Difficult People

DAN MCGINN: Welcome to Dear HBR: from Harvard Business Review. I’m Dan McGinn.

ALISON BEARD: And I’m Alison Beard. Work can be frustrating, but it doesn’t have to be. The truth is that we don’t have to let the tension, conflicts and misunderstandings get us down. We can do something about them.

DAN MCGINN: That’s where Dear HBR: comes in. We take your questions about workplace dilemmas and with the help of experts and insights from academic research we help you move forward.

ALISON BEARD: Today we’re answering your questions about difficult people, a topic our guest has written many books about.

DAN MCGINN: Bob Sutton teaches Organizational Behavior at Stanford. Bob, thanks for being on the show.

BOB SUTTON: Great to be on the show!

DAN MCGINN: We could do every show on difficult people because it seems like a large percentage of the questions we naturally get are going to be on that because that’s what people worry about, right?

BOB SUTTON: It’s kind of a two by two. It’s difficult and competent versus incompetent. [LAUGHTER] That’s my general model of the world.

ALISON BEARD: Right. So, Bob is there someone in your professional life who’s really bothered you throughout the years?

BOB SUTTON: Yeah. So, it is not a particular person. I can think of four or five of them. These are petty tyrants. When you give people a fair amount of responsibility, but give them low prestige or low status, they really do take it out on you.

ALISON BEARD: It’s so interesting that you bring up petty tyrants because I actually just ran into this experience and everyone kept telling me to calm down and that made me not at all calm. So, what advice would you give me?

BOB SUTTON: I’m a big believer in picking your battles. This is something we’ll come to over and over again. When you’ve got someone in your life who is making you feel bad, you can avoid them, you can fight with them, or you can quit.

ALISON BEARD: Terrific. Here’s our first listener question. Dear HBR: I’m a VP in a high-tech company and I’m dealing with a colleague who’s a bully. Here’s a typical example. I just scored a meeting with an important client and I came back to the office in a great mood. I tell the team, we just met with executive so-and-so, and had a great conversation. This colleague responds, well, that meeting wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t crawled up your [expletive]. It’s a one-two punch. Self-promotion and disparagement in one sentence. That kind of putdown happens almost every day in front of peers, bosses and my subordinates. The ironic part? We have signs all over our walls stating that respect is one of our company values. I’m leaving the company and starting to wean myself off the sedative Ambien, I’ve used to cope with the stress. I won’t have to deal with this particular bully anymore. But how could I have dealt with this situation more effectively? Why do the vast majority of corporations allow this kind of bullying to happen?

BOB SUTTON: Oh, my God. [LAUGHTER] So, this is actually a pretty bad one and this is pretty complicated. A couple of things just to start with, my number one recommendation is if you are trapped with somebody who leaves you feeling bad about yourself and acts like a jerk, is if you can avoid permanent contact with them permanently either by transferring to another department or quitting, I don’t think that’s the worst thing to do. So, this person’s quitting. I hope his or her Ambien consumption goes down as a result. But to me, this is the kind of person who is consistently leaving others feeling demeaned and de-energized. The place that I always start with someone like that, if it’s safe, pulling them aside and having a backstage conversation and say do you know that I consistently feel hurt because you do —

ALISON BEARD: This all sounds very confrontational. Sort of pulling someone aside. Is that really the best approach when you’re dealing with someone who’s vulgar, number one, as we see from their statement. But also just clearly a difficult, mean person. Do you really want to antagonize them?

BOB SUTTON: Well, so my first assumption, the first question I ask is, is the person aware of how they are coming across to others and the damage they’re doing to their reputation? For example, in this case driving away somebody who seems to be a competent employee. So, that’s the first question I ask. Because the research on self-awareness, especially negative features is that most of us as human beings have remarkably bad self-awareness of how we come across to others. There are situations where having the conversation can actually be very helpful. And a lot of times start with the assumption that the person does not want to leave others feeling bad. Now, there are people who are certified jerks and you give them negative feedback, they’re thin skinned and they go crazy and then they spend the rest of their life trying to get you. But even in those cases, when you start talking to people who work with them every day, they’ll say well, it’s not that simple. That they often can be very civilized and very supportive. If that doesn’t work, can you do something like form a posse and go to management over the person’s head to complain about the way that the person is behaving? And if they’re doing that having documentation does help.

