of secretly trying to get one over on you, you know, like they want to be laid on deadlines and they want to you know, they're not acting in good faith and they don't have good reasons for not getting things done on time. And I'd rather just trust people and occasionally be like, Okay, there's a thing that
you need to get better at. I was reading about one workplace where micro managing was to the extreme. It made me so uncomfortable. But the boss made his employees tell them when they were going to lunch. He got mad at them when they stepped away from their desks or saw that their chat light went red. Um. But also rewarded employees for ratting each other out and give people five dollar bonus as for calling out bad behavior.
What that's exactly the kind of like untrusting environment that micromanaging. So's I hate that that sounds terrible. But the two types of bosses you're talking about fall into like the two types of bad boss categories that UM researchers have found. So there's like the dysfunctional bad boss, which I think is kind of the absent team manager. It's like a
bad boss who's just bad at their job. And then there's what they call the dark bad boss, which is kind of like the evil bad boss, which to me is kind of what the micro manager is ye machiavellian or someone who has bad intentions, Like I think you can solve a lot of those problems as a manager by just feeling like you and your team are all sort of working towards the same goal on a team.
On a team. So let's talk about some other kinds of enemies or people we hate at work, because it's not just your boss's, right, the people you work with you also end up hating. Often. I have their kind person who just likes everybody. I guess there are those people I have a particular dislike for this one type of person that I am going to call the trophy collector. This is somebody who basically only does the work that is the most visible, so will perform being good at work.
You know, we'll send out emails about all the great things they've done, or we'll do something if they know it's going to get them accolades or if people in in you know, higher up positions are going to notice it. And those people also tend to kind of slack off on the work that's behind the scenes, because a lot of getting real work done is doing stuff that goes unrewarded and also helping out your colleagues. Like you see somebody's underwater and you're just like, hey, I can take
that over for you. You're not going to necessarily get praised for doing that. Your colleague might even get the credit, but over time it sort of evens out and you you're working in good faith. But these there's a certain type of person where it's like it makes it even worse that they don't do that because they're getting celebrated for all of this really high profile stuff that they are doing. When I've worked with people like that in
the past, it has driven me crazy. It kind of reminds me of this advice that you see a lot online, which is like nobody's going to remember you for the emails you sent, like they'll remember you for the things that your name is on. And I get that advice where it's like, you know, don't you don't need to put all of your work into writing emails. But it's also like sometimes work that nobody sees as part of work,
and yeah, it sucks. It's like you have to be a particular type of person who's willing to pick up that work. But but you know, the office doesn't move forward unless there are people who are willing to do that invisible work. I don't like that person. So those are some types of people that annoy us at work. But what about the ultimate work enemy, the asshole? Like this is a very broad and yes profane word. Uh,
that could mean a lot of things. So we want to break down what we're talking about when we say someone's an asshole and figure out how you can survive working with them. So we consulted an expert. Bob Sutton is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford. He wrote the widely acclaimed book The No Asshole Rule and just came out with its follow up, The Asshole Survival Guide. So let's jump right, and what is your definition of
an asshole? Oh, so, my definition of an asshole is kind of at your ear and in your brain, not at the other person's mouth or whatever. It's a it's that feeling that someone has left you feeling uh demeaned, de energized, uh disrespected, oppressed. They make you feel like dirt.
That's my definition. Yeah, so that sounds like a personal upfront is what makes some it's very personal, yes, And and the reason that I define it that way is there's so many different behaviors in so many different organizational cultures. Um that, um, what's bad behavior in one might be good behavior in the other. So just let's just take interrupting. There's some organizational cultures where you just stop and you
let the other person talk and you don't interrupt. And then there's ones that are sort of crazy businesses type where if you're not interrupting, you don't get in your word edgewise. And so whether or not you're feeling hurt is a big part of it. We could list behaviors that are asshole behaviors. We could talk about there's different kind of things that tend to set people off, but but to me, owning your feelings is a big part of it. It's a little bit in the eye of
the beholder. Um. You mentioned in your book that that there's kind of a assholes finished first mythology. Where do you think that came from? And and is there any truth to it? Yes, there is, Um. I would start with the headline that if you're an asshole and a winner, you're still a loser in my book, because you're doing
so much damage to other people. The there's a very specific kind of situation where people finish first if they leave others feeling to mean, to deenergize when it's a zero sum game, and and the way we play the game is by just stomping on others. So to use a examples of cultures, uh, the old Merrill Lynch culture, the old Microsoft culture. That's how the game was played there. But the problem is that's the way that individuals get ahead.
And all the evidence is that if you stomp on others on the way to the top, you undermine the performance of the people around you and your overall organization. So sometimes winners do finish first, but they end up running loser organizations and creating losers around them. You mentioned that some things might make one person feel demeaned or insulted or in another company just be the company culture or the way people talk to each other. And it's fine.
So how do you, as an individual determine how bad the problem is if you think you have a that's really, um an interesting question. And by nature this is human psychology. There's subjectivity to it. And uh, to me, there's the cultural part and then there's the part that you sort of own. The cultural part we've already talked about is that an insult in one culture is just everyday life and the other and the other part is that some
of us are more thin skinned than others. The fact is, Uh, my wife used to be managing partner of a large law firm, and her advice is, uh, if you're going to survive in a large law firm, you better have a pretty thick skin because you're just not gonna make it because people are gonna insult you, they're gonna ignore you, your clients are gonna yell you. This is what it's like being a large lawyer in a large law firm. But I don't know if you were going to work
in a yoga studio. Such behavior might not be quite as as I think that's why lawyers open yoga studios. But that's another that's another side story. Um So, so there's that part. And for me, the main way in a lot of the problem when you have asshole problems is to have people in your life who essentially can tell you whether you're crazy or not in a lot of ways, whether or not you have an asshole problem
and should do something about it. A lot of it is having friends co workers around you who can help you assess your souation. You should run it by your your inner circle and make sure that you're you're checking whether your feelings are accurate. Yeah, and and also it's this notion that, um sometimes there's a problem where somebody is treating you like dirt and they just hate you and they're nice to everybody else, and I would call
that you've kind of got an interpersonal conflict problem. Or one of the biggest problems is you've got an equal opportunity asshole, or somebody who just doesn't like women, or just doesn't like people who aren't white or something, And then you've got a different sort of problem than if it's just somebody who is out to get you, which happens sometimes in life. You mentioned earlier though that there are generic asshole behaviors. Can you get into some of
those things? I would break it into three categories. The first category is open, kind of in your face, treating you like dirt, so the flick cigarette or or calling you an obscenity would do. The second backstabbing in the book is a local Silicon Valley see Oh interviewed, and he described how he had a grip. So what would be is this guy, yes, boss, I'll do whatever you want. That's a great idea, and then he would bad mouth the boss and screw up the implementation of it and
then go blame somebody else. So so that's that kind of asshole and and that requires a different kind of situation because you kind of got to do recognizance um. And then the third kind are people who treat you as if you're a completely irrelevant object. Is if you're part of the furniture. And and if you have a boss or a co worker who just treat you like you're invisible, that's actually really painful that you don't matter at all. One of the solutions that you suggest in
your book is just to quit. And I wonder why. I mean, it's not always possible to quit, but what it is. Why does that solution not not seem available to people? First of all, there's there are some people who really can't quit. So one of the examples have in the book is a woman who is clerking for a federal judge and was one year into a two year clerkship and she looked at her option that just wasn't gonna work. But then there's the kind of people
who have are in denial. Next year, it'll get better. Um, she's promised me she's gonna stop do it doing it even though your boss has promised to you that she's gonna stop screaming at you twenty five times? So why would they stop the twenty six times? My favorite one? And I'm one of mine. I just have to finish
this one project, and there's always another project. But Um, the fact is that although I'm very careful to give people the advice, my main advice about quitting is don't be stupid, don't burn your bridges, and don't quit if you can't feed your children or something like that. Um. But um, the way I think about it is. It's sort of like people say quitters should be punished, but if somebody's hitting you with a hammer, maybe you should walk away from it and not walk back into that
room where you're being hit with a hammer. So there's a point where it might be time to quit. But my motto is, don't be stupid about it. Try to figure out what your options are, and don't burn your bridges and less than necessary. I there are other coping mechanisms that you said. Just before getting to the point of quitting. There's lots of things you can do. So there's one set of strategies that I call a distancing
or avoidance strategy. So to me, it's kind of like the asshole ism is kryptonite and your goal is to avoid as much exposure to it as possible. So leaving meetings early would be an example. Uh. I don't buy into the general notion that Steve Jobs was always an asshole. Nonetheless, somebody told me who worked for him for years, that he always would make sure not to sit next to Steve during meetings or to get an elevator with him.
There's also one of my favorite techniques is uh I call it the rhythm method, but it's the notion that, um, if you've got some in your life who wants to meet with you a lot and send you all these emails and they're like really nasty, uh, that what you do is you kind of meet as rarely as possible and wait for those six or seven emails, wait maybe a week or two in the answer them all at once. And that as a couple of things when it reduces
your exposure. The other thing is, and we haven't talked much about different sort of assholes, but there's a certain type of assholes probably once of Mackabellian personality. If you look at the research who they're not clueless. The reason they treat you like dirt is that their their brain lights up when they see you suffer. And if you've got that sort of asshole like giving them less reinforcement, it's just like giving a rap fewer pellets that at
least you're slowing the reinforcement. So so there's those kinds and then there's a whole another set of of coping mechanisms that are based on kind of cognitive behavioral therapy, which is you can't change your environment, but you change the way that you perceive it. So a couple of quick examples. One of my favorite ones, which is evidence based, is called temporal distancing, and what that means is when
somebody is treating you like there. It could be a customer, it could be a year into a two year internship. You imagine that, um, it's in the future, and your look back on it, it's not so bad. So by shifting time focus that helps. And then the other one is finding some way to become more emotionally detached from it so you kind of feel like you're not there. One of my favorite stories one of my friends, her name's Becky Margiotta, UM, and so Becky when she was
a first year plead at West Point. So if you know west Point, they're gonna yell at you and hayes you every day. And Becky's is the eighties, and yet every day some upper classmen would walk up to her and asked her what was on the front page of the New York Times that day, and if she couldn't recite it, she'd get screamed at and told how stupid she was. And the way that she coped with it was by imagining that these people were clever comedians and
she just thought they were so funny. So it was sort of like watching a movie and not taking it personally. And I thought that was brilliant. Those strategies are fascinating. So much about how we work is just learning how to not take things personally. Um, you have another strategy that you you I think we're writing about in terms of the type of asshole who treats you, like the furniture that you mentioned earlier, which is hiding in plain sight?
Can you explain what that is? Ah? Well, so one way to think about it, this is actually research on t s A agents. And one of the things that you'll do if there's you're in an asshole intensive environment and let's going through the security screening might be it's
a very asshole intensive environment. And sometimes in those situations, you just don't want to be noticed, so you're sort of the strategy is to sort of embrace if there's a if there's a neglectful manager, say, the strategy is sort of to embrace not being noticed because you might be in for worse. Absolutely, um And and that's also
one of the classic things. And I don't know they've been in a workplace like this, but I have where part of the executive assistance job is to tell you when the boss is coming and whether the boss is in a bad mood or not. And under those situations, you just want to be at your desk and not be noticed if he or she is storming through sort of flaming rebody. So one of those situations, we're not being noticed when an asshole is in the mood is
a pretty good defense move. Some of the t s A. Folks would say that they would try to dress in unflashy ways not to become too interesting at work so they wouldn't be noticed by their supervisor. Some of the research brought that out. Listening to some of the strategies, it sounds hard sometimes like you have to reframe your entire way of looking at things. Do you have any coping mechanisms for people who just want to, you know,
take care of themselves when they're in this situation. You can't become resilient and strong and the perfect person who isn't scared of an asshole. Well, I think that all of us are reasonably scared of of assholes, and um for me, if if you can't uh do the reframing is very difficult. That cognitive behavioral therapy, although it works, takes a while and having people who can support you
and it helps. But that's why I go back to a lot of the strategies where you're simply avoiding the amount of contact that you have with the asshole, hopefully that will help. And then and then the other sort of thing. And there's there's interesting research on temporary detachment. If you can just for example, and all of us, like we have our phones and we can't resist looking at our phones. If you cannot look at your email and not think about your job during the we can
detach that. There's pretty good evidence that people can separate from work, um have better mental health than those of us who are always on twenty four hours a day, which is more and more difficult for all of us. Of course, Yeah, we talked about that a lot, um, the need to do that. I just want to wrap
up with one final question. Um, from all of this work you've done, all the research you've reviewed on the different types of people who can make your life miserable, why do you think we end up working with so many people like this? Why does so many assholes welc among us? Uh? Well, I some of it you could lead to personality, but I think a lot of it is because of the nature of the workplaces we have these days. In particul ler but in general. You think
about it. If you want to create a laboratory experiment where you create jerks, what do you do? Uh well, you put people under time pressure. You create differences between the rich and the poor. For me, the analogy is kind of getting on an airplane. You can see it all happening. Uh well, you squeeze people close together in that case, um and um. And then there's this contagion problem that when when we see assholes, we catch the disease.
It spreads like a common cold. So in some ways are Oh, and then we communicate online rather we have eye contact. Right now, when you don't have eye contact, there's a bunch of evidence that we have less empathy for people, and it makes people nasty. So, um, if you're spending all day on slack, even working with people who are in the same space as you, and you don't get up and look them in the eye, that causes problems. So in some ways we are creating workplaces
that are almost perfect. Petrie disk dishes for assholes, and you kind of got to remember or to have some empathy and human contact and eye contact, and maybe we could bring down the problem a little bit. You know why. There's something kind of helpful about that we're not necessarily all such bad people. It's just the environment with the system game. Well, Bob, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about this. Is it kind of
sounds like we're all assholes. We all in certain times can exhibit asshole behavior um and that the conditions of the workplays make that very likely, and that you're not necessarily working with someone who is this thing, but you're in a situation with somebody who's acting like this thing. And I think that's helpful in dealing with these people. Yeah, Like one person's asshole is another person's perfectly fine colleague.
And I think realizing that we are that way to other people can maybe help us develop a little bit of empathy for them as one coping strategy. Like they're not a monster, they're just in a situation that's making them act this way, or at least it makes it more manageable to deal with this situation if it's not this person with this personality type, but somebody who's just acting away for a specific reason. I also thought maybe the whole idea of leaving your job seems a little
extreme if we're going to think of assholes this way. Yeah, I agree, now that we know how common it is, and like how many different types of people you're almost guaranteed not to get along with at work, leaving seems impractical for every single job. Of course, if you're in a toxic workplace, one of your only solutions for really making your life better maybe to leave um and we did a whole episode on toxic workplaces, which you can check out if that's your situation. But short of that,
you should probably try and find some coping strategies. Yeah. I think one of those coping strategies is understanding that you are going to be in situations at work with people who you don't like and sometimes you well aren't going to be nice to each other, and you can't control other people, so you need to learn how to deal with those situations yourself or change the way you see it. It's kind of like therapy for free. It's free therapy. You're welcome, and now it's time for half
big takes, halfy fake takes. You can leave us a voicemail and let us know what your half Bay take is by calling two one to six seven zero one six. This week, we had a caller follow up on my half Bay take from last week about how men don't know the difference between skirts and dresses. Hard Rebecca High Francesca I was calling response to your dresses versus skirts?
