Is your boss a ‘bosshole’?
The following is a guest post by Peter Sims, a former venture capitalist and co-author of “True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership.” His next book, “Little Bets,” will be published next spring.
It has been damn near impossible to find consistently good and objective insight and analysis from business thought leaders. But Robert I. Sutton, a professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford and the Stanford Institute of Design (where we have overlapped), is an exception.
His new book, out now, is his best to date. Good Boss, Bad Boss is food for thought for managers and leaders in organizations large and small. It is packed with insight, lists of “how to” suggestions, and questions for bosses to ask themselves.
Sutton weaves many of these nuggets together with interesting stories in Good Boss, Bad Boss — while building on his last book, The No Asshole Rule, a New York Times best seller.
Sutton draws upon an impressively broad collection of research, including fascinating sociology research from Rob Cross that shows top performing employees are far more likely to have high energy than high IQs. He also gives some space to Frank Flynn’s research about what kind of boss is most effective — competitive, aggressive, passive, or submissive. “Moderately assertive” bosses win. Those bosses are able to strike a balance between managing too much and too little, something Sutton calls “Lasorda’s Law,” after the former Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda’s style.
Most of the book is organized around insights like these, including INSEAD’s Morton Hansen whose research shows the problems with “solo star” organizational cultures and Amy Edmondson’s research about the importance of psychological safety in order to increase decision-making and creative confidence.
Sutton also quotes from Karl Weick, the legendary psychology professor at University of Michigan’s business school, who taught Sutton: “fight as if you are right, and listen as if you are wrong.”
I appreciate the comments. I would like to say something about the question about whether or not organizations dismiss bad supervisors. I would argue that the best organizations do it with surprising frequency. P&G, GE, Google, are a few well-known examples — perhaps it does not happen as often as it should, but there are plenty of places that don’t tolerate persistently lousy bosses.