How to become a “friction-fixer” with Bob Sutton (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Adam Grant:
Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking: my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is Bob Sutton, an organizational psychologist at Stanford and one of the world's most creative and most influential management thinkers. Bob is an award-winning scholar and teacher, and a bestselling author. He's sometimes known as the Asshole Guy 'cause two of his books are the No Asshole Rule and the Asshole Survival Guide.

Bob has a new book out, the Friction Project, with Huggy Rao. It's the ultimate guide to diagnosing and fixing the problems in your workplace. Talking with Bob always leaves me intellectually stimulated and emotionally energized, and this conversation was no exception. We discussed when it might make sense to be boring, why indifference is as important as passion, what it looks like to actually listen to your team, and how to tell if you're an asshole.

Let me start by asking you, Bob Sutton, one of my heroes of organizational psychology, why did you get interested in fixing broken workplaces?

[00:01:26] Bob Sutton:
I think I got interested in it way, way back when I was a PhD student at the University of Michigan where we both got our PhDs in the organizational psychology program.

[00:01:36] Adam Grant:
Go Blue!

[00:01:37] Bob Sutton:
And my mentor, the late Bob Kahn, who lived to be a hundred, his perspective always was that as, um, organizational theorists, it was our responsibility not just to write obscure articles that 25 people read and then tell you you're famous, but to actually try to have impact on making workplaces more effective and making people's lives better.

And, uh, I think in every conversation I ever had with him, that always came through, and just having a mentor who really thought that academics who only wrote for one another were, actually he would use the word “irresponsible”. So I think that's how I was raised intellectually. And just as a more practical matter, my, uh, late father was a defense contractor in the US and spent his entire life complaining about how broken the US government was. So I, I got some hints from that too.

[00:02:26] Adam Grant:
I, I love that orientation. It was one of the things that drew me to Michigan as well. I remember reading Donald Stokes on Pasteur’s quadrant saying the idea that there's a spectrum where on one end we have basic science, and on the other end we have applied Science–

[00:02:39] Bob Sutton:
Yes!

[00:02:39] Adam Grant:
It’s false! It's a myth. It's a two by two, and you can live in the both fundamental contribution to knowledge and meaningful, useful insight for humans, um, category, as Pasteur did with germ theory and pasteurizing milk. And I think you've been a wonderful role model for doing that in our field.

[00:02:59] Bob Sutton:
Well, I try. I'm not a purist, nor are you, and you're always gonna make somebody unhappy, so you just have to live with that.

[00:03:05] Adam Grant:
I think you enjoy that more than I do.

[00:03:06] Bob Sutton:
What I like is I like having 90% of the people like me and, and 10% of the people dislike me. And there's a quote from my late Father-in-Law that “I have a long list of friends and a short list of enemies, and I'm equally proud of both lists.” And I think that's, I, I think that’s kind of my philosophy, but I actually don't like hurting people or upsetting them for no apparent reasons.

[00:03:29] Adam Grant:
Wait, tell me though about the, the logic of this 90-10 principle. What, I think most people wanna be liked by a hundred percent of, of their audience, and that's a huge problem for them. But why are you okay with 10% not liking you?

[00:03:43] Bob Sutton:
I, well, I mean, that's like a rough estimate, but, uh, but, my, my perspective is that if you stand for something, then you can't please everybody. And, and I think that it's part of, and there's certain people who I will not name, who have values about where they exploit people, they're takers, or they're assholes. We can use whatever term we want, who I just really don't admire or accept their values.

[00:04:07] Adam Grant:
It seems like a healthy way to live your life though, because then when you know, when someone gets upset with you, you can just say, all right, well that's, that’s in the 10% for this year.

[00:04:16] Bob Sutton:
But when I hurt people who I care about or who I like, I feel terrible, actually. I'm quite guilt prone. So there's also that part of it.

[00:04:25] Adam Grant:
Same. Uh, I think we both suffer from it. All right. Let's talk about friction. What is friction?

[00:04:33] Bob Sutton:
Well, I'm not a physicist. I bet you they'd give you a different definition. But our perspective on organizational friction is that they’re obstacles that frustrate people, force them to slow down, then essentially slow and, and stop intended action. And we initially got interested in this by only focusing on bad friction or sludge, some people call it. But along the way we realized that friction is actually a pretty good thing a lot of times.

[00:05:00] Adam Grant:
This is one of the most surprising things about your book is, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Sometimes we might want friction!’

[00:05:06] Bob Sutton:
Uh, so there's this little girl and she's at home and she says to the family's Alexa, “I want a dollhouse and some sugar cookies,” and an Alexa, which is an automatic device for, um, ordering from Amazon, did the order. And then three days later, her parents get a $350 um, dollhouse and 25 pounds worth of sugar cookies.

And of course, I mean, they hadn't done the settings, but that's a case of not enough friction; friction of the wrong things being too easy to do. In organizational settings, sometimes you get in a situation where, sort of like a tragedy of the commons situation, where everybody's so free to do what they want, that they add to collective burdens.

