LITMIR.BIZ

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is KITA not motivation? If I kick my dog (from the front or the back), he will move. And when I want him to move again, what must I do? I must kick him again. . . . But it is only when one has a generator of one’s own that we can talk about motivation. One then needs no outside stimulation. One wants to do it [p. 55].

      Abrasive bosses manage for movement rather than motivation. They are blind to the fact that external intimidation does nothing to build internal motivation; they are blind to the reality that employees respond more positively to carrots than sticks. Abrasive bosses flog their coworkers into movement, whereas insightful (or what I will term adequate) bosses use positive strategies to make their employees want to move. They rely on the carrots of positive reward, unwilling to resort to psychological horsewhippings. And in the rare instances where employees refuse to move at the required pace, adequate bosses understand that beating a nearly dead horse is not only cruel—it’s also inefficient. Instead, they cut the employee from the herd through the civilized processes of formal termination. Abrasive bosses approach motivation very differently, and in the next chapters we’ll be looking at how, when, and why abrasive bosses kick their coworkers.

      Speaking of motivation, you may be wondering what motivates me to coach abrasive bosses. I’m going to confess something that I never reveal to prospective corporate clients. Ready? My mission is to reduce suffering in the workplace. I dare not speak of this mission when I talk with companies struggling with an abrasive boss—it absolutely reeks of touchy-feely. I don’t want these hard-nosed business folks to suspect that they’re hiring a bleeding-heart social worker, do I? Social service types are highly suspect in the work world; we’re perceived as do-gooders intent on disrupting hard business objectives with the ‘‘soft’’ stuff of putting individual needs over organizational objectives. Woody Allen once described a nightmare in which he was pursued by a monster with the body of a crab and the head of a social worker. My body is quite human, but I spare my corporate clients the prospect of any such do-gooder nightmares by concealing my mission and instead making the case for coaching in a language they understand: facts and numbers.

The Costs of Abrasion

      Let’s ignore the soft stuff for a moment and take a hard look at the scope and costs of organizational disruption caused by abrasive bosses. For those of you who need numbers, I offer these: A Gallup study of 2 million workers at 700 companies found that poor supervisory behavior was the main reason that employees quit or were less productive (Work & Family Connection, 2005). A study of superior-to-subordinate aggression in the United Kingdom concluded that close to 2.5 million UK employees considered themselves to have been victims of managerial aggression in the previous six months (Hoel & Cooper, 2000). Research conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership (Lombardo & McCall, 1984) reported that 74 percent of successful executives in three Fortune 100 corporations said they had had at least one intolerable boss, and another study (Spherion Corporation, 1999) showed that employees are four times more likely to leave bosses who are not considered ‘‘nice’’ (another word rarely used in a business context). Attrition of valued employees is just one of the prices paid. In the past decade researchers have explored other costs incurred by abrasive bosses: decreased morale and motivation resulting in absenteeism and lowered productivity (McCarthy, Sheehan, & Kearns, 1995), higher incidence of stress-related illnesses (Quine, 1999) and substance abuse (Richman, Rospenda, Flaherty, & Freels, 2001), increased number of legal actions alleging a hostile environment or discriminatory behavior (Leymann, 1990), and retaliatory responses, including sabotage (Laabs, 1999) and homicide (McLaughlin, 2000; Rayner, 1997).

Had enough? Do I really need to swamp you with more statistics to convince you that abrasive bosses take a serious toll on both employee and employer? Employers not only lose employees; they lose hundreds of thousands of hours of productivity while workers focus on the pain of abrasion instead of the tasks at hand. Think for a moment—how many hours have you seen coworkers spend around the coffee machine or behind closed doors processing the latest painful run-in with an abrasive boss? I have yet to see any formal research on the number of hours management (including human resource staff) devotes to abrasive boss-related issues, but those I have spoken with resent the ‘‘waste’’ (their word) of time that could be better spent on other concerns. I could devote many more pages to documenting the costs incurred by abrasive bosses, but the fact that you are reading this book suggests that you don’t need to be convinced—I suspect you’ve already paid a price.

A Bleeding Heart Is Born

      Enough of the hard stuff—let’s get back to my soft-hearted goal of reducing workplace suffering caused by abrasive bosses. As I read this, I realize that I may be giving the mistaken impression that I aspire to be the Mother Theresa of executive coaching, which is not the case. I don’t do what I do because I am divinely inspired or in the least bit noble. It’s my parents’ fault—I blame them.

      Too often parents are blamed for everything that we don’t like about ourselves, but I am pleased to blame my parents for teaching me that the most important use of one’s life lies in helping others. I learned about suffering from my psychiatrist father and hospital volunteer mother—not at their hands but through their hearts and eyes. I was blessed with a safe, loving home and only encountered suffering as I ventured out into the wider world.

My earliest lessons of suffering were taught by animals. When I was very little, my mother took me to a Tarzan movie where a mortally wounded elephant slowly found its way to the elephant graveyard to die. The pain and sadness that reverberated through me was excruciating—I was distraught. I remember my mother’s efforts to comfort her sobbing child, wiping my tears away, assuring me that the elephant was just acting and that it had been given a special treat of canned dog food once it finished ‘‘playing pretend.’’

      A later experience of intense suffering also involved animals. I must have been six or seven years old, and my father, founder of a local children’s mental health clinic, hosted a charity carnival to raise funds for the clinic. It was a typical rainy day in Oregon, and the carnival had a kiddy ride with ponies tied to a rotating frame. I remember the wet, downcast ponies, trudging around and around in a circle of mud, and to this day the memory cuts through me like a knife. I believed they wanted to be free (or at least loved) instead of being chained to a muddy merry-go-round for human entertainment. I felt terribly sad, knowing that I could do nothing to relieve their suffering. I believe this childhood experience of helplessness in the face of suffering formed the foundation for my adult wish to reduce suffering by eventually becoming a psychotherapist and, later, an executive coach.

      Intent on becoming a psychiatrist, I embarked on a premed track in college. As I wrestled with my courses, it gradually dawned on me that I was never going to succeed as a physician because, frankly, I didn’t have the patience or interest to memorize every bone, sinew, and organ of the human anatomy. I figured it would be pretty unethical to even consider the practice of medicine if I wasn’t willing to memorize everything (‘‘I’m sorry sir, but I’m hesitant to remove your appendix because I never bothered to learn what it’s connected to’’). I wanted to study psyche, not physique, and was fortunate enough to discover that I could become a psychotherapist without pursuing a medical degree. So I abandoned my medical pretensions and instead pursued a degree in clinical (or what was then called psychiatric) social work.

Working Wounded on the Last Frontier

Degree in hand, I moved to Seattle with the plan of paying my dues by working in respected settings and eventually opening a private practice to treat emotionally disturbed children. To that end I enrolled in the Child Therapy Certificate Program of the Seattle Institute for Psychoanalysis, where I was privileged to be clinically supervised by Edith Buxbaum, a student of Anna Freud. After two years of seeing patients in a community mental health clinic and working nights as an emergency room social worker in a major trauma center, I experienced two revelations. First, I realized that if I were to become a private practitioner, I would have to sit in a room, inside, all day, every day. Whoa— this heart not only bled, it wandered as well. The prospect of

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