DAN MCGINN: It’s interesting. I’ve read research on that. It seems like that rarely works and it seems like there’s a couple of problems. Number one, it seems like in the HR profession there’s no real agreement on what behaviors constitute bullying. And number two, there’s this need to seem impartial and to listen to the other side of the story, like Judge Wapner on the People’s Court. And it seems like HR has a very hard time figuring out what to do in these and I’ve actually seen a study that says that half the time they do nothing and a third of the time they actually make the situation worse. Your idea of getting a posse together is interesting because that takes it out of the one-on-one and makes it more of a, the data points accumulate. And tell us more about that.

BOB SUTTON: Well, so I think this is a great point of view because in deciding whether or not you’re going to fight back, it isn’t just HR. In fact, very often going to your boss’s boss or the way that some CEO’s, some local named CEO’s here in the Bay area who shall not be named, have been brought down, is that the Executive Vice President, President’s and other folks will make the case that the person is destructive and mean spirited, will go to the Board and the Board will make the decision to bring the person down. And so, HR, you’ve got to be a little careful about, but I don’t want to bash the entire profession of HR. There are organizations where people who are, who act like jerks, even if they’re high performers will still be sent packing. And the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, even if you’re a superstar surgeon, if you treat everybody like dirt, the CEO, he’ll find a way to get rid of you. And Netflix is actually pretty good too, historically. So, there are organizations where it is safe to go to HR, but you got to sort of make an assessment of whether or not you can win or not. But the research generally shows in terms of fighting back against any sort of abuse or difficult people is that certainly the more powerful you are, the easier it is to get rid of them. The more people you can sort of bring together and the more stronger the case is documented, the better chance you have to bring the person down. But I’m not even sure that the listener in this case, that the jerk he or she is talking about is somebody who necessarily deserves to be fired. I think that starting with the more intermediate strategies of having the conversation, seeing if the person can be helped. Maybe they’ve got some personal problems. So, I like to start out by assuming the best about a difficult person.

DAN MCGINN: Bob, one of the reasons we jumped on this letter is that in the first line the person says, I’m dealing with a bully. He didn’t say I’m dealing with a jerk or a difficult person. In schools that word bully has become almost sort of a trigger word. Schools have policies now. If you call a school and say hey, my kid is having a problem with one of his classmates, they’ll say OK. If you call my kid is being bullied, their radar goes up in a different way. Is that word yet having that kind of reaction in companies? Is that a word that will trigger more concern than just garden variety jerk-ness?

BOB SUTTON: Well, I hope so. That one thing that’s starting to happen is that in addition to all of the awareness that is coming out of the sexual harassment and sexual assault is that there’s an increasing recognition, and some of this is because of really dramatic cases such as what happened at Uber for example, and United Airlines with passengers. And in general, the evidence that bullying employees is bad for them, it’s bad for productivity, it’s bad for the reputation of the firm is something that’s coming more and more into center stage. When they’re known as a bullying or a nasty workplace, it drives away customers, it drives away the best employees. So, if you want to win the war for talent, you’ve got a problem. If people got a glass door and keep saying that employees are treated like dirt.

ALISON BEARD: So, we published research from Christine Porath who has also studied incivility for most of her career.

BOB SUTTON: I know Chris Porath’s research well. I’m a huge fan of her research.

ALISON BEARD: She argues you need to figure out a way to not take it personally and then you need to focus on yourself. Focus on your own growth and learning. Focus on your own mental health and physical health and she things and has research to say that this will inoculate you against this toxic worker.

BOB SUTTON: These are cognitive behavioral therapy techniques where you don’t take it personally. You find ways to emotionally detach and so on, to sort of focus on strengthening your armor. I’m going to take it for at least a while, so that means avoiding as much contact as you can with somebody like that which is sort of like kryptonite. And then using, I call them mind tricks to protect your soul. So, to find ways to not take it quite so personally and to say to yourself with somebody like that, it’s not my problem. That person is just a jerk doing the things that jerks do and it’s not my fault and I should not take it personally. But at least my perspective in healthy organizations and healthy relationships that I start with the assumption the person doesn’t mean to be a jerk.

ALISON BEARD: We, a while back published an article by Bryan Uzzi from Northwestern called Make Your Enemies Your Allies. Do you see any opportunity for that in this scenario? This is a woman who’s clearly very competitive and perhaps views this writer, this letter writer as a rival. So, is there any advice you would have given him had he stayed at the company about how to not just avoid her or confront her, but actually figure out a way to turn her into a friend?

BOB SUTTON: Sure. The Benjamin Franklin Effect. And what Benjamin Franklin did when he was a young adult and he had somebody that was a hater, was badmouthing him, what Benjamin Franklin did was started asking this guy to do favors for him, his critic to do favors for him and literally that turned his critic into a friend, a lifetime friend for Benjamin Franklin. Because if you think about the cognitive inconsistency of I am doing you a favor, but I hate you, it’s very hard to align those two thoughts.

ALISON BEARD: That’s really funny because Brian, in his piece, he talks about reciprocity, but he talks about it the other way. He talks about doing the favor for your enemy so that they begin to feel more positively about you. So, does it work in both directions?

BOB SUTTON: So, it works in both ways, but there might be a situation where it is just somebody you are on the wrong foot with, but the problem is what you start doing is feeding that thin skin-ness of narcissist and that constant flattery that they ask for. Beware because that’s the kind of thing that encourages jerks to keep going and going and going. Because if they keep, if they treat people like dirt and the result is that people reward them for it, beware because they’ll learn that it’s an effective behavior for recruiting allies even though they don’t deserve to have allies.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah, Brian argues that you end with rationality which is basically explaining how you want the relationship to work after they’re feeling good about you.

BOB SUTTON: Well, I don’t think human beings are that rational. I feel like an economist who hoped the world will be rational, but honestly it isn’t.

DAN MCGINN: So, it sounds like our best advice for this person goes back to one of the things you said at the open which is, A, is there a way to avoid it? B, is it worth fighting it, or C, is there a situation where you need to quit which is the decision this person has made.

BOB SUTTON: And to me, one of the things that, I wish there was a one size fits all sort of situation. I would go back to the empathy issue which is trying to have some understanding of why that person might be disrespectful is important.

DAN MCGINN: Good.

ALISON BEARD: Well, let’s move onto the next question.

DAN MCGINN: Dear HBR: I have a problem. My boss never admits when he’s made a mistake and when things go wrong at the office he always manages to find fault with someone else. One example, he recently complained loudly and publicly about my unit’s poor cash flow. I found a private moment with him. I explained that we’re actually cash flow positive, but he blamed his ignorance on me. His exact words were, well then you certainly don’t present it well at our monthly meetings. Even worse he acts like he’s the type to admit failure. He says things like people make mistakes. God knows I do and it’s OK. But he never really does. This constant blame game is really killing motivation. People on my team have gotten into the habit of saying, it doesn’t matter what we do, he’ll always find something wrong. So, how should I deal with a manager like this? How can I make him understand that it’s OK to acknowledge when he’s made a mistake and that shifting blame to us only makes things worse?

ALISON BEARD: Bob, have you ever been in a situation like this yourself?

BOB SUTTON: Yeah. Well, to me I hope this isn’t the case, but the manager that this person is describing sounds to me like somebody who is really got very strong defenses and they certainly have got some difficulties. But in general if you look at the kind of attributions that human beings have, we do tend to have self-serving attributions and we do tend to give ourselves excessive kudos when things go well and to blame others when things go badly.

ALISON BEARD: And in this instance when the boss says, well then you certainly don’t present it well, what could the employees say back?

BOB SUTTON: Well, there’s one of two strategies and this is where it depends what your goal, the first one if the person is really a jerk and represents, you say and you say thank you. The other approach is if you disagree with the person and you feel safe, maybe push back a little bit.

ALISON BEARD: Right. Dan you can be pretty snarky at times. What would you say? [LAUGHTER]

DAN MCGINN: I can? [LAUGHTER] I would have nothing to say in the moment and an hour later I would probably come up with something really clever and I would just, have only myself to listen to it.

ALISON BEARD: I don’t think I would have either. My face would have turned really red, my blood would have boiled and I think I would have then gone back to our cube that we share and I would have complained to you about it.

DAN MCGINN: I was just going to say the same thing. [LAUGHTER]

BOB SUTTON: But in your defense I do think that first do no harm is not the worst strategy in the situation like that. When it starts happening over and over again, that’s where you might be able to say something more snarky and, or even more constructive. So many people are in managerial positions. They don’t realize how much they’re hurting others and how they’re coming across to others. The research shows that as you get more and more powerful you tend to focus more on your own needs. You tend to be less sensitive to other people and you tend to not be aware of how you’re coming across to them. So, as a boss on the whole you’ve got to assume that the more senior and more powerful you get, the less able you are to understand what it feels like to work for you. Now, in this case of this particular boss, maybe it’s my excessive optimism, but there are so many managers and senior leaders that I’ve known over the years who have actually learned and grown in their role and learned to do things like take responsibility and how do deal with failure in such a way that they motivate people and make things better rather than are just viewed as somebody who won’t take responsibility.

DAN MCGINN: It’s funny. When I thought about this situation, like you I’d like to think I’m optimistic, that maybe this person could change over time. But I’m skeptical that the person that can lead that change is the underling. I just don’t think there’s enough power here. So, my mind instantly turned not to long term fixes, but to tactical workarounds. So, for instance it sounds like there’s a lot of errors coming up here and somebody needs to point them out, so how much of this would help? Can we do this by email? Can we sort of depersonalize the language? Instead of you made a mistake, there’s a problem here. Sort of we’re not saying the underling should take responsibility for any of this, but is there a way to do this in a less charged way that doesn’t promote an attribution or a fact finding investigatory thing? Just fixing the problem, moving on and making it very unemotional.

BOB SUTTON: So much of organizational life and we all know this, are short term fixes to try to avoid contact and confrontation with the jerk and to avoid their attention. And this is the kind of classic thing that people do where they’ll try to avoid contact with a boss like that. I’d try to avoid as much contact with a boss like that as possible.

ALISON BEARD: Can you really avoid contact with your boss though?

BOB SUTTON: Oh, there’s, I mean it depends on the nature of your job, but there are lots of ways to figure out well, when are they going to be in the office, when do I need to be in the office? Steve Jobs apparently got better later in life, but somebody worked with Steve Jobs for years told me what he would do is he’d look at the room that he was in, that Jobs was in, the seven or eight people and he would sit in such a way where Jobs wouldn’t notice him quite so much. He would do stuff like that and one of my favorite thing, colleagues start developing early warning systems where it might be the executive assistant. It might just be somebody who works near the bosses, they will warn people or people will call them and email them or text them and say, what mood is he or she in today? Can I talk to that person? I’ve got some bad news. Is it a good day to give it to him or her or a bad day? I was doing some Executive Ed a few weeks ago and I was asking the question of, well what, how do you deliver bad news to a volatile boss who’s going to blame you? And this guy raises his hand and he says, that’s what interns are for. [LAUGHTER] It’s a sacrificial lambs. So, I don’t recommend that to your listeners, but apparently it’s a practice that is used in some cases to take some of the flax so they wouldn’t have to.

ALISON BEARD: Well, that’s the thing. A lot of this sounds like enabling and it sounds like our letter writer is conscious that this is not just effecting her, but it’s hurting morale on the whole team. So, it does seem that they can’t really work around it anymore. You talked about organizing a posse. Is there a potential for that here and finding a peer or higher up that could correct the bad behavior?

DAN MCGINN: It sounds like an intervention.

