bad-apples – Justin Owings

http://www.kottke.org/09/02/managers-as-servants

Another Google Reader shared item from Patri that relates to group behavior (and the work environment), a discussion of “non-hierarchical management in the workplace:”

Instead of the standard “org chart” with a CEO at the top and employees growing down like roots, turn the whole thing upside down. Employees are at the top — they’re the ones who actually get stuff done — and managers are underneath them, helping them to be more effective. (The CEO, who really does nothing, is of course at the bottom.)

Swartz also quotes a friend who believes that people who act like jerks in the workplace are not worth the trouble.

I have a “no asshole rule” which is really simple: I really don’t want to work with assholes. So if you’re an asshole and you work on my team, I’m going to fire you.

I have worked with (and near) several assholes in my time and I’m convinced that firing one unpleasant person, even if they perform a vital function, is equivalent to hiring two great employees.

This hits on two points. One reminds me of how leaders, as central decision-making nodes in a system, tend to have considerably less “freedom” than many think. They work within a delicate eco-system of employees/followers, resource/time constraints, personal and system goals, etc. Thus even as it appears the manager may do very little “work,” he/she is spending a great deal of time balancing a slew of complex demands.

Enter in this great advice I read last night from William Glasser in Control Theory regarding child-rearing (Chapter 18, Control Theory and Raising Children):

Try as hard as possible to teach, show, and help your children to gain effective control of their lives.

Apply that concept to managing employees (or team members). You want to empower your employees to have more control. You do this by teaching them how to substitute their own good judgment for yours. This makes the hierarchical system less centralized and more robust. The worst managers I have seen strip control from employees. It’s not that any manager should just tell their employees to go buck wild and do what they want, rather they should mentor and teach them which will give them greater control, and more freedom to you, the manager to spend time considering more important decisions.

Which brings me back to all the talk about regulation and centralization (and how I think decentralization makes more sense).

Less related is the comment on “assholes;” moving fast and eliminating bad apples from your group is a good way to improve the odds of success. I know that has been the case in my own experience.

http://www.codinghorror.c…ves/001227.html

Fascinating write-up of a study on “bad apples” affecting group behavior. Supposedly conventional wisdom is that groups are dynamic enough to overcome the bad apples; however, I would have suspected the opposite: it’s easy for one person to spread the “virus” of a bad, disruptive or counterproductive attitude.

The big takeaway here (for me) is to be aware of two things:

Be aware when you might be exhibiting bad apple behaviors
Be aware of when others are exhibiting bad apple behaviors

H/T to Patri Friedman via Google Reader for sharing this. Cross-linking this article to another he shared that is on a similar subject.

Groups of four college students were organized into teams and given a task to complete some basic management decisions in 45 minutes. To motivate the teams, they’re told that whichever team performs best will be awarded $100 per person. What they don’t know, however, is that in some of the groups, the fourth member of their team isn’t a student. He’s an actor hired to play a bad apple, one of these personality types:

The Depressive Pessimist will complain that the task that they’re doing isn’t enjoyable, and make statements doubting the group’s ability to succeed.

The Jerk will say that other people’s ideas are not adequate, but will offer no alternatives himself. He’ll say “you guys need to listen to the expert: me.”

The Slacker will say “whatever”, and “I really don’t care.”

…

Groups that had the bad apple would perform worse. And this despite the fact that were people in some groups that were very talented, very smart, very likeable. Felps found that the bad apple’s behavior had a profound effect — groups with bad apples performed 30 to 40 percent worse than other groups. On teams with the bad apple, people would argue and fight, they didn’t share relevant information, they communicated less.

Even worse, other team members began to take on the bad apple’s characteristics. When the bad apple was a jerk, other team members would begin acting like a jerk. When he was a slacker, they began to slack, too. And they wouldn’t act this way just in response to the bad apple. They’d act this way to each other, in sort of a spillover effect.

What they found, in short, is that the worst team member is the best predictor of how any team performs. It doesn’t seem to matter how great the best member is, or what the average member of the group is like. It all comes down to what your worst team member is like. The teams with the worst person performed the poorest.

The actual text of the study (pdf) is available if you’re interested. However, I highly recommend listening to the first 11 minutes of the This American Life show. It’s a fascinating, highly compelling recap of the study results. I’ve summarized, but I can’t really do it justice without transcribing it all here.