Who You Callin' WUSI?

SPEAKERS
Paul Harvey, Frank Butler

Frank Butler  00:00
Hello Busybodies, welcome to another episode of the Busyness Paradox. I'm Frank Butler here with Paul Harvey. 

Paul Harvey  00:06
Good day. 

Frank Butler  00:07
And I'm really excited about today's episode and what we’re going to discuss. But before we do that it's got a couple of Busy-bites to get into. And it's really interesting because both of these busy-bites, I think, really sit well in the theme of what we've been discussing here. The busyness paradox, really the idea of not being busy and creating structure, I think those are two big themes we've been running through the course of our entire podcast. So Paul, what do we got?

Paul Harvey  00:36
These two busy-bites are kind of joined at the hip. One is a blog post based on a book came out a couple of weeks ago, the blog post came out a couple weeks ago. The second one we'll discuss is a Inc magazine article based on the same blog post based on the same book. So first one I want to talk about is called "Efficiency is the Enemy" from the Always Invert blog, and raise s the idea that being busy doing stuff all the time is not the most efficient way of getting things done. And it sounds a little bit paradoxical. How can working all the time be less productive than working some of the time? And this notion of slack is what they use to explain it. So if you work with production management, inventory management, you may be familiar with this term slack. So applying it to busywork and our own personal work schedules, the more we max ourselves out, the less we can accommodate unexpected things that pop up. So if you're booked solid, every waking hour, and you're getting everything done, great, until something else happens, you get a flat tire, everything falls apart. We see this with doctors here in the US, you know, they're scheduled, say half an hour per patient every day. That's being generous. Yeah, well, that's the thing. They're scheduled, quote, unquote, half an hour per patient, all throughout the day. But as soon as there's one patient that takes more than half an hour, because of whatever reason, everything else has to be squeezed or rescheduled, the whole rest of the schedule falls apart. And this happens basically every day in the American doctor's office. So the same thing happens with our own personal work lives. If we have ourselves completely maxed out, we always gotta be busy. There's no time for other things that have to be dealt with. Plus, and this leads into the second busy bite, we burn ourselves out, as we all know, but then, you know, we easily forget that time is a resource, but so is our own cognitive energy, our own physical energy, health, we deplete all these resources so that we don't have any excess capacity to deal with other challenges that come up, we get sick, because we work all the time and don't sleep enough, being sick, causes our workload to build up and up and up and up. So we get better, we have to double down even more, we get sick again. So this Inc magazine article has an interesting subheading, it says “to be productive, slack off more.” Yeah, sometimes you’ve got to quote-unquote, slack off, to give yourself slack in your personal schedule, and your personal resource management so that you're able to function at a high level over a longer period of time. Do you think my interpretation is more or less on point there Frank or am I forgetting anything?

Frank Butler  03:24
No, I think you're spot on. But I do want to go back you were talking about like production? And yes, and inventory or what have you earlier. And it kept making me think about like Lean Six Sigma and project management. And the whole idea is that you want to minimize Slack, right? 

Paul Harvey  03:37
Just in time, yeah. 

Frank Butler  03:38
And I'm sitting here going, Well, those professions are all about trying to minimize slack. Whereas we're trying to say you need slack in your own world. Now, that said, that was just a little aside. But I think your interpretation is right.

Paul Harvey  03:53
No, it's relevant. I think. I think that's relevant because during the pandemic, we saw the limitations of that lean production type of model where you couldn't buy toilet paper for a couple months, because there was no extra slack in that system.

Frank Butler  04:08
No, man, it's bad right now, too. I mean, that just in time, inventories and all that we're seeing still, there's huge delays on lots of products. I tried to build a house right now. Yeah, I ordered a guitar a few months ago. And I don't know when it's gonna come and I've even heard secondhand that it might not be until October November until they catch up on production, which is mind boggling. I mean, I ordered that I think in February Wow. So almost forget about it by then. I'll get it. Oh, crap. I ordered this. That's right. No. That said though, how do you create some slack? It's not just saying hey, kick up and procrastinate and watch TV and so on. This is what's really, I think important. This gets into the structure idea. This author sociologist and author Christine Carter, setia. She sells she sells Exactly. One of the things that sociologist and author Christine Carter said is that one, she's a self-confessed slacker. But she said, I actually have a strategic way of slacking off. So her slack is actually structured, she takes breaks at designated times for regular intervals. That helper then sharpen her focus when she goes back to work. And I think that's something that's important. And we see lots of research that says that, on average, you need to go to bed at the same time every night and get up at the same time every morning. The idea is that typically, most people tend to work better or function better rather, when they have structure. She's not advocating for just being a slacker and then worrying about but building in structure to have that downtime. And I think that's something that we've talked about a little bit in general, one of the things that we've addressed, for example, is Google saying that all their employees have unlimited vacation time. Well, we see what that it takes away structure, it takes away a quantity that's identifiable, and then you have to start relying on social cues on whether or not you can take vacations,

Paul Harvey  06:09
And no one takes vacation. 

Frank Butler  06:10
Right. And no one takes vacations, that's what we see is that they use less vacation days in those scenarios. That's the extreme form of not having structures like, Hey, we're giving you too much of a good thing, in essence, but in this case, we're saying, hey, you need to build in this good thing. And I think that idea of keeping it regimented is so important. And some basic ways you can do this, use your calendar, especially for stuff like this, use your calendar, say, Hey, I'm blocking this time off, it's me time, I'm going to go watch TV for 30 minutes, or I'm going to go do this for 10 minutes or whatever. It can be smaller chunks, whatever you feel like is necessary. Get your mind to relax. And we've talked about this before we did it with niksen, right? That art of intentionally doing nothing. This is just more adding to that idea. And like I said goes in line with perfectly with what we say. Business is not the best thing, the busy works, not the best thing. You got to find a way of getting things accomplished and doing so in a way that's going to make sure that you're creating value for yourself, I would say as a healthy boundaries for yourself.

Paul Harvey  07:10
And as we've said before, there's no shortage of ways to, like you said time blocking strategies to build slack into your schedule in a literal sense, apps as pomodoro timers that tell you Okay, now we work for 25 minutes. Now we're off for 15 minutes. I'm actually thinking Frank that if I can find a really cool hourglass inspired by our new fancy logo that listeners may have noticed, I get an hourglass, like a half hour or something hourglass, flip it over and work, work, work, work work. And when that sand runs out, that means it's break time  for 10 minutes or something, then look back over again. That's gonna be my new attempt at structuring slack into my personal schedule.

Frank Butler  07:49
So basically, you need to hourglass is one that's really a half hour glass and when it's like a 10 minute glass, yes. Yeah, like maybe you could do like a double hourglass type thing where it's like it flips and it starts counting down and then it's got a secondary our glass, it's just whatever. That's

Paul Harvey  08:07
Like an infinity hourglass that like fills itself back up. It’s a perpetual hourglass.

Frank Butler  08:14
Speaking of awesome, our new logo is pretty awesome. And we're excited that it's out there. We haven't addressed it when we released it. But we hope you like it. We’d love your feedback on that too.

Paul Harvey  08:25
We're still not married to the colors.

Frank Butler  08:27
But yeah, let us know. But now that transitions us not so neatly into talking about WUSI. So a little backstory on WUSI, it’s a scale that we created. A survey scale that we created, research scale, it’s called it it stands for waspishness, umbrageous sensitivity and insecurity. And basically the way it came about was Paul came through with his wife, Lily came through Chattanooga, prior to him and Lily going abroad for a semester at sea, I believe. And so he stayed it was New Year's Eve. And we were just having a conversation and one of the things that we started to discuss was this idea of being frustrated with how the research in abusive supervision was going in essence, the way it seemed. every article we saw was that every supervisor was becoming abusive

Paul Harvey  09:19
Or if an employee rates their supervisor as being abusive, that supervisor is therefore abusive, but there's no allowance for the fact that maybe the employee is just perceiving them unfairly.

Frank Butler  09:31
And this also started to trend out of some other things we've seen in the actual workplace too where Paul, you might want to share this story. You I believe you were either an expert witness or you had to do something with a case in which two girls are suing their manager because of emails. 

Paul Harvey  09:48
Oh man...yes. Oof.

Frank Butler  09:53
It was something about the day perceive the emails to be abusive and they were trying to sue their supervisor, I think it was the owner of the company, and it was a small business and being brought in about that whole thing. And I know you were kind of frustrated by it, because it was like, the emails are clearly not abusive at all. They were direct, but not abusive, right? They weren't, like, you're a piece of bleep bleep bleep. On the lines of, you need to get your job done. These are the things you're supposed to do. You're not doing them, which I think is fair feedback.

Paul Harvey  10:26
Man, I had almost completely forgotten about this. Like, you seem to remember it much better than I do. But yeah, the gist of it is what you said. And in my opinion, a lot of it came down to kind of a generational difference in you had someone the manager or business owner was probably in his mid 60s, the employees were much younger, like early 20s, mid 20s, maybe. And sometimes we see those generational communication differences, particularly with email, where the older generation tends to be more just to the point and emails and less elaborative or whatever. And so that can be misinterpreted as Curtis, and that's what was happening in this case, but it was really probably limited to what I should share. But it was a cut and dry situation. I mean, these, the business owner was being charitable by any stretch to even keep the employees employed. It was ridiculous. And so when they finally were let go, they just basically went looking for anything to, to sue with. And they settled on these emails, because it's something in writing. And it really reinforced the point that it's very easy, even without trying to misperceive someone's intentions through even direct face to face communication, as we'll talk about in a second, whether studied but even more. So when you have nonverbal communication, communication over zoom, or just written communication through email, it's easy to misinterpret. And we often tend to slant towards the negative when we misinterpret other people. If you are primed perceptually, to think that someone is being mean to you, it's very easy to pick and choose little bits of data out of an email communication, say that will reinforce that belief, even if it's completely off base.

Frank Butler  12:04
Exactly. And for me, part of the reason why I was interested is I did work in Germany for three years. Germans are different than Americans, right? They tend to be very direct. A lot of people mistake this for them being rude. In some cases, there's a lot of different ways people perceive the Germans in and I never felt it as such. I actually really liked the directness, because you can't mince words, you don't get into this immersed interpretation of things, when it's very direct and clear, right? It's very easy to lose sight of the importance if it's being sugar coated. I think here in the US, we tend to sugarcoat things feedback a little bit too much

Paul Harvey  12:43
Relative to the Germans say, but compare us to many Asian countries. And we look like the blunt direct ones compared right to those styles. So it's all really relative.

Frank Butler  12:54
Exactly. I think there's that idea of the relative but I always, to some extent, not idolize Steve Jobs, but rather, I admired what he had done when he came back to Apple. And Steve was notorious for being considered in a hole. But a lot of that was because he was very direct about things. He had a very specific way things should work. And if they didn't work that way, it didn't matter. And I think the one that stood out the most is when Apple rolled out mobile me, which was the precursor to what we now have is iCloud. It was a disaster. The rollout was a disaster. And so Steve got the mobile meeting, team together. And he asked the vice president over mobile me, what is mobile me supposed to do? And the person fumbled it, and basically, he's like, you're fired? And he's like, Can somebody in this room Tell me what mobile means supposed to do? And finally, one person chimed in and actually was able to define what the project was supposed to do. He actually promoted that person over the group, because he's like, Why doesn't it do it?

Paul Harvey  13:54
I didn't hear about that other part. I just heard the "That's right, so why the F doesn't it do it."

Frank Butler  13:58
 Right. 

Paul Harvey  13:59
That response. I didn't know about the promotions and firings aspect. That's funny.

Frank Butler  14:02
Yeah. I remember reading the firing. I mean, I could be wrong. Could have been some weird outlet. But I remember that being part of it. And yeah, it seems harsh, but at the same time, you're playing with house money, right? It's like, you've got to make these things work and part of the company's reputation, especially somebody like Apple who charges premium prices, they can't really afford especially at that time to have too many of these missteps. There has to be an air of perfection, when you're trying to rebuild and be part of the future. So anyway, that's a little bit of inside.

Paul Harvey  14:33
I'm gonna aside your aside, because just like yesterday, the day before, I just happened to see a YouTube video. And it was called something like, I'll see if I can find it again. So we can link to it. Like Steve Jobs, showing that he's a real aihole kind of thing was like the name of the video. And then you watch the video, and it's Steve Jobs and like opening day of an apple store or something and he's talking to a customer who's in a wheelchair, and I watched it I thought that he can't I thought he kind of came across as a nice guy in that like, what's going on? So I looked at the comments, and it's crazy to see the variation in opinions like no, he did. So that's so like so wrong. Did I help you? Like what? Like, what are you talking about this shows that he's really a good person are so easy to see the same thing and interpret it very differently. And that is where was he comes from?

Frank Butler  15:21
And I think at the time, one of the examples I had is, I was asked to do a reference for a major for a student of mine at a major company here in town. And they called in, they asked some questions, but they weren't really actually good questions. They weren't good reference questions, they were very basic, really didn't get into any content about the student and what they need to help that student with going into a job. I think that's one of those important things, if you're gonna do reference check. And you know what that references for? It's not just about seeing if they're a warm body, but rather, how can we help develop that person in some way, you know, what might be their weaknesses, so we can be prepared for that, that I might know, I might not know those things, but at the same time, was a little frustrated, because it took five minutes out of my day, that I had a schedule. And not that five minutes is much, but when you feel like your time is being wasted, and you're not in particular was not so much my time is being wasted. Because I felt like I couldn't provide the developmental feedback because that student was more than qualified, I was gonna give him an excellent recommendation. But rather, I wanted to also help that company, make sure that they knew how to best work with that student of mine. And I was underutilized your time, rather than wasting it, perhaps that's probably a better way of framing that. And so I knew one of the other people who worked in HR there, and they said, Hey, just send us an email about your experience. So we can work from that. So I sent an email and I, and I was pretty direct about it. I didn't want to sugarcoat that, Oh, I thought this was a great product. No, I was I found this process to be underwhelming, and not really giving you guys a good sense of the person you're hired. I was like, I just felt that this wasn't a good way of doing it. And fortunately, my time is a little different than some other people who might be providing a reference or a recommendation. So I said, you got to really be careful with it. And they actually perceived my feedback as being pretty critical and kind of negative. They were kind of like, Huh, and I was like, No, it wasn't intended to be I'm trying to help you guys as a you guys are important to hiring our students. I just want to make sure that we're all getting something out of this, we're all making gains. And that's that was sitting in the back of my head when Paul had come, because that experience had just happened. And at the time, too, I had noticed that people react differently to how people behave. I was like, I thought it was a perfectly good email they took it is very critical and not abusive, necessarily, but more just very sharp and maybe hard. In appropriately harsher, right. So that Paul and I got talking on this stuff. And we were I mean, we were just going through this. And we're like there's got to be some sort of personal attribute in some way that's making people perceive something else as being abusive, and when it's not necessarily that to somebody else. And there's nothing in the research end on abusive supervision that really is created some sort of way of looking at that thing. Is there something on that personal and then there's skills that people have used? But those really don't, that context of perceptions of others?

Paul Harvey  18:23
No. So we're looking for identifiable, stable traits or characteristics of different people that make them perceive or bias them towards perceiving, abuse or mistreatment, or other people experiencing the same exact treatment don't perceive that. And all we could come up with was Wussitude. Wussitude's not really a word. Or wussiness? You know, not very academic term. So we do what academics do. We came up with an acronym.

Frank Butler  18:56
Tongue in cheek, Paul and I are a little tongue in cheek, we think a lot of our research sometimes is a little too dry. So we wanted to add some flavor. So we came up with WUSI. And we had to create the acronym for that which was waspishness, umbrageous sensitivity

Paul Harvey  19:11
No need to give away the secret sauce necessarily. No, I think it's pretty obvious that we reverse engineered that I acronym. WUSI was not a coincidence.

Frank Butler  19:21
Well, and we didn't want it to be like wussy as in 

Paul Harvey  19:23
Right

Frank Butler  19:24
Weakling or something like that. We just wanted to be in that vein, but not really imply the same thing at the end of the day, because that's not what we're trying to go with. We're just trying to say people perceive the behaviors of others as potentially being either abusive or not, are on some continuum, in essence, I think so we created that and this was on New Year's Eve. So you know.

Paul Harvey  19:43
New Year's Eve. 2014. 

Frank Butler  19:44
Yep. 2014 

Paul Harvey  19:45
Or it was becoming 2014

Frank Butler  19:47
We went from there. And when Paul got back from his Semester at Sea, we enlisted the help of another Florida State graduate, Jeremy breeze, because his dad had recorded an awesome video. I was providing feedback. So we created the scenario and saying, hey, do you perceive this feedback as being abusive or not?

Paul Harvey  20:07
It's a virtual feedback of a supervisor staring directly at the camera. So it looks like they're looking at you, and delivering critical feedback 

Frank Butler  20:15
On your performance on your job performance. 

Paul Harvey  20:17
Right, yeah 

Frank Butler  20:18
It was pretty good. You know, nothing really, too much in there. There was like a swear word at one point, 

Paul Harvey  20:25
I don't think...was there?

Frank Butler  20:26
Yeah, there was one. But it wasn't like...he's like, you need to get your ass in gear. 

Paul Harvey  20:30
Oh Yeah, yeah. 

Frank Butler  20:31
But it wasn't anything bad. It wasn't like he was cussing you out. It was more along the lines of your performance is not up to expectations, you have to hit your goals, you got to get out there. And I think it was sales, and sell or it was pretty innocuous. And it was a great video. And it was amazing. I think what a third of them perceived that as abusive, or something of that nature. I think it was something around 

Paul Harvey  20:55
Hmm...I have the numbers here. 

Frank Butler  20:58
And while Paul's looking that up, it was one of those that it actually did lead to some interesting feedback, because I watched the video. And I was like, Oh, this is pretty good. This is good feedback there is to the point, it's not sure coding, you're not performing. So you got to get your butt going and make progress, whatever that's going to take. And if you get feedback like that, if you're in that situation, sometimes it's okay to ask for help. It's like, what can I be doing differently? This is what I'm doing? Can you help me? So you're not sinking? In? Typically, if you're on the management, and I would say, what can we do to help you meet your requirements? What is it that you need? Where do you think you're lacking? So you can hit your goals, but neither here nor there? We weren't assessing that. We were assessing whether or not we perceive that to be abusive? And well, it turned out our survey pretty much show that there was a perception aspect. Now that's not to say that there aren't supervisors who are abusive or not, or that there are abusive, we're saying that there are still some out there that are abusive. But for us a big part of it was we were seeing too many studies coming back saying oh, no, everybody's abusive 

Paul Harvey  22:02
And not even asking the question, not even acknowledging the possibility that employee ratings of supervisor abuse might not actually translate into this supervisor actually being abusive. It might be partially on the employees side their perception. We won't get into all like the academic politics of this. But trying to make this point in the academic literature is very difficult. People just didn't want to hear it. Like stop. Why don’t you just go away with all that, you know, “not every one who's claimed to be abusive is actually abusive, silliness,” like, “you're in the way.” So there was a, this was a little bit of a, putting the finger or two up in the air towards the academic establishment, I think. Yeah. And I think too, we were we were interested in this because we wanted to make sure that we weren't getting to a situation where too many people were being perceived as abusive when they're not. And we were, we were, and I still think we are around that same time, I was asked to testify in front of the State of New Hampshire house Subcommittee on whatever, because a law was being considered to protect employees from abuse of supervisors from like workplace bullying from bosses. And this is what I went up there to the state capitol and said was that you were relying on all this academic literature here and findings, that all has this one fatal flaw. It's all based on the accusation of abuse equals abuse. And we don't know for sure, it can't always be one to one. We all know somebody who just like flies off the handle or thinks everything is a personal insult, you know, do you really want to be putting people supervisors on the wrong side of a courtroom because they told someone to get their act together? Quick history lesson that the committee was not fully swayed by me. I guess they moved that bill forward and ended up passing the State House and Senate but the governor at the time and Maggie Hasson vetoed it for largely the reasons that I had argued in that really committee meeting. So nice, that bullet was dodged, but a lot of states have passed these workplace bullying laws that are based on this research, that if it hasn't already, I'm sure it's going to result in legal ramifications for supervisors who are simply being critical in a non-abusive way.

Frank Butler  24:21
Right. And the other thing that we've been seeing too, is that I mean, this paper has been published now for this book chapter has been published now for six years about

Paul Harvey  24:29
Yeah, we wouldn't try to publish this in an academic journal, like for the reasons we've mentioned, and just the whole tongue in cheek was the thing wouldn't have flown but the book chapters have. It's a little different. So yes, it's been out in that room for quite a while.

Frank Butler  24:41
And it hadn't gotten a lot of traction. But there had been some research I worked with a colleague at UTC, Dr. Carl, who I work with, she brought me on she did a study on our helicopter parents creating a generation of WUSI employees. And so we worked together on this book chapter and we have two other co-author and co-authors on this joy Shay and Mariana gunkel and what we did is we looked at whether or not having helicopter parents would impact the whiskey aspect of things right? So would it impact their child's perceptions of abusive supervision? And we did find that really what was interesting there is that helicopter mother is significantly related to an individual's tendency to react with anger. So the wasp vicious category to supervisor behaviors that others might view as benign, as well as a tendency to anticipate negative interactions with their supervisor experience high levels of anxiety when such interactions occur, which is the insecurity element of was he so was these three categories in there under that waspishness, umbrageous sensitivity and insecurity. So those are three aspects

Paul Harvey  25:45
We should probably quickly define those like waspishness if you've ever encountered a wasp in nature probably you know what we mean by that.

Frank Butler  25:53
Quick to anger to anger.

Paul Harvey  25:54
The definition we use here is quick to resent a trifling affront or injury, easily annoyed or angered. So basically someone who takes a smaller perceived front and fights back hard, and breaches sensitivity, denotes a tendency to take offense and feel resentment at often imagined slights or insults will not necessarily provoke provoking immediate intense anger associated with waspishness, can lead employees to feel unjustly treated and wronged where others do not. And then insecurity is insecurity. The three pillars of WUSI.

Frank Butler  26:28
Three pillars of WUSI, I like that. Yeah. So that's what we had in there. And so we found mothers do that. Now having a helicopter father was only associated with an individual's tendency to experience higher levels of insecurity. However, mothers were rated higher in helicopter parenting than fathers in respondents were also more likely to prefer their mother's involvement over their father. So that was very interesting. But again, that was only one of a few studies that looked at this aspect. And something interesting happened. The other day, I get a notification that our book chapter was cited. And I look at this in this is a dissertation that was published in in this is by Brooks T. Durham, over at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, he just received his DBA or ductwork was a doctorate in Business Administration, from UNC Charlotte, and his supervisor, chair was David Woer. Yeah. And it was incredible, because the title of this study is the impact of subordinate characteristics on perceptions of abusive supervision, a relative importance analysis, and basically, he was trying to determine what subordinate characteristics tend to influence perceptions of so the employee, right, the employee compared to the manager, what are the characteristics of the person to perceive whether or not their supervisors abuse? Well, I was like, excited about this, because it had cited us as like, Well, okay, cool. So I'm reading the abstract. And also, I see were cited in the abstract, which is an unusual occurrence. Typically, you tend to cite things in the body of the text, but this is a dissertation too. But what stuck out here was that it said, I found that collectively subordinate characteristics accounted for 47% of the variance, and subordinate perceptions of abusive supervision. And that the was the scale clearly dominated, representing 59% of this effect size. Okay,

Paul Harvey  28:25
So let's translate that into English for folks. So yes, that first number there. 47%? Oh, that's correct. Okay. So that's basically saying, if you go back to the study that we were talking about, with the pre-recorded pretend job interview, we did that so that every person would be viewing the exact same managerial behavior. So the differences in their assessment of that behavior would be totally on them, and nothing else about the situation is different. So all else equal, if you've got the same exact supervisory behavior, what's the amount of difference between different employees in terms of their perceptions, so we take that difference between employees, and we're saying half of that difference could be explained by the things in this study. And then half of that variance was explained by our was the skill over half over half. So basically, about 25%, roughly of the difference of opinion between multiple employees when viewing the same supervisors behavior was accounted for by our WUSI scale. And that makes us all like giddy and whatnot. But the more important thing here is that there's that much of a difference between different people's perceptions of the same thing or the same supervisory behavior.

Frank Butler  29:35
And I just loved the fact that he said WUSI clearly dominated

Paul Harvey  29:39
We clearly dominated!

Frank Butler  29:43
But the other things I used in there or that he used in his study were things like positive effect negative effect as one of the subordinate characteristics. So the employee characteristics right, not the employer or the manager, but rather the employee or they can so that was one of them that was in there. 

Paul Harvey  29:58
They tend to be happy or not happy.

Frank Butler  30:01
Right

Paul Harvey  30:02
Positive/negative affect. They tend to view things positively or negatively. There we go. 

Frank Butler  30:05
That's it. 

Paul Harvey  30:06
The Big Five personality types 

Frank Butler  30:08
In there too, which is openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. What else was in their core self-evaluation? Maybe? I don't remember. No, it was definitely PANAS. I know for sure the other ones, but at the end of the day, you looked at it several different things that have been using the abusive supervision literature, as subordinate characteristics or employee characteristics to determine that, that has been used as controls. But then he threw in WUSI, which hadn't been used before, which was actually a big part of his entire study was that he was using WUSI to help that aspect of it to really evaluate can WUSI be used to help capture subordinate perceptions of abuse?

Paul Harvey  30:43
So here's the other stuff. They compared it with the age of the employees, the tenure with the organization, how long they've worked with their boss, the gender of the employer of the supervisor, the industry, the race of the employee, employees, how long they've worked together with the supervisor, the race of the supervisor, personality types, you mentioned, positive negative effect. And WUSI. And WUSI kicked all their butts!

Frank Butler  31:10
That's right. 

Paul Harvey  31:11
We get academics get competitive about weird things, by the way.

Frank Butler  31:15
Well, I think too, it's helped provide some clarity as to why we hadn't seen was he really be adopted in the literature? Oh, we know why. We kind of knew, but it reaffirmed that notion that it probably would have eaten up a lot of variants, for other studies, like trying to look at other indicators of, Oh, this is an abuse of supervisor abuse of supervision, this probably would have absorbed a lot of that which would have made those other effects not significant, which means that they don't matter.

Paul Harvey  31:43
Yes. 

Frank Butler  31:44
Which is probably why we're not seeing them being published using WUSI

Paul Harvey  31:47
We're calling a lot of the published research into question, because it's saying, "This causes supervisors to be abusive." And we're saying no, no, no, no, what you're seeing as abuse, a big chunk of that is just employee noise and how they perceive things. Well, no, then that means all my, my publications aren't as important. I don't like that idea. So go away. So this is something I think people need to understand about research science and public policy and such that there are these weird things that happen behind the scenes. And we see consequences. We see states and countries, perhaps passing laws based on academic research, which is self-filtering, because egos are involved and grant money gets involved. And it's a messy process.

Frank Butler  32:30
And to build off of that. Just recently, there was a study published in Wired about the Coronavirus, being actually airborne and there was a lot of I would, what's the word there was a lot of apprehension to label it as such by the who and the CDC. And it turns out that they finally figured out why. And it goes back to an error that was made about 60 years ago, on some other research that was examining another virus that was airborne and somehow was interpreted that, in order for something to be considered airborne, it had to be a certain size, I think it was five microns, approximately, this is not my world. But it was something about that. But the reality is that the Coronavirus is actually a little bit larger than that. But based on a lot of studying that's been done out there. There's people who study fluid dynamics and all these kinds of things, they figured out that there's that there was actually an arbitrary number selected based off this one study that was looking at a completely different thing. And that was part of the reason why we took so long to realize that it could be airborne. And even though there was a preponderance of evidence that supported that based on how air would travel through a room and people get sick based on the air currents, those kinds of things. But this is that same idea, right? There's the research moves the needle, but sometimes you have to go and do a check. Okay, we've learned something new. Now. Let's see how that applies. So it's that idea of building knowledge, right? We create building blocks, does these abusive supervision vision exist? Yes. Are there things that can help us identify that? Yes, but not everything is abusive. And that's why we wanted to create a measure that would be used as a control. So we could really identify those things that are considered abusive traits,

Paul Harvey  34:10
Exactly what are the characteristics. And we've gotten some feedback, informally, I guess that, you know, "you guys sound like you're trying to protect...you're giving abusive supervisors kind of a backdoor, like an escape hatch." And that's exactly the opposite of what we're doing. We want protections to exist for people who are truly being mistreated by supervisors that have a position of power over them and control you know, their career trajectory and such like those people need real help. People who take offense at the wording of an email do not need real help. If they cloud the picture, though, they prevent the people who do need serious attention and protection from getting the attention that they need that they deserve. We do want to protect supervisors who are not being abusive by any rational definition from being accused or punished for being such But we also want to be able to do a better job of identifying supervisors who truly are misusing their positions, and protect those employees focus on them.

Frank Butler  35:09
And I think there's another point you mentioned too, it's if a person is perceiving an email as being abusive, and it's not right, it's overwhelmingly just their way of perceiving things in general. That's also important because we can understand how we can identify and help that person to get to make them help realize that no, not everything is really the way you perceiving it to be. And I think that's important, because one, it helps lead to better understanding. I think that's another side that we haven't really addressed in any of the literature, as far as I'm aware. How can we help people who are going to be higher on that woozy scale, be aware that they are more sensitive to these kinds of things? And how can we then help them

Paul Harvey  35:49
It's implicit bias, just like we hear a lot, and we hear all about this recently, different other kinds of implicit biases, but it's the same, it's the same thing. It's an unknown perceptual bias that's a lot of people have. And we don't realize, you know, perception is reality. We don't realize that we're perceiving reality wrong until someone comes along and proves it to us. So just like we see that with consequences involving racism and gender bias and such, we see it with WUSI too. 

Frank Butler  36:18
And I think that's something that it might help by being able to understand this might be able to help with seeing things maybe a little bit more objective Lee and a little less, subjectively, or at least be more open to was that really supposed to be a slight at me? What was the intent? Or is that just how that person is? And it's not really a slight because this is how they talk to everybody. And this person sees it differently. And they go, Oh, no, this is perfect. I needed that feedback. And of course, some managers actually want to know, too, because if they know they might be able to at least tailor the way they speak to certain individuals. Now, again, you got to take that with caution. Again, sugarcoating too much can lead to not understanding that it's a big deal. 

Paul Harvey  36:57
Yeah.

Frank Butler  36:58
When it's a big deal

Paul Harvey  36:59
If you're working on a construction site, and you're just about to step on a nail, or knock over a cannon gasoline to where someone's using a blowtorch. And your boss says, Stop, you effing effing f idiot. Like, I don't think that's abusive, like those words, those f bombs, get your attention real fast, like, right. So the situation that you're in the context that you're working in matters a lot as well. There's a difference in what is generally acceptable behavior in a dangerous, loud environment versus a quiet laid back office.

Frank Butler  37:33
Yeah, like I said, we were just excited. We said we were going to do a study. All right, an episode on Morrissey at some point, it was just a little pet project that we had, because we felt that it was important. And we've always wanted to take it further. But we were busy. We have different things going on and tick diseases and different

Paul Harvey  37:51
Tick diseases and kids and it's...you can only spend so much of your time fighting a sissa-...sisiffusion?...an uphill battle.

Frank Butler  38:00
Haha Sisyphean, yeah 

Paul Harvey  38:01
Ack, tongue twisters. You know, it's...this is why we're so excited to see this. A young scholar adopting the ways of WUSI. Early in his career, it takes a lot to, to change existing paradigms in any field. Academia is no different.

Frank Butler  38:18
So we were excited. We wanted to share this was a big deal for us

Paul Harvey  38:21
We'll link the chapter in the show notes. So you can go nerd out on our academic, academic sly humor

Frank Butler  38:28
Genius

Paul Harvey  38:29
And genius.

Frank Butler  38:32
But yeah, we'd love to hear from you about your experiences on this too. I'm sure you've either had an actual abusive supervisor, or you might have been in a situation where you might have perceived your supervisor as abusive. And it turns out that they weren't or you had a colleague you worked with, and you had shared the same supervisor, and they perceived that person is always being abusive, or, and I guess, abusive, is kind of a weird term, because it's kind of a catch all term different. Right? bullying has been part of that, too. We've heard hostile, hostile work environment. Yeah. So those all kind of fit a little bit under that umbrella.

Paul Harvey  39:09
I'd also like to hear from any supervisors who have been in their opinions unfairly judged as being abusive.

Frank Butler  39:16
Yeah. And if you want us to help your organization out, and do some training with folks, reach out

Paul Harvey  39:23
We do have a passion about this. Yeah. 

Frank Butler  39:27
It's a big deal. It really is a big 

Paul Harvey  39:29
We do get involved with companies and state governments occasionally dealing with these issues. So we're happy to help. 

Frank Butler  39:37
Well, I think that's another episode. Thanks for listening, everybody.

Paul Harvey  39:40
Get your ass back to work. 

Frank Butler  39:44
We're out. 

Paul Harvey  39:46
The Busyness Paradox is distributed by Paul Harvey and Frank Butler. Our theme music is adapted from its business time by Jemaine Clements and Bret McKenzie. Our production manager is Justin Wuntaek. We hope you enjoyed this episode and we'd love to hear from you. Please send any questions, comments or ideas for future episode topics to input at busyness paradox dot com or find us on Twitter. Also, be sure to visit our website, busyness paradox dot com to read our blog posts and for links to the articles and other resources mentioned in today's show. Finally, please take a moment to rate and follow or subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Spotify, I-Heart Radio, Google podcasts for your preferred podcast provider