But the one that I'm really interested in, and this comes from our friend Paul Leonardi. He studies digital transformation. And there was one organization he worked with where everybody would order whatever software they wanted. And for example, they had five different versions of Slack. They had eight or nine different sorts of video systems. And, and the CTO, he just had a rule that if you ordered some new software or it just renewed on your credit card, he'd have to review it and approve it. And they went from about 55 to about 20 apps in about six months. And to me, it's actually using good friction to stop bad friction 'cause when everybody has too many apps, they're slowed down. They're confused. They have to learn all the time.

[00:06:30] Adam Grant:
It seems like the very people who have the easiest time avoiding friction are the ones who need it most.

[00:06:38] Bob Sutton:
[laughs] Yes!

[00:06:38] Adam Grant:
So you highlight this as a big problem with people who have power, who have wealth, in particular with leaders. This is one of the lasting lessons from this read for me was we should stop protecting leaders from inconvenience.

[00:06:51] Bob Sutton:
It’s, it’s like the definition of privilege is the absence of inconvenience, that the little people have to suffer from. It's really bad that the auto companies in Michigan, that the leaders are oblivious to what it's like to drive other cars and deal with the buying a car experience. When you're a leader, not even that senior, they give you a free car every six months or so. And in most large facilities, you don't have to put gas in it or maintain it. You don't have to negotiate over the price. And I would argue that their leaders should not have that sort of privilege. When you protect people from the kind of inconveniences, it's, it's really a problem.

[00:07:27] Adam Grant:
So the challenge here is leaders are busy and their time is scarce.

[00:07:31] Bob Sutton:
Yes.

[00:07:32] Adam Grant:
Are you suggesting that they should occasionally have to suffer through the regular customer service line, the standard car experience, or do you actually think they shouldn't get those privileges in the first place?

[00:07:42] Bob Sutton:
I guess that their time is more valuable 'cause of hierarchy and everything, but I guess that, on average, it’d be better for their organizations if they didn't get that kind of privilege.

And, and one, one of my heroes in the book is a guy named Carl Liebert. Carl's been around corporate America everywhere. His last two jobs, he was CEO of AutoNation, the largest set of auto dealerships in the world. But when he was head of supply chain at Home Depot, they were having a supply chain problem, and Carl, bless his heart, a couple times a month he'd worked the night shift, shift and tried to figure out why they were having so much trouble getting inventory from the back of the store to the front of the store, which was costing 'em a lot of money.

And what he figured out was that because store managers got dinged when they had shrink or unaccounted for inventory, the root of the problem was that suppliers were sending boxes that weren't completely full. So he figured out that's what, what the problem was.

And, and to me, I'm, I’m not saying they should have to suffer completely, but boy, people who are seeing, who are on the front lines, who understand how it works, I mean, it really matters.

My late father, he was in Patton's army at the Battle of the Bulge, and he said “This is a foot soldier like me, you'd see Patton all the time. He was with us. He wasn't just hiding in the back." So I do think that stuff, that stuff does matter. Yes. I realize that some people, their safety needs to be protected, that they need to be able to concentrate without being interrupted.

Uh, but, but I think that leaders who isolate themselves have problems. And as we both know, there's other problems too that when you're in a leadership position, you will automatically assume that you know what's going on, even though you don't know what the heck is going on. There's a lot of evidence to support that.

[00:07:42] Adam Grant:
This reminds me of what our, our dear colleague, Sigal Barsade used to call ‘leading by doing’ instead of management by walking around. And she would recommend that leaders spend five to 10% of their time, basically in undercover boss mode. When, whenever she talked about leading by doing, I would picture Undercover Boss and think, “Okay, the leader's gonna go and, you know, and do the regular work of the people below them so that they're in touch with what, with what's happening every day.” Uh, and they have a better understanding of, of what's going on in the organization.

[00:09:50] Bob Sutton:
It, it’s, it's also why I think that leaders are, are more effective when they've had different sorts of jobs. So Mary Barra actually really, I think she's one of the great US CEOs, and if you look at the difficulties she has, boy, it's a lot harder to lead General Motors than it is to lead Microsoft. As much as I love Satya Nadella, there's just a lot more constraints with unions, histories, manufacturing costs, laws. It's really difficult. And, and one reason I think she's been so effective is she's had so many different jobs. She's been head of manufacturing, she's been head of product development. She ran a plant. Her last job was head of HR. So she understands how the pieces fit together. So that, that's another kind of understanding the system, not just my one little part.

[00:10:31] Adam Grant:
I, I think that makes so much sense and it, it tracks with some of the evidence I've read recently that companies that are run by generalists actually innovate more than those that are led by specialists where, you know, if you've worked every function in the organization, you may look like a jack of all trades, but you're actually a master of leadership because you're qualified to understand what the people around you and below you are doing.

[00:10:51] