706: Tessa West | How to Deal with Jerks at Work

706: Tessa West | How to Deal with Jerks at Work

[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:03] Tessa West: The number one reason why people get credit for things that they didn't do is because — and we don't like to admit this — they restate your ideas in a way that is cleaner and more powerful and with more leadership style than you did. And unfortunately, that means the things stick to them and not to you. And so the best thing that you can do is actually learn how to have voice at work. And what that means is when you say something, people listen to you and those ideas stick to you.

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[00:01:30] Today, we're talking about jerks at work, the types of personalities that can make your workday miserable and even limit your career. Sometimes jerks at work seem impossible to root out or to get away from. And sometimes bosses are too dependent on the jerk to actually act against them and save everybody else. Other times they're too distracted by other things to pay attention in the first place. Maybe they're reversed to confrontation, or maybe they even feel like they can't do anything about that person. Stress at work then comes home with your family and into your marriage. And today, we'll discuss the seven types of jerks you might find at work — the kiss up, the credit stealer, the free rider, the micromanager. And of course, we'll also discuss how you handle these people or how you should handle them and what you can do to work with or around them. So they don't end up making your work life a mess or hampering your performance or your career in general.

[00:02:21] Now, here we go with Tessa West.

[00:02:27] I love how utilitarian the book is. There are seven types of jerks we see at work, which, you know, at first glance doesn't sound like enough types of jerks, but I'll defer to you on that. And then you tell us how to spot them and what to do about them. And I know we don't have time to dissect each one. But I'd love to get through as many as we can because some of these are fun, especially when we recognize somebody we know like ourselves, maybe even.

[00:02:51] Tessa West: Or that person that tortured us for 10 years when we first got a job and we just haven't let go of it.

[00:02:56] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, no, of course. I think many people are — if somebody tortures anyone for 10 years, you're never going to let it go. Like if you have a really bad boss for a really long time, you're probably not going to let it go. And so this is almost therapeutic in a way or I should say pretty therapeutic because you can find out if you have one of those or if it's just you, or if it's just the way things are. You can get an action plan for what to do about it instead of going, "Well, this is what work is like, and work sucks. Haven't you seen office space? That's useful. I think because a lot of people feel trapped by these jerks sometimes deliberately and then they lose hope and they just say, "This is my life for the next 30 years. And I should just forget about it."

[00:03:32] Tessa West: Yeah. I actually think most people fall into that category. I think we underestimate how awful day-to-day stress is.

[00:03:39] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:03:39] Tessa West: You know, we think that this is just life. And even little small things like hearing someone's footsteps, walking down the hall, or knowing that if you're going to go heat up your coffee, there's a 30 percent chance you're going to run into. You know, that jerk at work will just make you drink your coffee, cold. Those little things really add up and they really affect us in ways that we often underestimate. So I hope people feel like after reading this, they can handle these difficult people in a kind of more manageable way.

[00:04:04] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And first I wanted to spill a couple of myths about jerks at work, because I think a lot of people believe, for example, that only inexperienced people have to deal with jerks at work. So like if you're new and you're young, you're cutting your teeth, you know, you're putting into your hours, you have to deal with the micromanager, the neglectful boss, the Gaslighter, or the bulldozer, the credit stealer, the person who blames you, you know, all these different types of. What do you think? Because it's great to know that that's not necessarily the case.

[00:04:34] Tessa West: I actually think it's the opposite. I think it's the older people who've been working for a longer time that don't have these strategies because they come from a generation where learning conflict management was a soft skill. It's not prioritized. No one actually cares if you know how to say something nicely to someone and the number of people who come up to me who are in the C-suite that start as this with, "This is embarrassing, but I don't know how to handle this conflict in my team. These people are accusing each other of stealing ideas and it's super stressful. And I'm disengaged from all of them." I mean, that's actually the most common type of person. Young people come to me and they say, "What are you talking about? Work's going to be awesome. You know, everyone cares about well-being now. We're not going to run into these issues at work." And then, you know, in six months, come talk to me, but it's actually older people who've been working for a while that are a little bit worn down that are like, "God, I wish I knew some of these things a long time ago or that we're even allowed to talk about it.

[00:05:25] Jordan Harbinger: My dad's not here right now. And I don't plan on asking him because I don't want to know his answer, but I can tell you already that his answer would be, "You're just lucky to have a job. Quit crying."

[00:05:34] Tessa West: Yeah.

[00:05:34] Jordan Harbinger: I had a boss that whipped us with metal objects or something and I'm like, okay, fine. But you know, you can't do that anymore. It's not 1968 at a Ford plant.

[00:05:41] Tessa West: Yeah. I mean, my dad was in the army. He was a military guy. It was very much a "suck it up" or "you go tell that person off, you know, you stick your claim," so that they don't come and bother you later kind of mentality. And, you know, they all drank way too much—

[00:05:54] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:05:54] Tessa West: —and smoked and died of heart attacks in the early '60s. So we don't want to end up like them.

[00:05:58] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. There's a lot of things that we probably shouldn't copy from that generation. And maybe yeah, like drinking on the job at Ford and breaking the glass bottle and putting it in the car door so that it goes down the assembly line. Like there are real stories like that. And I'm like, "I don't think we need to copy all that, including our management techniques from back." I guess this is all it's to say that time in the workplace seldom includes behavioral management skills. Right? You might learn more about — like, when I worked on Wall Street and doing law, I learned more about documents, but people weren't like, you know, when a partner is throwing books at you, you should not just accept that as part of your job. That is not okay. They don't really go through that.

[00:06:35] Tessa West: Yeah. Or it was okay, right? It was, you suck it up—

[00:06:38] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:38] Tessa West: —because that's the boss or, you know, that's the person the boss loves and you just deal with it. And yeah, we learn technical skills. We don't learn people management. We get promoted because we're good at old jobs. Not because we know how to actually talk to people or give feedback or do any of these things.

[00:06:53] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:54] Tessa West: And I think most people suck at it and I suck at it. I'm not even naturally good at these things. And I study these things and I have found myself in like really awful situations where I've been like a total jerk to people. And I should know better.

[00:07:04] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You should.

[00:07:05] Tessa West: Being a social psychologist doesn't prevent you from being a total jerk. I don't know what does, so I think we can all be this person.

[00:07:11] Jordan Harbinger: Exactly. Yeah. I think that's a little scary, but it seems definitely true. Another common misconception is jerks at work are problem employees with no real skills and it is easy to villainize these people. But the unfortunate truth is, what? That most jerks at least have some skills because they got into a position to become a jerk in the first place.

[00:07:29] Tessa West: Yeah. They have skills. They're usually good at something. You know, maybe it's technical skills, maybe they have some idiosyncratic skill no one else has, but I think no one wakes up in the morning and looks in the mirror and says, "I want to make Jordan's life hell today. That's what I'm going to do," because it doesn't actually help them get ahead usually. In fact, most of these people, their own behaviors, their jerk behaviors, are just as harmful to them as they are to everybody. We forget that because we think that they're motivated to destroy us, but you know they usually aren't. They're usually products of their environment or they've been encouraged to behave this way for one reason or another.

[00:08:03] Jordan Harbinger: Don't worry, by the way, if you're listening to this and you relate to the jerk at work, because would you agree that all of us kind of maybe have some of these personality traits deep down? Maybe it's turned down to two or one or even zero in some folks, but it's not necessarily disruptive of our work life. And yet, I don't know, I feel like if you look around and you can't see the jerk at work, maybe you are the jerk at work.

[00:08:25] Tessa West: Yeah. I mean, I think all of us can be the jerk. So I'm not a very positive person. I'm a pretty negative person. Everything I study is the dark side of human nature. Even people who are motivated to help people can become jerks. They can become victims of time thieves who suck them dry. So they end up ignoring the people who report to them. They don't give the feedback in a timely manner. So even people who are actually motivated to do good can turn into jerks to other people if they're not paying attention.

[00:08:51] So jerk is very much an eye of the beholder's word. It's not that you are a jerk it's that someone sees you as a jerk and it could be because you are doing things that help others and accidentally neglecting someone, or you think that level of attention is useful, but they think you're a micromanager. So jerk, I think is really just kind of a loose word to describe you're doing something to piss somebody off and you might not even mean to be doing that. You might actually be hurting someone while helping another person.

[00:09:18] Jordan Harbinger: Let's talk about the kiss up / kick down. This is one of the most common, or at least the way the book starts off with the kiss up / kick down. And we've all kind of met these people. Tell me about two-faced Dave, the shoe salesman.