BOB SUTTON: That’s definitely an intervention. And the more people you can get on your side, I had a woman write me, she was a government employer. I believe she was an Animal Control Officer, a Dog Catcher and they had a racist and sexist boss who was constantly insulting everybody, so they went to their boss’s boss and complained and nothing happened. But then what they did was they put together what she called the [expletive] diaries, where she and her colleagues just documented the behavior of this difficult boss and went to the boss’s boss and then that person disappeared very quickly. And to me life doesn’t always come out that neatly or cleanly. There are just many managers who behave that way, not just, not because they’re crazy, not because they’re naturally unable to learn or dumb. They just might not have learned how to be good managers yet. Because being a good manager’s a hard thing to learn.

ALISON BEARD: I think it all goes back to empathy too right? You need to think about what else might be going on in the person’s life. They might be lashing at you because they have personal pressures, because they have professional pressures and they’re worried about sort of hitting deadlines or hitting their budgets. And I think if you come at anyone who is attacking you or blaming you with that perspective, I feel like that can go a long way toward helping you depersonalize it and detaching yourself from it emotionally.

BOB SUTTON: Yeah, I like that. And so, one of the distinctions I make, because all of us when we’re having bad days or in a bad situation, might be capable of being rude or lashing out or being insensitive. It’s just actually very good research that shows that managers when things go wrong who take blame, who take responsibility and say, it’s my fault, they actually are generally viewed as more positive than people who try to do external attributions and blame others. So, CEO’s who blame themselves for performance problems, overtime, they tend to last longer in the role and to be higher performing. It’s also true of lower level managers.

ALISON BEARD: Well, that’s what I was going to ask about because I can understand the CEO’s sort of taking the high road, but if you’re working your way up and you’re trying to impress your bosses, and you’re trying to persuade your team that you’re smart and you know what you’re doing, when maybe you’re a little bit insecure, it’s not as easy to always say, oh, this was totally my fault guys. I’ll fall on the sword.

BOB SUTTON: Well, so when I see bosses who do it, they don’t just say it’s my fault, they say three things. They say it’s at least partly my fault or it’s my fault. Here’s what we learned from it. Here’s what we’re going to do differently or start doing differently as a result. So, you don’t just sort of whimper and say, oh, I’ve screwed up. I’m such an idiot. What you do is you do the emotions of some contriteness, then you confidently say, here’s what we learned, here’s what we’re going to do differently. And to me what that does is it shifts from this whole emotional and finger pointing to us working together to try to solve a problem, and I’m not blaming you. I’m maybe blaming myself some, because that’s what a leaders job is to do is to take some of the flack. But to really focus the attention on looking forward and we’re going to work together and solve it. The best leaders especially when things are messy, that’s kind of the formula. They say it’s at least partly my fault. Here’s what I learned. Here’s what we’re doing to fix it. And people like that tend to be more admired and the reason is not just because they’re viewed as humbled people, it’s because they’re viewed as people who are capable of learning from the situation.

ALISON BEARD: So, to wrap up I think our advice for this person who has a blaming boss is again, to not take it personally if possible. To try to create some self-awareness with the boss and maybe have a private conversation with them about what they’re saying and how it effects the team and possibly if that doesn’t yield any results, to take it to higher levels and see if there’s a peer who can encourage the boss to change his behavior or even someone higher up in the company.

BOB SUTTON: Yeah, so those are all rational solutions I agree with. Also in the process finding ways to protect yourself by limiting exposure. Maybe having a little early warning system to figure out when the person’s especially in a bad mood, that might help this person and colleagues to avoid extra damage and extra suffering. Because some people, sometimes you just need to avoid them and protect yourself.

ALISON BEARD: Great. Let’s move onto the next question.

BOB SUTTON: All right. Let’s move on.

DAN MCGINN: Dear HBR: I’m really struggling with one of my subordinates. She’s great with clients. They go to her happy hours and text her all the time. But internally at our company she treats people terribly. Once during a large group meeting she drilled a project manager about a timeline, insisting that it was the third time she’s asked for it. He was too stunned to respond. Everybody was uncomfortable. Thanks to her bad reputation with colleagues, she wasn’t selected to go to a conference. She learned at a client event that she’d been passed over. Her face turned red and her whole demeanor changed. The next day the client emailed my boss saying how much they appreciate her hard work, no mention of anyone else on the team. We suspect that she vented to the client. It was too much of a coincidence to think that she’s not airing our dirty laundry. I’ve tried constructive feedback, recommending an EQ course, but she always reverts to the same old MO. Her behavior’s reflecting poorly on me as a manager. Should I do the brave thing and put her on probation? Or, should I protect client relationships and redouble my coaching efforts? Please help. I’m at the end of my rope.

