If you are a fan of Bob Sutton’s The No Asshole Rule (a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Business Week bestseller), when you start reading Good Boss, Bad Boss you might be forgiven for thinking he has overly mellowed. Even the chapter titles are a lot more sanitised. You have to wait till Chapter 8 to come across Squelch Your Inner Bosshole (“bosshole” is defined by the Urban Dictionary as a “… deadly hybrid of boss and a*****e”). But this would be unfair to Sutton: his message remains consistent with his previous work and he continues to deliver sound, practical advice in a short, eminently readable dose that even busy bosses have little excuse not to read or understand. Those of us who are still eager to have our schoolboy sniggers will have to content ourselves with the ARSE (A*****e Rating Self Exam) Test, the TCA (Total Cost of A*****es) computation and the MAM (Marge’s A*****e Management) Method.
In his previous book, Sutton defined a*****es as mean-spirited jerks, who revel in aiming their poison at people less powerful than themselves and who leave their “targets” feeling oppressed, humiliated, de-energised or belittled. Sutton focuses in this book on bosses who, he believes, have a tough task to avoid being a*****es. As he puts it, “If a team of world-class behavioural scientists designed a job that was optimised for turning occupants into a*****es, the result would be disturbingly similar to many, if not most, bosses’ jobs”. Good Boss, Bad Boss attempts to arrest the a*****e-wards slide that caused by the differential power enjoyed by bosses.
Sutton starts with the modest declaration that “If you are serious about becoming a skilled and compassionate boss, just reading this or any other work isn’t enough... Despite the horseshit spewed out by too many management gurus, there are no magic bullets, instant cures or easy shortcuts to becoming a great boss”. Sutton explores the virtual opposites a good manager has to reconcile and convincingly explains why managers who see people and things as just black or white are as effective as a pianist would be if he played either only the black notes or the white ones. A quote Sutton uses from Tommy Lasorda conveys the sense of this argument well: “I believe that managing is like holding a dove in your hand. If you hold it too tightly, you kill it, but if you hold it too loosely, you lose it.”
Sutton follows up with seven chapters about what the best bosses do. Actually it’s what the bad bosses do that makes for the more entertaining reading but that naughty meat is neatly sandwiched between homily bread — you can’t get at it without going through the stuff you should be doing as a good boss. A juicy example of the filling is Sutton’s cheeky (no pun intended) concept of “a*****e taxes”, in the form of extra pay, which “people who work for, or with, known a*****es often extract ... in return for enduring poor treatment”. The serious implication is, of course, the substantive saving companies could make in employee costs if they could eliminate “bossholes”.
Each chapter contains a box or two summarising most of the advice. But, if you limit yourself to the boxes, you will miss Sutton’s stinging statements on topics like performance evaluations (“Many organisations impose such rigid, legalistic, inhuman and onerous evaluation procedures that that these chores distract bosses from tending to their followers in more important ways.”) and the amusing reason one boss chose to conduct such evaluations in a hospice!
Memorable as Sutton’s concepts and examples are, you won’t come across any earthshaking new practices or theories of leadership in Good Boss, Bad Boss. For instance, the stand-up meetings Sutton recommends were part of standard practice when I joined Telco (now Tata Motors) in the early seventies. Similarly, Robert Townsend’s 1970 best-seller Up the Organisation was essential reading for those who wanted to be organisational revolutionaries then. One could have hoped that at least some of the 10 references Sutton gives to it could have made way for more recent works on leadership.
Sutton’s book is unabashedly directed at a North American audience. The examples he quotes are all from the US and the research that buttresses his arguments is mainly from there, with a tiny sprinkling from Europe. But there are several reasons why Good Boss, Bad Boss is more rather than less necessary for managers in India.
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The first and least convincing reason comes from some research Sutton quotes about higher ambient temperatures magnifying “crankiness and aggression”. If you were to take this at face value you would have the climate to blame for India having more than its fair share of CAs (Certified A*****es — forgive me, my accountant friends).
More worrying is India’s position on a measure like the Power Distance Index (which measures the extent to which the less powerful members of organisations and accept and expect that power is distributed unequally) where we scored 77 as against 40 for the US. Admittedly, Geert Hofstede’s study is rather dated now but we have little evidence that the relative positions of the two countries have changed substantively since then. Indian managers, therefore, have more reason than Western ones to fear Sutton’s “toxic tandem”, which arises because “power turns people into insensitive jerks” and subordinates are hypervigilant about superiors’ moves and often assume the worst about their intentions”.
Indian organisations that are most likely to get AAA (Above Average A*****e-share) ratings are those in which the power distances between the managers and the managed is excessive. But it’s not only managers in such organisations who can benefit from the lessons of this book. Good Boss, Bad Boss can be an eye-opener for any leader seeking to improve team commitment. It doesn’t contain everything you need to know about managing people but, after reading it, you will have a very good idea whether the people you lead think you are an a*****e and how you can relinquish that appellation before you acquire certified status.
The reviewer is CEO, Banner Global Consulting