[00:09:29] Tessa West: So I sold shoes at Nordstrom for a very long time in college. And sales has full of these kinds of people who are really good at impressing the boss. They seem like people who are on your team, people who do really well with customers, but they'll really sabotage you to get ahead. And I think part of that is kind of the structure of how sales work. It's very competitive. But Dave would sabotage people. He would hide popular shoe sizes. He would steal customer names during the anniversary sale, things like that. And I think it is a common type of person in very cutthroat work environments. And, you know, I led with that chapter because I clearly am not over Dave. He still bugs me to this day

[00:10:07] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:07] Tessa West: And I wanted to monetize that in some way. And so, you know, he really got the better of me and I'm still kind of pissed off that I didn't figure out how to outwit him in a timely manner. I didn't say the smart, witty things to him, you know, in the moment. But I think a lot of people, especially younger people when they're starting work and highly competitive people and law firms and on Wall Street, they run into these folks a lot. It's pretty common.

[00:10:30] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. This reminded me of people in law school who would be really nice if there was a professor around, or maybe they would offer to help you with something, but then they would hide the book required for everyone else to do the assignment. There were times when professors would have to go, "So I'm giving an extension on this assignment. And the reason is because, and you know who you are, someone hid the book and only a few people were able to complete it. So it's one of you who hit it and it's not going to be that hard for me to figure out. And I'm going to make sure that you pay for it later. But now I have to give everyone an extra week to do this assignment. And if you hide the book and I find out about it, I'm going to get you in as much trouble as the law school will allow me to do." And I just remember thinking who is the kook who hid a law book in the library? That the librarian then had to go and find, I mean, to which I'm sure was not easy. The level of almost like sociopathic competition at that level is banana. You're right. It does sort of seem to appear in what would you call this, like a social comparison orientation where somebody has to be worse in order for them to be better. It can't just be like, wow, everyone did well. That's not good enough for them.

[00:11:35] Tessa West: Yeah. I mean that person is probably partner now, right?

[00:11:37] Jordan Harbinger: Maybe.

[00:11:38] Tessa West: Like get in a top firm because they knew to hide the metaphorical book —

[00:11:41] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:11:42] Tessa West: —anytime that they needed to, to get ahead. And I think in zero-sum occupations where only a few make it to the top. And then the people at the top get a hundred times more than the people at the next level down. That's where you really see it. It's not just a hierarchy. It's a really uneven distribution of resources hierarchy where the CEO makes 500 times what the CFO makes.

[00:12:03] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:04] Tessa West: Or, you know, even someone in a senior leadership role. And they really just don't care though. They're willing to kind of do anything. It's a little bit embarrassing, but they don't feel the embarrassment the same way we do. They don't feel that shame. They're like, "Yeah, I hid the book. Guess what? It worked."

[00:12:15] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:12:16] Tessa West: You know, it's a little embarrassing, but it got them to where they wanted to go. At least, probably five times out of 10 actually works.

[00:12:22] Jordan Harbinger: You call the status acuity in the book, right? Is that what we're talking about right now?

[00:12:25] Tessa West: Yeah. I mean, that's your ability to read the room. And I actually have some research showing that is a real skill. Some people, we can just watch groups of people interacting with total strangers, and they can tell you who has status and who doesn't. And we're actually able to measure that just by having people watch these videoed interactions of random groups. It predicts their behavior a year later. It is a skill to be able to know who has status. And the reason why it's critical is because you know who you can actually jockey for status against. I know to take on you, but not somebody else. And I pay attention to who listens to you and who ignores you, who interrupts you and who doesn't. And that way, you know, they really get away with kissing up and kicking down because they know who our safe targets. That's really what that skill buys them.

[00:13:07] Jordan Harbinger: What do these people do in groups versus one-on-one? This is like, one of those tells where it sort of seems like you know you're dealing with this person when.

[00:13:14] Tessa West: Yeah. There tend to be two-faced. So one-on-one, they tend to be much worse than if high-status people are present. So the real key variable there is, is there a person in power in the room? If there's a person in power in the room, they tend to be very nice. They tend to be complimentary. They actually tend to highlight your contributions to the team. When it's one on one, they're kind of more demeaning. They make you question yourself. So they're a little like a gaslighter.

[00:13:38] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:13:38] Tessa West: They question your expertise and your knowledge, and they really want you to understand that they're the big dog here. They're the one who actually matters. So out of all the jerks, they're the most, two-faced, they're the sort of, you know, all the world is the stage and you just act the person that you need to be in that moment.

[00:13:52] Jordan Harbinger: They often seem to be clamoring for power from bosses that maybe aren't paying attention to what they're doing. A lot of people are doing that. So maybe that's not exactly an obvious red flag, but the way they do it seems to like constant undermining. It's a little opportunistic, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.

[00:14:06] Tessa West: Yeah. So their real talent is in finding overworked bosses and offering to offload communications from that boss. So where bosses really screw up is allowing kiss up / kick downers, to meet with all their direct reports for them to have li those weekly check-ins with the interns, by becoming that person who then is the sole kind of communicator between the boss and everybody else, they're handed a whole bunch of soft power and bosses don't really realize that. And so they are opportunists. They find bosses who are overworked and exhausted, and they say, "Let me just take some of that off your workload, for now, let me handle some of those meetings for you." They love to handle meetings and then it allows them to control the narrative of what's going on, which is actually really smart.

[00:14:50] Jordan Harbinger: That is smart.

[00:14:51] Tessa West: And who doesn't want to hand over a meeting? Like we're in this era now where my LinkedIn feed is full of articles called no-more meetings, kiss up / kick downer is like, "Yeah, no more meetings."

[00:14:59] Jordan Harbinger: No more meetings.

[00:15:00] Tessa West: Like who would get in there?

[00:15:01] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You know what this reminds — do you remember that show Parker Lewis Can't Lose? I don't know how old you are. Remember that show?

[00:15:06] Tessa West: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:15:07] Jordan Harbinger: Like three people listening right now remember that show. I'm glad that you do. So there was a guy in that show who was the principal's little pet and he had like long black hair and he was always in her office and he'd be like, "I'm going to get you, Parker." And he always had plans, right? This is that guy, right? Where he's like—

[00:15:21] Tessa West: Always have plans.

[00:15:22] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. He's got a plan. And he's like the evil little sidekick. And he is always running something in the school. And the principal is delegating him power, but of course, Parker Lewis and the crew, they always end run that guy. That's the whole show. So, this is kind of like that guy in real life, right? He's like, "Oh yeah, I'll run the meeting. No. Oh, don't worry. I'll plan this for you." And then it's like, "Oh, I want to have Jordan on my team." And then suddenly I'm incompetent. I didn't do this. He runs in and saves the day and I'm like, "He never told me I needed to go pick up a bunch of cookies from the store." And then he just happened to have a bunch of cookies from the store in his car. After saying that I forgot to. Is that not suspicious to anyone else? And the idea is the boss is like, "Well, thank goodness we have so-and-so on the team because Jordan, man, that guy can't even tie his shoes." This is like their plan over and over and over and people listening right now, I assume are nodding because every workplace has one of these, right?

[00:16:09] Tessa West: Yeah. Every workplace, I mean, I started off selling shoes. Academia is full of these people. You know, someone who tells the meeting starting in a half hour later than usual.

[00:16:18] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:16:18] Tessa West: They show up and everyone looks at you. Like, you're this huge slacker and yeah, I think it's very common. It's sad, and these people, it's like, it's sad.

[00:16:27] Jordan Harbinger: It is a little sad, like solidify power, hold on for life. This is all I have in life. I'm the guy with the key to the filing cabinet. And I'm not going to let you take it. So they grab power early, okay, but is that always a red flag? Like don't natural leaders do this too, but aren't necessarily toxic people?

[00:16:43] Tessa West: Yeah. This is a real tricky one. So grabbing power early is something I both tell you to look out for as a red flag and also something that you should try to do to prevent from being a jerk. So I talk out of both sides of my mouth. I think it's you're right. I think red flags for grabbing power early, it's always good to assert yourself to organize the team, to have the veneer of a leader so that everything else you say is kind of seen through that leadership lens.

[00:17:08] When it kind of becomes jerky behavior is when that person makes themselves invaluable to the team and they're very reluctant to hand over work or passcodes or, you know, whatever to anybody else, even though it would help everyone to kind of spread the workload. So people like bulldozers do this and people like credit stealers do this. They make themselves invaluable to the team in almost arbitrary ways. No one can access those resumes because so-and-so holds the passcodes or they wrote the code to the program, those kinds of things that a company grabbing the power early and we're usually very eager to just hand over that stuff, because it's pain in the ass. Nobody actually wants to do it.