ALISON BEARD: It sounds like a pretty desperate situation. Especially because I feel like this manager has tried everything that I would initially recommend. So, Bob what do you think she should do?

BOB SUTTON: So, I have a worry, but I also have a strong reaction. So, my worry is that I wonder if this manager in the company have failed to give this person direct constructive and clear negative feedback and perhaps even tying her compensation. So, I don’t know how the compensation system in this works, but when you’ve got organizations that are very client focused, what they will do and I know this from law firms, I know this from professional service firms, is that they will let people get away for years with treating people internally like dirt as long as the money keeps rolling in. So, the question that I ask is, is this behavior the result of years of a dysfunctional reward system that happens with rainmakers all over the world? That they’re allowed to get away with all sorts of nasty behavior, so long as they keep bringing in the money. So, that’s what I would ask the organizational question. But the second part is that if this behavior is part of a pattern and in general in this organization they don’t suffer from that dysfunction, gee I guess they could per her on plan to do a performance improvement program, but this is where I’m a big fan of Patty McCord’s Netflix system where there is no performance improvement program. What they do is they fire you. That might not be possible in this organization. It’s not a tradition and it’s not something they have done consistently, but I think that’s a situation where you send the person packing. But the question I want to know before is how have this person and other rainmakers been treated in the past? And if she’s just doing what everybody else does in the organization to get ahead, then it’s actually managements fault. It’s not her fault.

ALISON BEARD: I was actually going to reference Richard Boyatzis, Intentional Change Theory. And that talks about helping the person sort of envision the future they want and showing them that their current bad behavior is going to stop them from achieving what they want. But this goes back to your point Bob, that if she can achieve everything she wants, if she can become head of the sales department and CEO of the company, behaving this way because she’s making clients happy, that whole strategy isn’t going to work.

BOB SUTTON: Yeah, so for that situation, if that actually would help her and the firm would support it and her in the management would, bless them. Let’s go forward. But there’s just way too many companies where as long as you’re bringing in the money you can do whatever you want. And then the other thing that happens in companies like this and I know this from law firms and other professional service firms, hospitals too where this happens with star surgeons, that they get promoted to be management where they’re overseeing the surgeons or the sales people or the lawyers or whatever, and the exact same behavior that they were rewarded for to get them the senior management position, then they try to stop it because it makes their job harder. So, I want to know whether this person is a bad apple in a good organization or is they’re all bad apples and this is just a manager who has to deal with it all of a sudden.

DAN MCGINN: My reaction was similar to yours Bob which is she’s probably paid largely on commission, so of course she cares more what the clients think because the incentive structure is done that way and number two, this is why 360-degree evaluations were created in the first place. To make a larger set of incentives play a part in how she’s rewarded. So, there’s no way for a company to say, oh we’re suddenly going to start doing 360’s, but only for you. So that structurally might be kind of hard, but the idea that in order to manage this situation, you really need to start measure it somehow. And creating some sort of a mechanism where she is educated and her performance is tied to what her staff thinks about her. That seems like it would somehow fix this.

ALISON BEARD: And she needs to be presented with concrete examples. The boss can’t say, you rub people the wrong way. People don’t think you treat them nicely. All the examples that she wrote in this letter, she needs to repeat to the employee and say, these are the three things that I’ve observed just in the last week. If you continue to behave this way there’s no way that you’re going to be paid X this year. There’s no way that you’re going to advance to my position two years from now. So, if that’s your dream, there’s a big gap between dream and reality and we do need to put you on a performance management plan. It’s very much about your personal growth. And if it’s framed that way, I want to help you be the best colleague, manager, sales person you can be. And if you don’t have your colleagues onboard to support you, you’re going to at some point stop being good with clients because you won’t, everyone will abandon you and you won’t have their help.