Uh issue. I do think there's a male equivalent of that confusion or problem, which is that sometimes I come to work wearing a jacket or a blazer, and uh, I'm told suit, which is a very nice compliment. But sometimes I think to myself, well, I'm not I didn't come to work wearing a suit just for a jacket. Uh. So you know, it seems like some people men and women, Uh, I don't wantly think about or know the difference between
a suit and a jacket. I guess, um, But it's two thousand and seventeen, so you know you can't really be super upset about that way. Thanks for a great podcast. I just thought i'd call in and and relate to that. Keep up your really great work. By this is on point. He's totally right. This is the exact male equivalent of skirts versus dresses. I didn't really know, so now I know, Thank you you didn't know. I mean, I feel like I kind of knew, but I'm sure I've I have
made that mistake, like maybe I've said suit jacket? Is suit jacket a thing you can say? I don't know? The fact the fact that we don't know shows that, um, we have reached complete gender equality when it comes to ignorance about clothing items. Um. Also, I have found a lot of men who do know the difference between skirts and dresses over the past week. So I'm I'm sticking with my happy take. I still think it's a problem,
but it's a problem for men and for women. Becca, what take do you have that is too hot for prime time? I recently wrote an Amtrak train and so this is where that take comes from. And my hat big take is that everything should have assigned seats. M Um. When you are boarding an Amtrak train that is that all crowded, which most of them are very crowded. It is so stressful to try to find seats, especially if you're with another person, and it's just like, why aren't
there assign seats like on an airplane? I don't understand, and technology should be able to solve any problems you can think of about this. But it's not just the train that I think this would be better for. I was wondering if this went beyond. Does have you been to the movie theaters with a signed seats? They're usually the fancy ones with like reclining seats. It's great. You don't have to get to the movies half an hour early to make sure you don't sit in the front row.
You know your seat is you get to sit there. I don't understand why this is not just everywhere. Yeah, they should put you in charge, and you should reorganize. Leaving my career in journalism. It's just it's so have you ever been on amtrack and tried to find a seat together with one? It's terrible and rude. Yeah, and movies like I prefer going to movies on my own for the specific reason that it's so hard to find two good seats next to each other, but you can
find one seat always, all right, FANTASTICA what's your hat? Pig? Take mine? Is that? People? And it's it's a proposed for this week's episode. I think people overuse the word nice. I'm so on board with us. Oh really, so okay. So I think people say nice when they just mean someone is kind of polite or doesn't aggressively get in
your face about things. But I think that nice is actually really a high compliment, Like you should call somebody nice when there's someone who genuinely cares about other people, that should be the criteria. And I often hear people that I work with described as nice, and I'm like, are they nice or are they just sort of well spoken or polite or you know, nottings on time people use it, and I hear a little bit of a insult. Yeah, she's nice, it's nice. That means like you lack other qualities.
I actually think being genuinely nice it's pretty hard and it's a It's a quality I think we should treasure. When I was in high school, I used to say, just because she's nice doesn't mean she's cool, which I think gets at this problem. I realized it's kind of a flip thing to say, but whatever, you're a teen, but it does get at that thing where it's like nice is not nice is kind of meaningless At this point, it's lost its meaning. But yeah, that's a little bit
of a different point than mine. Okay, I mean I both have feelings about nice. I think nice has lost it. I think we should restore the meaning to nice, make nice nice again. This has been half bake takes, half baked takes. Thanks for listening to our show. You can find me on Twitter at Francesca Today and I'm at RZ Greenfield. And if you want more of us, go
subscribe to our newsletter at Bloomberg dot com slash Newsletters. Um. If you have thoughts, tweet at us or call and leave a voicemail at two on to six seven zero one six. If you like this show, head on over to Apple Podcasts where ever you listen and rate and review and subscribe. We read every single one. This show was produced by Liz Smith and Magnus hendricksonkad of podcast is now me see you next week? Just do I have to do the acting again? Do you think Leslie
acting again? Okay, acting, I'm really good at act saying de do do do