[00:17:47] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:17:47] Tessa West: Right. And I think that's kind of where those red flags, it's the bridging of those two things. That I think is dangerous.

[00:17:53] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that is interesting. My mom gave me the key to the filing cabinet example because there was a secretary at her school where she worked as a teacher and there was some filing cabinet. I don't remember what it was for, but there was one secretary who had it. And if you didn't kiss this woman's ass, every single opportunity she would never let you do it. She was always too busy to open it for you. "Oh, I have to go get it. It's in another room and I'm in the middle of something." And so my mom was always like, "I have to be really nice to Millie," or whatever and go in there and be like, "Hey, how are you? Oh, a student gave me an apple. Do you want it? I'm full from lunch. By the way, can I get in the filing cabinet? I need an HR form," or whatever the heck it is. "Oh, of course." But if she just decided she didn't like you or hadn't had her coffee, it was like, you're not getting that form until after labor day weekend or whatever the hell, because she didn't feel like dealing with you. Like, it was annoying enough for my mom to tell me that as a kid. Right?

[00:18:44] Tessa West: Yeah. My mom had a filing cabinet too. She was also a teacher. There was always these filing cabinets. I don't know all the power was concentrated into a filing cabinet.

[00:18:52] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:18:52] Tessa West: And I would ask her what's in the filing cabinet and it was just like forms. I'm like, "Couldn't you just copy them yourself and like keep extras?" That didn't occur to her, but—

[00:18:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:18:59] Tessa West: Yeah, there are these gatekeepers of stuff that do this as a way of grabbing power.

[00:19:08] Jordan Harbinger: You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Tessa West. We'll be right back.

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[00:22:29] Now back to Tessa West.

[00:22:32] The problem with this sort of thinking, though, if you are the kiss up / kick down, status isn't always stable in any organization, big or small, right?

[00:22:41] Tessa West: Yeah.

[00:22:41] Jordan Harbinger: So somebody who's useless to you today, they might be really important tomorrow. This is almost like a movie subplot where someone is mean to somebody. And then they find out he's like the head of search at the company that they work for the head of whatever. The short-term thinking would have consequences that you would think would catch up to these people.

[00:22:58] Tessa West: And my guy definitely caught up to him. In fact, he actually ended up stealing from Nordstrom.

[00:23:03] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:23:04] Tessa West: As a last-ditch effort, but yeah, it does catch up with people I think eventually. It usually takes a while and it's usually serendipitous when it does happen. And so I think we're seeing a little bit more of it now that people are kind of hopping from job to job. But historically people would stay in the same job forever and they would just kind of slowly climb up. They actually didn't climb up and over that often. They stayed within the same company, the same kind of hierarchy, and they got away with it for like 20 years before it became a real problem. I think now people hop from group to group, from team to team. And in academia, you can be a grad student one day and then, you know, a professor or another and in charge of somebody. And I've actually seen that happen. It's not so linear anymore. I think people now say, "Well, of course, you're going to get caught because we were used to these kinds of non-linear work structures."

[00:23:48] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:23:48] Tessa West: But back in the day, I mean, my mom was a teacher. She had the same principal for 30 years. And that person didn't lose their job until they were dead. And then it was the next person she knew. Everyone has a very predictable path. And so you could safely kiss up and kick down for a very long time.

[00:24:03] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Now it seems like a, that's a tough game to play these days. If they're seeking bosses that they can exploit and that want to hand off power and duties, you end up with this, I think, you call it the toxic protege. The guy from Parker Lewis with a long greasy hair. I mean, that's the kiss up / kick down that ends up being the boss's pet that everyone hates. And it's only a good position while that boss is around. And as soon as that person leaves and your cover's gone, it's like communist China, you get thrown in the gulag. The next guy's in charge, right? It's over. You have no allies. So how do we then handle this? It seems like the idea would be to create a bunch of allies that can rally around us in some way.

[00:24:40] Tessa West: Yeah. I think our tendencies to complain to our friends and to complain to our close others, but you kind of have to get over this idea that the best people to complain to are your friends at work.

[00:24:50] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:24:51] Tessa West: I actually think most of us have deep social networks, but not broad ones. We don't know a lot of people outside of our immediate circle. This got really bad during the pandemic. We didn't talk to anyone outside of our circle. The more people you know, who are like, not just your boss, but your boss's colleague, that's worked with your boss for 10. Or, you know, people who are onboarded five years before you, but aren't in your immediate organizational silo or whatever, but one over those are the type of people that you actually want to meet with because the wider spread the problem, the more your boss is going to care.

[00:25:20] And so your goal is to get your boss to care. That really should be your only goal. It shouldn't be to like tell this person off or to scare them off or to find a new victim for them. It's to get your boss to hear you out. And most bosses don't want to hear you out. They like this person. This person's doing good work. In order for them to care, they have to feel like this person is a cancer. They're creating a widespread problem. It's not just you, this complaining and being a baby about it. It's a lot of. And it could be even more people and you have to scare them a little bit. And the best way to do that is to kind of form these arm's length allies who are outside of your immediate circle that who do know this person.

[00:25:53] Jordan Harbinger: I guess also finding other people who are a victim of that person would help too. Right? Like if they complained to your friend and they said, "Oh yeah, well you think you got it bad. You should see what he did to Janice. He told her the meeting was canceled. She didn't show up. And now everyone's mad at her," and it's like, "Well, okay."

[00:26:07] Tessa West: Yeah.

[00:26:08] Jordan Harbinger: As an attorney, I'm always like document everything because that's what evidence is.

[00:26:11] Tessa West: Yeah.

[00:26:11] Jordan Harbinger: Right? Like, yes, you said it. But if you've got a journal of the number of times, this person has not allowed you to get into the filing cabinet or told you a meeting was at a different time than it was in an email. And it turned out to be wrong. It starts to look like a deliberate pattern. If you've got May 25th, won't let me get the form, form due tomorrow. Then, it's not just you whining about somebody. It's like, "They have it out for me. Here's the evidence."

[00:26:34] Tessa West: Yeah. And I think you hit on this important point that it feels like whining. Each of those instances feels like one, right?

[00:26:39] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:26:39] Tessa West: This is why we don't document. I mean, for people like you and I, documenting seems obvious. Of course, you're going to document, but I feel stupid saying they told me the meeting was 30 minutes later and I don't think it was, but after this happens 50 times, it really does look like a pattern. And you just have to remind yourself when you're documenting these small acts that they will add up. You know, over time, eventually, you see this pattern, but don't feel like no thing is too small to document. You might not have to act on it, but just write it down before you forget about it.

[00:27:07] Jordan Harbinger: I think a pro tip with documenting, by the way, is use your personal account first of all, not a work shared drive because that could go horribly wrong. But if you use Google Docs, then when they say, "She could have written all that yesterday. Look, they just used different pens." You can look at the version history and it's like, "No, no. Google says this was started a year ago and was edited 48 different times." And there's no faking that. It's like there's no, then no doubt that you didn't just write that over the weekend to get somebody fired. It seems like approaching your boss is a logical next step to this. Once you've got some evidence together, you maybe have some allies. You obviously, at some point have to tell your boss, right?

[00:27:43] Tessa West: I think you do have to tell your boss. I think the telling of the boss is the toughest part. I've screwed this up many times. I've led with the why I hate this person and why they're torturing me—

[00:27:52] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[00:27:52] Tessa West: —angle. And it's actually better to lead with what that person does that they do well because it creates a shared reality. And no one likes this. It sucks to say there, "You know, for me, Dave sells a ton of shoes. He's really good at that. Or he is really motivated to care about X, Y, and Z." But it leads, it shows that you have perspective and that you're not just being kind of a baby about the whole thing.

[00:28:13] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:28:13] Tessa West: That you actually can acknowledge someone's strengths when they are there and that will actually help your boss see you as a more mature complainer, I think, than just kind of leading with that and then leave your feelings out. I mean, people don't like this advice. They want to talk about their feelings.

[00:28:28] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:28:28] Tessa West: But I feel hurt. I feel embarrassed. I feel disrespected. Who cares?

[00:28:32] Jordan Harbinger: Not your boss.

[00:28:33] Tessa West: Talk about what they did.

[00:28:35] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:28:35] Tessa West: Your boss does not care. I mean, great for you if your boss cares. Most bosses will pretend to care, but they don't actually care. Lead with what the person did and why it's disruptive, not just to you, but to the whole team. Use that language, that sort of behavior-based approach, and try to not editorialize it. Don't say why they did it. Don't talk about that they did it to be mean or to destroy you. Just say what they did and that's it. And you've documented it. Keep it clean and clear. Your boss doesn't have much to argue with when you do this. And then just kinda let them sit with it. Let them marinate on that for a little bit and don't push them on it right away because they're going to have to do probably some strategic maneuvering to figure out what to do next.

[00:29:14] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's interesting. I think a lot of people might drop the ball when it comes time to wait for some action, because it's like, "Well, I reported this on Friday and it's Tuesday and why is he still working here?" And it's like, "I haven't even had time to look at this. And over the next few weeks, I'm going to ask everybody during their reviews that they're coming into my office for it. Anyway, if they've heard or seen anything about this and then in a month or two, I might have an opinion on this that goes your way or not." But how long do we wait? How do we know when our boss is just like, "Oh yeah, I'm right on that"? And it's like, "Okay, it's been six months. You obviously don't care. How do we know if they're doing anything or not?

[00:29:48] Tessa West: That's a good question. I like to ask bosses just for short, two-word updates even if it's just to say, "I'm still working on this." And I would ask them at the end of the meeting, "Is it okay if I check in with you in two weeks just to see where things are going? I understand that for confidentiality reasons, you might not be able to tell me anything, but just to let me know if things are going." And ask them at the end of these meetings, "Is it okay if I ask you again in X days?" Just to sort of warn them that it's coming and then just kind of keep up with that communication. I think that's also another form of record keeping. So if your boss is dropping the ball, then you're like, yes, eventually you're going to have to raise this issue and it's going to have to go up the ladder. But sending those really brief, I'm a huge fan of nothing more than 50-word emails that just say, "Just checking in. Is this still in progress?" the end and tell them that this is coming.

[00:30:33] Jordan Harbinger: If we are the boss, how do we avoid hiring these people in the first place? And part two, what do we do if they're already in the organization? I guess we can try and fire them, but can we also correct their behavior? Like, "Hey, I'm onto you. Quit your bullsh*t," basically.

[00:30:45] Tessa West: Yeah. I think, for bosses, don't hand over communications to these people, I think early detection is really hard, partly because no one actually contacts references. It's pretty rare to actually do a deep dive unless you're hiring for someone in the C-suite to do a deep dive about what the reputation is at their prior workplaces. That information is hard to get, but I think you can also, as a boss, there's a whole bunch of kind of early detection strategies you can use when you talk to your employees.

[00:31:14] So don't, when you have meetings with people, say, "How's everything going? Is everybody getting along?" Too broad, no one's going to talk to you. Ask them very specific questions that are designed to detect problems. "How's everything going with Dave on the floor? Do you guys take turns with customers or does he take three customers and then you take a customer?" Like really specific questions designed to sort of detect that kiss up / kick down or behavior, but not impression formation questions. Don't ask if you like someone or if you get along with them or if they're nice. Who cares about that stuff? It's too vague. Ask about very specific behaviors that are usually red flags for kiss up / kick downers and people will be much more honest with you about behaviors and about impressions.

[00:31:55] Jordan Harbinger: I have a feeling this is going to be one of those episodes where people say, "Oh, I knew I didn't like that guy. And I couldn't figure out why until I heard this episode. And the book has even more practicals about people that do bad things at work and how to handle them. And one of the next ones is the credit stealer. Now, this seems so, so very common. And we usually look for credit theft coming from the outside, but you say it's the inside where it usually happens. I don't know if we need to define credit stealer, right? We've all seen someone be like, "Don't I have so many great ideas." And you're like, "This is my idea," or, "This was Tess's idea." Tell me a little bit about this because these people can be a little, they're pretty sly, sometimes when they do this.

[00:32:32] Tessa West: The ones that we have to worry about are very sly. They will take credit for ideas that are often expressed to them in private. And so these tend to be good friends, often bosses. In fact, the number one complaint I get since I wrote this book is, "It's my boss that stole credit for my idea."

[00:32:46] Jordan Harbinger: Yikes.

[00:32:46] Tessa West: And then they can go to their bosses and take credit. And you're not even in the room. So you have no idea that this is happening, especially bosses that have run out of ideas. They love to steal credit from their own team members, their own direct reports, but they also grant credit. And so kind of one of the more surprising things about credit stealers is just when you think they're going to out themselves as being the loser with no ideas, they will give you credit for work that sometimes you didn't even do in a very public setting. And this is an impression-management technique, and I think it can really work wonders on making them look like a good person, a conscientious team player who is very respectful of other people's ideas and contributions. And that's just part of their game. So, I know I make these people sound Game of Thrones level scary, but the most dangerous credit stealers I've run into who have covered their tracks by credit granting. Sometimes like in academia, it's like in publications and papers, they'll say you did things you didn't do. And you're like, "What?" but it's to make themselves look good more than you.

[00:33:47] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Because then if you complain, it's like, "Well, he gave you credit for this and this." And then you're like, "But I didn't do that. I did the important part of the thing that he took credit."

[00:33:54] Tessa West: Stop whining you got credit.

[00:33:55] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Like, let's not split hairs, Tessa. You're so petty, right?

[00:33:59] Tessa West: Yeah, exactly.

[00:33:59] Jordan Harbinger: So how do we handle this? How do we handle the credit stealer? They're almost playing chess at some level. Maybe it's not 3D chess, but it's still chess. If they're giving you credit and then you're like, "Well, crap, now I can't complain," but you still should because they're still stealing your ideas at work.

[00:34:13] Tessa West: Yeah. I mean, I think, in the moment we tend to want to try to get back credit once it's stolen. How do I steal it back from someone who just stole something from me?

[00:34:21] Jordan Harbinger: During their speech about how you're great. You're like, "No—"

[00:34:23] Tessa West: Yeah.

[00:34:24] Jordan Harbinger: "I'm better than that."

[00:34:25] Tessa West: I'm not great. And you stole my idea six months ago." I mean, you look like a crazy person.

[00:34:29] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:34:29] Tessa West: It's more offensive stuff. It's more learning how to have what I call voice at work, walking into the meeting. So the number one reason why people get credit for things that they didn't do is because — and we don't like to admit this — they restate your ideas in a way that is cleaner and more powerful and with more leadership style than you did. And unfortunately, that means that things stick to them and not to you. And so the best thing that you can do is actually learn how to have voice at work. And what that means is when you say something, people listen to you and those ideas stick to you. And the only way to really get voice is by learning how to become an advice tie at work.

[00:35:05] So that's someone that boss goes to, to get things done, to get the gossip, to learn who's easy to work with, and who's hard to work with. Informal knowledge, you know, sometimes we call a hidden curriculum, all that stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with the thing that you're getting your credit stolen over, those are the things that actually give you voice. Then once you walk into that meeting, your ideas will stick to you. So actually the solutions don't have anything to do with getting credit at all. They had to do with becoming someone that others listen to and care about the opinions of especially people in power.

[00:35:37] And so when we try to think about how do I get credit from ideas, how do you become someone that's invaluable to the boss? How do you become someone? The boss can go to and say, "Just tell me what's going on between Tom and Stacy right now. Like, what's up with those two?" It doesn't seem like it's relevant to credit granting, but it is because now the boss listens to you and when you speak up, your ideas will stick to you and not to another person it's very difficult to steal credit from someone who has voice.

[00:36:00] Jordan Harbinger: Is this what you call becoming an advice tie?

[00:36:03] Tessa West: Yeah.

[00:36:03] Jordan Harbinger: Where you're kind of like, hopefully not the evil guy from Parker Lewis, but you're doing it in a positive way. Right? You're becoming a trusted resource. I think the example you gave in the book was — was that the coffee shop guy? That wasn't really him. That was a different role, right?

[00:36:17] Tessa West: He is an advice tie, but yeah, I went to him for kiss up / kick downer, but he also was an advice tie. He knew who to go to and how to get things done.

[00:36:25] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:36:26] Tessa West: What days of the week you should meet with the boss and what days of the week you should avoid the boss? Like those little kinds of things actually really help.

[00:36:31] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's useful. So rather than kissing up to the boss, you become useful to everyone. Possibly, especially the boss. And then ideally you don't use it to screw over your colleagues and you share the info with others. Like that's the difference between becoming an advice tie and somebody who is stealing credit or who is a kiss up / kick down, yeah?

[00:36:50] Tessa West: Yeah. It's all in what you do with that, right? Both probably are advice ties, but you just are doing it to protect yourself versus doing it to actually steal.

[00:36:59] Jordan Harbinger: Right. And then, okay, don't handle it dramatically, "So no toast to the company Christmas party about how James actually didn't do anything. And everyone hates him and happy new year to everyone, by the way, except for that good for nothing wanker James." Make sure you handle it in a more professional way by getting voice. It's almost like if someone steals credit, you almost can't really, unless it's a huge deal, you almost have to let it go and then build voice. Would you recommend that versus like trying to correct the record all the time?

[00:37:23] Tessa West: Yeah, I think correcting the record is really hard. I think you could be better at record keeping. And I talk about in teams where credit granting is really hard, which is like every team. Everyone thinks they contributed to all the stuff. I think that yes, record keeping is key, but trying to constantly correct credit stealing is telling you something. It means that no one's listening to you. If people are always stealing credit for your stuff, that means you have low power and low status. And no one's actually listening to you when you talk or you're overstating your contributions. So I think we have to acknowledge our own weakness, our own role here. Why is it that everyone steals credit from me all the time? That's because I have a really annoying voice and no one likes to listen to me and they put me on mute on Zoom. That's why.

[00:38:02] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:03] Tessa West: And that's hard to admit to ourselves, I think most of the time,

[00:38:07] Jordan Harbinger: I like the idea. And you mentioned this in the book that some people steal credit, but it's actually not deliberate. Right? When they work in the same space, they come up with very similar ideas. And this I think is a brilliant point. The best way to have different ideas is to give yourself different skills and different experiences that other people do not have. This way other people can't come up with similar ideas, and it will also be more obvious if they steal one of your ideas, because it's based on your unique experience and background. And I thought that was really insightful and useful.

[00:38:39] Tessa West: Yeah. I think a lot of us think of ourselves as unique snowflakes that have special contributions, but at the end of the day, most of us are replaceable.

[00:38:46] Jordan Harbinger: The cold truth.

[00:38:47] Tessa West: I am a cold truth kind of girl. We think that, "Oh my god, if I were to leave this organization, everything would fall apart. They wouldn't find someone who can do what I can do." And nine times out of 10, that's just not true. So if you want your ideas to stick to you and not to other people, and if you just want to have better, more interesting ideas that do make you invaluable, they're going to have to up your game. You can't have the same skills, everybody else has. With the same exact record and the same exact resume, you're going to have to think outside the box. And the best career advice I ever gotten, even in academia is have skills others don't have, so people need you. I thought of myself as just wonderful on my own. I'm smart. I'm interesting. Now, what can you give people that they don't already have, you know, that they actually need skills that they don't have? And I think that's really critical for protecting yourself from credit stealing.

[00:39:33] Jordan Harbinger: The idea of credit stealing actually reminds me — in copyright law, there's this idea, and I forgot the name of what this concept is, but there's the idea that you can come up with something strikingly similar to something else, but have done so independently. And I think, the case law was like the Beatles. Have you heard about this? They come up with a song.

[00:39:48] Tessa West: Yeah.

[00:39:48] Jordan Harbinger: It's remarkably similar to another song, but they were like in Paris, France or something in 1960, whatever. They could not possibly have known about this other song that was being written in the United States. They didn't know the person, there was no phone calls between them or anybody that knew them. So the court ruled, "Hey, this is just like bad luck for you because the Beatles came up with the same melody at the same time and they made a bunch of money."

[00:40:10] Tessa West: Yeah. I mean that happened on a dating website. I can't remember which one, but it was basically the same ruling that two people came up with like a match.com-type idea at the same time it was in the air, right? It was part of the zeitgeist.

[00:40:22] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:40:22] Tessa West: It was to sort of do this online dating thing. And one group tried to sue the other and it was just clear that they were working in the same universe. Of course, they're going to come up with that. Two people are going to come up with that same idea at the same time. You just don't want to be in that situation too often in life, I think. And that's why you have to kind of be more heterogeneous with your skills.

[00:40:39] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:40:40] Tessa West: And more interesting than other people.

[00:40:45] Jordan Harbinger: This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Tessa West. We'll be right back.

[00:40:49] This episode is sponsored in part by Grammarly. Your writing can make an impression based on how competent and articulate you come across. Let's be honest. We freaking judge people when they use the wrong there and stuff. I mean, I do, all right. Grammarly is a tool I use every single day in all of my written communication because I want to save you from people like me. It's way more powerful than a spelling and grammar checker. Grammarly is like having a professional editor, giving you suggestions gives you corrections as you write, but it's not just spell check. It's not just a grammar check. Grammarly helps by proposing rewrites that are more concise and clear, identifying weak adjectives, you know, that overused crap that sort of cliche. It provides better alternatives. Avoids embarrassing typos and errors I may have overlooked, which is always kind of a lifesaver. Grammarly even has features to help with the tone of a message. So if you want to come across as friendly or confident or more analytical, how do you want your writing to be received? I find that helpful as well. It always says I could be a little more friendly. I wonder what they mean by that. Grammarly works seamlessly in the background across multiple platforms and devices. So it works in your Google Docs and your email. It'll help you step up your game at work school wherever else you need your communication to sound as polished as possible. I've been using it for years. I'm a huge fan.

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[00:42:13] Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored by European Wax Center. You don't need a summer getaway to transport yourself. Book your smooth escape with the wax experts at European Wax Center. A fresh wax transports you to a smooth state of mind where you feel effortlessly confident. If you're headed somewhere fun, you want to look and feel good on your trip, make your way to your local European Wax Center beforehand. Their wax passes are a great deal. Jen always gets those. If you're new to waxing, rest assured that they offer personalized consultations. So you can find the wax that works for you. I guess there's different waxes. And they have strict hygiene standards, so you'll be literally in the best sanitized and glove-covered hands possible. European Wax Center's certified wax specialists are expertly trained in prepping, protecting, and pampering your skin. Whether it be your back shoulders, legs, nose, or brow, or in my case, probably all of the above. The secret is their signature comfort wax. It's a proprietary blend of bees wax source from Europe and other skin soothing ingredients that allows them to remove hair easily for a virtually pain-free experience.

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[00:43:47] Now for the rest of my conversation with Tessa West.

[00:43:52] Doing those stacks of skills where you're really, maybe you're like a B in different areas and you stack those together. It's really hard for someone to then claim they came up with this idea that you had when you brought it from the world of competitive luge or something. And you brought that into your shoe company. It's like, well, I'm pretty sure it was the luge guy who came up with this and not the guy who has never walked more than a mile in his life. It seems like somebody stole this idea from someone else.

[00:44:18] Tessa West: Yeah.

[00:44:18] Jordan Harbinger: The other idea that makes this, I like this concept as well, because I think a lot of people get upset that their ideas are getting stolen, but again, spotlight effect, right? We think other people are paying attention to us when they are barely listening. I mean, especially now in Zoom meetings, it's like they are playing whatever today's equivalent of mind sweeper is. They're not paying attention to you. So it leads us to think that other people are taking our ideas when they, it was in one ear and out the other if they heard it in the first place. And you should track ideas in writing if they're important and maybe let it go, if not. For me, sometimes in the past ego has made us think, some of us, that our ideas are uniquely brilliant when really they're just so stinking obvious for people who have all seen the same data or trends.

[00:45:00] Tessa West: Yeah. I think, you know, we all live in our own heads. We anticipate what we said. We said the thing, and then we look at other people and look at their reactions after we said the thing. And then after we go through that process, that anticipatory stress of saying the thing, they're like gaining information about our reputation based on their reactions, then we space out. So if someone talks to us after that, and they have a brilliant idea, we're actually coming down from that kind of what we call motivated performance situation. And we're actually really spaced out. We're not listening at all.

[00:45:32] It's a little bit like in high school, when you had to present your country project or something, maybe more like fourth grade, your country project. After you go, you sit down, you don't pay attention to anyone else's country project and adults are the same way. And we're really not listening after we're done saying our thing. Yet 20 minutes later, someone gets credit for the thing that we thought we said when we weren't even really paying attention.

[00:45:55] And that's just like how the body responds to stress and engagement. And that's natural. We do this all the time, day after day, but we don't realize how much it affects the process of credit granting. We weren't actually even listening when that person said the idea because we are coming down from some stress response, yet, we still think that they stole our idea. So there's a whole bunch of human biases involved here, for sure.

[00:46:15] Jordan Harbinger: Speaking of group projects in elementary school and high school. What about free riders?

[00:46:20] These are the worst. I remember, and every kid has heard this. When you're like, "Angela didn't do anything." And they're like, "You know what? When you grow up, you're going to have to do projects at work. And there's always going to be an Angela who doesn't do anything."

[00:46:29] Tessa West: There's always an Angela.

[00:46:30] Jordan Harbinger: And you're just going to have to deal with it. And you're like, "Nah, it's not fair," right? There's still free riders in the adult world, which is, I thought that was a lie that teachers told us because they didn't want to do anything about free riders in school. But no, these people, they are everywhere.

[00:46:43] Tessa West: Yeah. You know, I have a nine-year-old and I talked to him way too much about this book. And he was like, "how do I ever become a free rider? That sounds awesome. They get away with it forever, Mommy?" And I'm like, "They really do." Yeah. I think the truth of free riders is we let them get away with it because they're nice and they're attractive and they're funny and they have gossip. And we like keeping them around and their real skill is in finding teams that will let them do these things.

[00:47:09] And there's kind of this ironic thing that happens if you're a team and you're conscientious and you're real, go-getters you plop a free rider in that team. And it will actually work like 20 percent more than a team without a free rider because they overcompensate for the free rider. And then the boss sees that team and says, "This team worked 20 percent harder than that other team I'm going to give them more work. They're so awesome." And so the free riders actually have better performing teams than the non-free riding teams.

[00:47:32] Jordan Harbinger: There's something here about adding a free rider into your high-performing team to get everybody to work harder. But something tells me that there's a trade-off with the people who are conscientious and picking up all the slack, maybe not loving that after a while.

[00:47:44] Tessa West: You're the first person to actually connect those dots and think we could use this for evil.

[00:47:49] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:47:49] Tessa West: We could just plop free riders into our team.

[00:47:51] Jordan Harbinger: Oh good, like, no, I mean, what if I'm like, "Oh, we are killing it. You know what we need? We need dead weight."

[00:47:56] Tessa West: Dead weight.

[00:47:57] Jordan Harbinger: As much dead weight. We need to throw some dead weight in here.

[00:48:00] Tessa West: Totally.

[00:48:00] Jordan Harbinger: That is interesting. Especially because it probably takes a while for people to notice that someone's a free rider because let's say I'm a conscientious person on a team and I'm working with a bunch of other great people. I probably don't have a whole lot of time and energy to dedicate, to being like, "Yeah, well, Tom's not doing anything. We should punish him." It's like, "Let's just get this done. We're all smart. They're not even that great. We're going to work circles around them. They're going to get credit for it, but who cares? We're all going to get promoted. And then when it comes time to do something important, we're just going to exclude Tom."

[00:48:30] Tessa West: Yeah.

[00:48:30] Jordan Harbinger: Right. I'm not going to sit there and be like, "We need to be fair about this."

[00:48:33] Tessa West: Yeah.

[00:48:33] Jordan Harbinger: It's not going to happen.

[00:48:34] Tessa West: I mean, it's an annoying trait to be the hall monitor around fairness. So people don't like that person—

[00:48:39] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:48:39] Tessa West: —especially in really cohesive teams, but also gets to a point you made earlier, which is when it comes to documenting stuff, we don't document small slights because it feels stupid and we feel immature. So if one person, Tom just didn't do his share of the work one day. We're not like writing it down feverously in our Google Docs because we feel silly about doing that. We feel like your work we're past that. We're past that point in life. And so we don't. And then, you know what these free riders do is they break up the work evenly among everybody and split it up. They don't just like load up to one person. They'll load up the new people that don't know any better. And they have this great way of kind of saying publicly that they did things or having ideas without actual concrete, anything behind it. They're very good at presenting. So they're very good at standing up in front of the room and saying what the team came up with, that they had no role in. And there is a human bias to when you sound smart and you sound like a leader, we just assume you contributed to the group. They get all that kind of glory, partly because we allow them to do it. And partly because they tend to be the most well-spoken people on the team, the most charismatic, the most interesting.

[00:49:44] Jordan Harbinger: Devil's advocate, that's also kind of skill.

[00:49:46] Tessa West: Yeah.

[00:49:47] Jordan Harbinger: If you're really good at that, and everyone else is just really good at putting this stuff together. There's a part of me that's like, "What's the problem if I had a bunch of quiet engineers who are scared to death of getting up in front of the room." I'm painting with a broad stroke here, sorry, engineers. And then one guy who's really good at sales goes up and crushes it.

[00:50:04] Tessa West: Yeah.

[00:50:04] Jordan Harbinger: And delivers everything. But what he did was work on the PowerPoint deck in the presentation. It's like, that kind of sounds—

[00:50:09] Tessa West: Yeah.

[00:50:09] Jordan Harbinger: —fair to me.

[00:50:10] Tessa West: Free rider is in the eye of the beholder, and I've worked with teams like this before where the so-called free rider, we just gave them the new job of doing just that. Your job is now just to stand up and do all this stuff. So insofar as that actually counts as part of the hard work that no one else can do, then I actually don't think it's free riding. It only becomes free writing when they're not doing things that they agreed to do. And other people are then doing those things. There's a discrepancy between what work I agreed to do and what work I actually did. And it actually did has way too much crap that came from a third person on the team or another person on the team. So that's where the discrepancy is. But yeah, of course, sometimes that is the person's job and that's all you really want out of that person, especially if they suck at everything else and you can't get rid of them.

[00:50:52] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, right.

[00:50:53] Tessa West: You don't want negative work. You don't want negative labor. Stuff you're going to have to fix. So that's what you have him do.

[00:50:57] Jordan Harbinger: You don't want to give somebody an important job knowing they're going to screw it up. And then the rest of you are going to have to stay up till 3:00 a.m. fixing it. And it's like, "Let's just agree that Tom's not going to do anything competently. Don't even call him. We're just going to pick up the slack." And when he says, "I'm going to handle the PowerPoint, we're going to make a duplicate PowerPoint because he's going to call us at 7:00 a.m. and be like, 'I deleted it. Oops.' because he didn't do anything."

[00:51:18] Tessa West: Yeah.

[00:51:18] Jordan Harbinger: So what do we do aside from picking up the slack for these people and letting them get away with it even more? What sort of plan can we put into place? Where we're like, "Okay, we know we're stuck with him. We're not letting him get away with it this time." Or, "We got to get this guy out of the organization," you know? What do we do to start that process?

[00:51:34] Tessa West: So once you kind of know the person's free riding, but actually detection's harder than it sounds. I think a lot of people sort of deny it for a while. So once you kind of do know, our intuition is to approach them and like shame them into submission, right?

[00:51:46] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:51:46] Tessa West: "We know what you've been doing this whole time, Tom." But the problem is these people are already disengaged for whatever reason. Usually, they have some reason. And that reason is, "I'm working so hard on this other project that you guys have nothing to do with. And it's really wearing me down or they're being micromanaged," instead lead with why you wanted them there in the first place. And then don't let them off the hook. Come up with a very concrete plan of what work they're going to do and when and how the team is going to check up on that.

[00:52:10] And I like having kind of a rotating role of someone that does the sort of system of checks and balances is everyone doing the work that they agreed to do. The manager doesn't need to be involved in this at all. The team themselves can do it. I think, have it rotating, have everyone play this role, and have just really clear deadlines. Don't let them sweet talk their way out of any of those deadlines. Have set consequences, a little like treating a little kid. Have set consequences of what will happen if you don't actually meet this deadline. Then we're going to have to actually talk to the boss. So then we're going to have to do X, Y, or Z, but leave us something that you like about them. Why do you want them there in the first place? To try to bring them back in and not to shame them. That'll just make them disappear even more, even more embarrassed, or just deny. In fact, there's lots of research showing the free riders, even when confronted with evidence will still just flat-out deny that they've done it. "What are you talking about? I'm awesome."

[00:52:58] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, sometimes they're probably not aware. And other times they're like," I'm not just going to cop to my entire career strategy of never doing anything. Nice try." I want to talk about the most common kind of jerk at work, which is the micromanager, right? This is maybe somebody who's even above you or I guess would have to kind of be because they're a manager. They somehow work the hardest but accomplish the least amount of work.

[00:53:20] Tessa West: Yeah. I actually feel bad for these people until I have one and then I hate them.

[00:53:23] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:53:23] Tessa West: Like everybody else. Yeah, everything's equally urgent and everything is equally important. These four quadrants of urgency and importance, they don't know what's urgent, but not important, what's important but not urgent. Everything kind of falls into one quadrant. And because of that, it's always putting out fires with them and it's always 2:00 a.m. emails that should be answered by 6:00 a.m. even if it's a really important thing or a totally arbitrary, stupid small thing that doesn't matter. They're very bad at calibrating what needs to be done now versus later, what we can dial in versus what we have to do well. Everything has to be done well according to them. So if you work for them, you work the hardest and get the least done. It's very maddening.

[00:54:02] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And of course, that goes hand in hand with then having to disrespect personal time or space because if you can only do three things and two of them are important and she's got a list of 10, she's just going to shove all 10 into the time allotted for those three things. So of course, you're getting emails on the weekend. Of course, you're getting emails at 9:00 p.m. that you have to address. That might actually be important because you spent the whole rest of the day — what was your example? Organizing the entire store by the color of the clothes instead of the size of the clothes.

[00:54:30] Tessa West: Sorting sweaters by color, yeah. In this job in Nordstrom, I also sold clothes at one point in another department. And my manager, because she was a micromanager, other managers also didn't like her. So one thing you don't know about your micromanager because you're only thinking about yourself is that other managers at the same level and above them actually hate them too. They find them very annoying to be around because they are taskmasters to everyone. So they get cut off. They're not in these kinds of like "how the sausage is made" meeting. So you're not going to learn anything institutionally important from them. And they're going to come up with arbitrary tasks to remind you that they are in charge.

[00:55:02] These are kind of the worst kind of micromanagers. "I'm in charge here. Don't forget about me." They don't trust you to kind of spend your time wisely. They will make things up for you to do. And this sounds really evil, but I've seen it a lot at NYU, you know, made-up committees, tons of made-up committees, task forces, steering committee after steering committee that do nothing, but keep people busy that the boss has told a micromanager to create, to get rid of that micromanager. So the boss doesn't have to see the micromanager anymore.

[00:55:30] And that's really like the real dark side of this is you usually are dealing with someone who's pretty socially isolated from their own leadership, because they're annoying. Now, you're like running all this dumb stuff, running all these projects that will lead to nowhere because of your micromanager.

[00:55:44] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:55:44] Tessa West: Being socially disconnected and having no power.

[00:55:47] Jordan Harbinger: Micromanagement, it shows dedication in the mind of the micromanager. They're thinking like, "Look, how hard my team is working? I rearrange the entire store today." And it's like, yeah, but you didn't make any fricking sales.

[00:55:58] Tessa West: Yeah.

[00:55:58] Jordan Harbinger: Because now people come in looking for a size 10, whatever, and all they see is reds over here, blue over here. Like I'm out.

[00:56:03] Tessa West: It's in the blue.

[00:56:04] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I'm like, yeah, I'm out. I don't care about the color. I need a freaking sweater.

[00:56:08] And that comes at the cost of efficiency and developing, like you said, developing the people who work under these managers because you're just slicing these people off. I would imagine that since those people are isolated because they're annoying and inefficient that it's probably a negative cycle, right? Because they feel irrelevant. They feel like, "I'm on the chopping block. Everyone's in meetings without me." So then they ratchet up their micromanagement. They're like, I just need my team to work harder, making sure that the tiles each shine using linoleum spray or whatever, instead of actually hitting metrics, making sales, doing things that the organization cares about it all.

[00:56:42] Tessa West: And you also get this problem where the people who work for them, the talent bleeds. So eventually, people with options don't have to work for that manager anymore. They often leave and they go to different teams or they can like see the writing on the wall really early.

[00:56:55] So I've worked with a micromanager where within a week people were like, "Oh, I know what this looks like. I'm not going to sell anything here, I'm out." But then people like me who didn't know any better, who are naive, who are socially cut off or I just wasn't that invested in actually making money, it's just like a bunch of subpar people working under that micromanager. So not only is that person actually like not hitting any of their numbers, they're not selling anything. They're spinning their wheels, but they have a team of mediocre people underneath them and it just gets watered down and watered down to the point where you walk into one of those teams and it's not just being micromanaged, it's really morale-killing to work for someone who has had a team of say five employees who've been there for more than two years. They're just not the top brass because everyone who's good has managed to find a way out. So you're also kind of stuck with just a team of mediocrity and that can get really depressing when you're working for someone like this.

[00:57:47] Jordan Harbinger: You do see that where like the salesperson goes, "I'm not going to make any money doing this. This person doesn't have me selling. They have me doing like these dumb, organizing the store," like you said. And so they go to every other manager, "Please give me a chance. I will crush for you. I will work weekends. I'll work every shift." And they're like, "Well, I need a guy who's going to jump at every stupid shift that people call off on. Great." And then they show up and they do great. They never go back there. So yeah, you're with all the people that can't quite show up on time and call off all the time and are out of sick days, but don't show up or they show up late and they can't sell. So it's like really the C team and you're stuck there and you want to quit, but you don't really have a choice. So how do we handle these people? If you're smart and you're good, you get out, but is that all? Is that what we try to do? It's just to escape.

[00:58:30] Tessa West: I mean, I try to think beyond the micromanager and try to get into the why. So not all these jerks, you really care why they're doing what they're doing, but micromanages are all from products of.

[00:58:40] Structures of situations. And if you know the why that can actually really help you when you do approach them. If the answer is they're cut off and their boss thinks they're an idiot, then even getting them to change their micromanagement behaviors, probably not going to help you kind of climb up and out. If they're just, there's a fear of failure or they're good at their old job, which you now hold, or their manager is neglectful, but they actually quite have a lot of potentials, then I think you can approach them. You know, you're going to wanna have short frequent meetings with them, which you're not going to, like you of them, not more of them, but more of them in short structured ways is actually better.

[00:59:13] And, you know, giving them a little bit of a window into what you're up to. So micromanagers like to be spies, they're creepy little spies. They like to like see your Dropbox update and your Google Doc updates. Give them a little bit of that. Give them a document that tells you what you've been doing, where they can see that it's timestamped without actually bothering you directly. And don't call the micromanagers. They know they're micromanagers, but say you're misaligned on the big picture, on where you think you should be going and where they think you should be going.

[00:59:41] One of the main complaints I get from so-called micromanagers or people who are accused of this is that they don't see themselves as micromanagers. They see themselves as working with someone who isn't trustworthy, who needs to be overseen because they've made mistakes before. Confusing someone who cares about micro indicators of early red flags is not the same as a micromanager. So you need to take a good look in the mirror and think, "Have I made 15 mistakes that's making this person nervous? And that's why there's so much oversight, or are they doing this to everybody? No matter how good they are no matter what the quality of their work is, then they're probably a micromanager, but you will need to approach them.

[01:00:16] And in my book, I kind of layout this sort of science of conflict. It's based on how you have a fight with your spouse. How do you tell your spouse that they're lazy and they need to actually like pick up their socks in a way without saying that where you're sleeping on the couch? And I think you don't want people stonewalling each other or getting defensive or engaging in reverse blame. So there's a bit of an art to that. But I think if you kind of carefully walk the walk, you can have the conversation and give them these little cheat sheets along the way to scratch their little itches, to spy on you, and to know what's going on.

[01:00:43] Jordan Harbinger: What about setting clear boundaries around work hours? You know, like, "Hey, I'm not trying to get emails from you on Saturday afternoon. I've got two kids. This is not important." You can't say that, right?

[01:00:54] Tessa West: Yeah.

[01:00:55] Jordan Harbinger: But there's got to be a way to be like, "I'm not going to reply to your crap because you're bored," which is, I think a lot of micromanagers, they feel irrelevant. So they're bored and they're like, "I'm going to fire off a project outline that I just made up over breakfast to my team, who's out with their kids at the zoo right now."

[01:01:09] Tessa West: Yeah. I think our tendency is to want to just hit reply because they have power over us. But, you know, think about this from a rat-in-a-cage perspective. You don't want to reinforce that behavior. And so yes, you can set the boundaries. You can tell them you have these boundaries and that's great. They're going to ignore them. The single best thing you can do is just write your response and have it sent out Monday morning. And every time they do this to you on the weekend, Monday morning at eight, they get the response. What they'll learn is that every Monday morning at eight, they get five emails from you and they will learn that that's when they're going to get the response.

[01:01:43] So you can tell them not to do these things, but I wouldn't expect them to actually respect those boundaries. They know they exist. They're walking all over them because they can't help themselves. They have some anxiety or whatever. They have some self-control issues, but if they reliably always get your responses at the same time, Monday morning, they're going to learn. This is the technique that gets me where my response Monday morning at eight.

[01:02:02] I do that with everyone that micromanages me, that makes me feel uncomfortable. I actually do want to respond to them right away because I feel anxious about it. I just set the date and time to be delivered at the same time every time it happens. It actually really works. They get used to it. It's predictable for them.

[01:02:16] Jordan Harbinger: That's good. Yeah, the old send later. So if even if you want to reply, then you can be like send Monday at 8:00 a.m. and then it's just boom, done. That's a smart idea because then it's not, I'm not replying to you and make sure that they can't track opens, right? That's the thing. Make sure they don't see that you read it.

[01:02:31] Tessa West: I hate that thing that like send is read.

[01:02:33] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:02:34] Tessa West: It's so creepy. This is why you can't text with your boss too. If they text you on your phone, write an email back because seeing delivered is like another little spy technique that they see. It's a lot like dating. Like our lives are not that different, all these different ways of communicating. You don't want to give them data, you don't want to have access to. So seeing that something was read, seeing a text was delivered, all that kind of stuff gives them data that you don't want them having on you on the weekend. I always bring my mode of communication back to something more professional. I always bring it back to email for bosses that tend to micromanage and overstep.

[01:03:08] Jordan Harbinger: That is brilliant. I love that because bosses will text. And look, if it's like, "Can you make it in? We had an emergency, someone called off, we really need you." Fine. But if it's like, "Just wanted to get your thoughts on the Henderson account." And you're like, "It's Sunday, man. What are you talking about?" Write that email.

[01:03:22] Tessa West: Write that email and the emergency isn't an emergency when it's coming from your micromanager, right?

[01:03:25] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[01:03:25] Tessa West: Like they can't have 19 emergencies a week. They feel an emergency all the time because their level of stress and thread and their physiological responses look like yours when you're really, really stressed. That's just what they look like all the time. So they actually have a really bad kind of way of detecting within themselves when it's a real stressor versus like a self-inflicted stressor. And that's part of their issue is they can't actually detect the. It sucks for you, but they have a real problem with that, I think.

[01:03:53] Jordan Harbinger: This is brilliant. The book has plenty more. So we went over a kiss up / kick down, credit stealers, free riders, micromanagers, but the book also has bulldozers. So people who want their way, no matter what, gaslighters, which are people who — how do you define gas lighter in the context of work?

[01:04:08] Tessa West: Lying with the intent of deceiving on a grand scale, cutting you off socially to accomplish that.

[01:04:13] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. And then the neglectful boss, who a lot of times just is dealing with their own micromanager and has no time to develop you or deal with any of your stuff and leaves you kind of adrift and then has to maybe lay the hammer down because they've let you just drift. So there's a lot of the folks at work that can cause problems. There's more in the book like I said, and I love how utilitarian it all is. A lot of practicals in here.

[01:04:35] One of the main things that overlapped is the answer to or part of the solution to all of these jerks is the antidote being more friends at work, more allies at work. The social solutions were present in pretty much each type of jerk-at-work solution. And so would you agree that developing a deep and wide network is really important to solving these problems?

[01:04:58] Tessa West: 90 percent of these problems, you cannot go alone, but I also think it's really important when you want to think about leaving your job. So lots of people are moving from job to job and social connections are really critical to kind of getting those new positions. If it's bad enough and you need to leave, you're going to need those social connections for that too.

[01:05:15] So for solving these problems, for coming up with strategies, for getting a reputation for being good at this, you're going to need those social connections. So you can be brilliant at all these things, but if you're doing them alone, no one's ever going to know. It's going to be really hard to recommend you for things in the future. And I think most of us kind of underestimate the role of our networks and promoting us because it's hidden, it's behind the scenes. We don't see it happening, but that's usually how people climb up in the workplace. It's through these kinds of invisible social connections that are going on when they're not paying attention when they're not like watching.

[01:05:44] Jordan Harbinger: Don't just have great relationships with people who are close or nearby or in your unit, have lots of varied relationships outside of your industry as well. And that dovetails really well — I have a free course where I teach networking skills. And people are like, "Oh, I don't need that because I'm just a teacher. I'm not going to—" and I'm like, "Well, what happens when you don't want to be that anymore? Or you want to go to a different district and get a job, or you don't want to be teaching this grade anymore, but you want to move to a higher paid higher grade?" And the problem is a lot of people don't build relationships until they need them. You're not really building a relationship. You're asking an awkward favor from somebody who you've talked to once in the last decade, That's not the way to do this.

[01:06:22] Tessa West: Yeah. You have to build those networks. That's essential and people hate it. It's uncomfortable. They think networking is a bad word, but there's ways of doing it that are genuine and it will protect you and it will help promote you. And I think we just have to get more comfortable with having relationships with people who aren't our best friends and seeing them as such. And I think that's okay.

[01:06:40] Jordan Harbinger: Tessa West, thank you very much. I really appreciate this. I love when someone can break down different personality archetypes. I don't know what it is but I've got a thing for personality archetypes, especially when they are based in science or research, which these are and come with solutions instead of just, "And if you see one of these you're screwed, so good luck out there, champ."

[01:06:59] Tessa West: Thank you so much.

[01:07:02] Jordan Harbinger: We're playing a trailer for a previous episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show. This week's trailer is from Scott Galloway. This is one of our most popular episodes 204. Scott Galloway gives some great advice for people who want to be successful, economically young professionals and people that want to make an impact. If that's you, be sure to check out that episode of the show.

[01:07:21] Scott Galloway: Most of the people, young people I deal with envision themselves in kind of the top economic class, or at least aspire to it.

[01:07:27] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[01:07:28] Scott Galloway: Two basic rules, get certified and get to a city.

[01:07:30] Jordan Harbinger: I know, of course, most people want to be in the one percent — you know what, actually, I take it back. I think now most people want to be in the 0.1 percent, they just think that's what the one percent is.

[01:07:41] Scott Galloway: A hundred percent, a hundred percent, the myth of balance is a myth. And the other big myth is this notion that you should follow your passion and the notion that you should follow your passion is dangerous because most passion sectors are overinvested. If you want to open a nightclub, go to work for a Vogue or play professional sports or music, just recognize you a better great deal of psychic income from those things. Because the monetary income relative to your effort will be dramatically lower than other asset classes.

[01:08:11] Your job as a young person is not to follow your passion. It's to find out what you're good at and then invest the time, the grit, and the energy to become great at it. And the accoutrements that follow being great at something status, respect your colleagues, money, access to better healthcare, the ability to take care of your parents and your kids, you will become passionate about whatever it is that lets you do those things.

[01:08:38] Happiness is love, full stop. So the depth and number of relationships across work, family, and friends is the best practice around happiness.

[01:08:49] Jordan Harbinger: Scott has a bunch of great advice, whether you're young or old and you want to live a rich and happy life, whether that means economics or not. And that's episode 204 with Scott Galloway, solving the algebra of happiness here on The Jordan Harbinger Show, check it out.

[01:09:05] I enjoyed this conversation, very practical. The book is a really good guide to come back to as you need to deal with different types of jerks at work. And hopefully, you only need it once and then you can put it away forever. But let's be honest, I mean, have you been to an office before? This thing is an encyclopedia, you might as well keep it on your desk.

[01:09:22] I think this stuff is useful, even if you don't know if you've got a jerk in the office or you do, but you're not sure what kind of jerk in the office. It does give a really clear idea of what's okay. At work and what isn't and how to fix the problem. It's great for employees and managers, alike. Also, there's a lot of useful things in the book — practical exercises and a flow chart about how to tell what kind of jerk you actually have in the office. I think that's probably extremely useful. Maybe you should print it out and put it in the fricking break room. And remember, if you don't know any jerks at work, maybe you are the jerk at work. This material also dovetails great with Six-Minute Networking as well. Again, jordanharbinger.com/course is where you can find it big.

[01:10:03] Thanks to Tessa West. Links to all things Tessa West will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Books at jordanharbinger.com/books. Please once again, use the website links if you buy books from any guests on the show. Transcripts in the show notes. Videos up on YouTube. Advertisers, deals, and discount codes, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support us. I'm at @JordanHarbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. I really do enjoy hearing from most of you. I say most of you, because I like 0.1 percent of you are just batsh*t crazy, but the rest of you, you're great. So you can always connect with me and send me a DM. I do like to hear from you and have a little conversation there. So don't be a stranger.

[01:10:43] This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's got a jerk at work, definitely share this episode with them. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show, so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time.