Frontline Manager: Are you an asshole?

I think some of the employees I’ve managed thought I was a jerk. Maybe I was the right kind of jerk suggested in this article I read.

Jerry Useem in a June 2015 Atlantic article, “Why It Pays to Be a Sucker” lends credence to the old adage that the good guys finish last. He gives us the results of various studies that somehow the jerk stands out. He points to the success of two of my favorite idiots, Steve Jobs and George Patton. He leaves out two other famous jerks, Lee Iacocca and Jack ‘Neutron’ Welch. Iacocca said in his book that he confronted the engineer who told him it took time to design a convertible with the comment, “Take a sedan and cut the top off.” Jack Welch is reported to have cut General Electric’s payroll by 100,000 employees. The famous list of assholes is long and I could mention more. The article points out that being a jerk is okay if it benefits the group; not so, if the jerk is in it for his own benefit. I think I know what you mean. I was an idiot to the group.

So what kind of idiot was I as a front line manager? He had high standards for me and for the employees. When we failed to uphold standards, I addressed the issues. This could make me shake. Especially if the same employee repeatedly created the same problem.

I bet they thought I was a jerk when I took over a trade and made the corrections. These fixes were quickly addressed. In fact, one employee told me at her third annual performance review after I arrived at her office, “Jim, when you came in, we didn’t know how to get you there. We called your last office and they said give it time, you’ll understand.” ” I took this as a compliment. The employees knew that my actions were not for my benefit, but for the benefit of our group and the company.

Sometimes I had to push a person off the trampoline, this may seem like an idiot. She had a new dispatcher at the storm center. She was fully trained, but she had never worked in a major storm. She came to see how she was. She was in a panic. She said, “I can’t do this, I need help.” I said, “Yes, you can.” She said, “No, I can’t; you don’t love me.” I replied, “Yes, that’s why you will stay here and work in this area.” I’m sure she thought I was an idiot. I should have saved her. I did not. She calmed down and from then on she did a great job.

Sometimes, I was a silent idiot. I just took action and didn’t say anything to the employees. At an office I ran, I got a call from a couple of linemen who worked for me. They said they couldn’t find the break in an electrical circuit that fed Washington Camp. It was a long rural power line. I knew it well. They asked me to come help them find the problem. Both linemen were new to my office. This for me was a test of what I would do. He knew that the line had to break at a place where it ran through the forest. When I walked past them, they were leaning against the hood of their truck waiting for me. I drove to the spot where I thought the line was down. There was the line on the ground. I called them on the radio and said, “The line is behind the old school bus.” I walked past them on my way back to the office. It took me less than five minutes to find the cable. I never mentioned this to them or they never mentioned it to me. I knew they were screwing me. Maybe they thought he was an idiot, a silent idiot. I never got a call from them again saying they couldn’t find the cable.

Be careful of being a jerk outside of your workgroup. My wake-up call came one day when I was discussing a metering issue with our division’s superintendent of meters. He said, “Jim, why is it so hard to get along with you?” Wow, this got me. Did he think I was an idiot? He made no difference why he thought this, I had to do some repair work. If he thought this, what must the other employees of the company outside my work group think of me? I instantly realized that he was not creating goodwill for me or my work group. I changed. Being a jerk gives you a reputation outside of your work group that can’t be good for you. You can get away with some idiotic actions in your workgroup, you work with them every day. But being a jerk won’t work with others outside of your work group. They don’t know you or your intentions. They just think you’re hard to work with, “an asshole.”

This is my point; never be an idiot unless it has meaning beyond yourself. Be a jerk for the betterment of your group. Employees may, as a group, talk about you like a jerk; but, most will know individually that you had to be an idiot for them to accomplish their mission. So if you’re a jerk, be one for the right reasons; no, because you think you have the right to be. That makes you a real insufferable idiot.

Frontline management is hard work and employees will sometimes think you’re a jerk. If you want to remove yourself from the permanent idiot category, here are a couple of special comments that will, “Thank you” and “I appreciate your efforts.”