In fact, some of them really do care - they want to make you feel hurt and upset, they take pleasure in it. I think it’s more complicated than simply saying an asshole is someone who doesn’t care about other people. I'm talking about somebody who is consistently this way, who consistently treats other people this way. I would make a distinction between temporary and certified assholes, because all of us under the wrong conditions can be temporary assholes. So an asshole is someone who doesn’t care about other people? Robert Sutton In other words, someone who makes you feel like dirt. There are a lot of academic definitions, but here’s how I define it: An asshole is someone who leaves us feeling demeaned, de-energized, disrespected, and/or oppressed. Not giving a shit takes the wind out of an asshole’s sails.” Sean Illingīefore we can talk about surviving assholes, we need a proper definition of assholery. “One of the simplest - but admittedly hardest - things you can do is simply learn not to give a shit. The idea was to avoid hiring assholes if it all possible, and if one squeezed through the cracks, we would deal with him or her collectively. But if someone was acting like a jerk, we would gently shun them and make life difficult for them. Stanford’s a pretty passive-aggressive place, so it wasn’t really in your face. We would talk about this explicitly when we were making hiring decisions. Wait, what? What does a “no asshole” policy in an academic department look like? Robert Sutton I was also part of an academic department that had a no-asshole rule - seriously. I even did some ethnographic work as a telephone bill collector, where I was dealing with assholes all day long. I wasn’t using that word at the time, but that’s basically what I was doing. I’ve done a lot of research on the expression of emotion in organizational life, including how to deal with assholes. Well, there’s some intellectual logic to it. How does a Stanford professor come to spend so much of his time thinking about assholes? Robert Sutton “And when they are kind enough to tell you, listen.”Ī lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. “You have to know yourself, be honest about yourself, and rely on people around you to tell you when you’re being an asshole,” he told me. I sat down with him recently to talk about his strategies for dealing with assholes, what he means when he says we have to take responsibility for the assholes in our lives, and why he says self-awareness is key to recognizing that the asshole in your life may be you. If you’ve got an asshole boss, an asshole friend, or an asshole colleague, this book might be for you.Īsshole survival, Sutton says, is a craft, not a science, meaning one can be good or bad at it. In the new book, he offers a blueprint for managing assholes at the interpersonal level. In 2010, Sutton published The No Asshole Rule, which focused on dealing with assholes at an organizational level. He’s the author of a new book, The Asshole Survival Guide, which is basically what it sounds like: a guide for surviving the assholes in your life. Robert Sutton, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has stepped up to answer this eternal question. Wherever you live, whatever you do, odds are you’re surrounded by assholes.
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