BOB SUTTON: Yep. I like that solution. I think that’s right. As long as the culture supports it. If the culture doesn’t support it then you’ve got a much larger reset coming.

ALISON BEARD: And then the boss, or letter writer should probably just leave this company because she’s surrounded by people who are rewarded for acting like jerks.

BOB SUTTON: Right. Unfortunately too many organizations like that. But they’re not all like that.

ALISON BEARD: I wonder too if gender plays a role in this one because this is a female who’s a standout performer and so, perhaps her behavior is tolerated in a way that a man’s wouldn’t be.

BOB SUTTON: Or, actually the research suggests the exact opposite. That men who are more temperamental and emotional that they have a much, they have much wider sort of bandwidth on how much they can get away with than women can. So, women have much narrower emotional expectations. And what will happen when women are competent, but are sort of strong willed is that they’ll be labeled with the B word and men who are labeled with the S word for being strong.

ALISON BEARD: I get that from an interpersonal perspective, but I wonder from a practical perspective if she’s one of the only women at her level, whether she’s more difficult to fire.

BOB SUTTON: Yeah, but she probably is more difficult to fire. I know it just doesn’t seem to stop any of the firms I know and the other part is the question I would ask if we want to go to the gender part, is that is she being held to different emotional standards than men? Because there’s all sorts of evidence that men can get away with much more wide range of emotions and disrespectful behavior and being, just being more hysterical than women and it’s kind of funny. I mentioned at one point I think that my wife was managing partner of a large law firm. It had as many as 1,000 lawyers and she was number two and the number one was a woman named Mary Cranston. It’s like the first Am Law 100 law firm ran by women and even in an organization like that she used to joke that when we made partnership decisions, if women were really emotional and volatile or whatever, none of us would want to make them partner, but we would let the men through as long as they had big books of business. And the result was to quote my wife, was that so, among our partners we had calm women and quite a few hysterical men. So, which I just love that sort of image because it’s the opposite of stereotypes. And this notion that women are held to a narrower and more unreasonable set of emotional standards than men is something you got to really be careful with in a situation like that.

ALISON BEARD: So, you’re saying when it’s described that she drilled a project manager about a timeline, if a man had done that, maybe it wouldn’t have been as off putting.

BOB SUTTON: Yes. But that behavior by a man or a woman might be bad in any case. So, we don’t know all the facts. But gender bias is always with us.

ALISON BEARD: So, it sounds like our advice for this boss is to really take a look at her company’s culture and make sure that she’s not working in an organization where someone who’s great with clients, but terrible to their colleagues will be rewarded and won’t really suffer any financial consequences from that behavior. Assuming that she is working in a company that wants colleagues to be collegial, she should speak with the employee more than she has. She should offer concrete examples of the bad behavior. She should perhaps suggest a 360-degree review and she should talk to that employee about envisioning the future that she wants and showing her that the way she acts now isn’t going to get her there.

BOB SUTTON: I think that’s excellent. That was beautiful. [LAUGHTER] I really like it. I’m not being bad.

ALISON BEARD: Terrific, Bob. Well, thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate it.

BOB SUTTON: That was really fun. Thank you all so much.

DAN MCGINN: That’s Bob Sutton. He’s a management professor at Stanford University. Thanks to the listeners who wrote us with their questions.

ALISON BEARD: We also want to thank Louis Weeks and Nick DePrey for composing our theme music.

DAN MCGINN: Now we want to know your questions. Send us an email with your workplace challenge and how we can help. The email address is dearhbr@hbr.org.

ALISON BEARD: On our next episode, we’re going to be talking about generational conflict. We’ve gotten lots of questions about how older and younger people can work better together.

DAN MCGINN: To get that episode automatically, go to your favorite podcast app, or wherever you’re listening to this right now, and hit subscribe.

ALISON BEARD: And if you like the show, please give us a five-star review.

DAN MCGINN: I’m Dan McGinn.

ALISON BEARD: And I’m Alison Beard. Thanks for listening to Dear HBR: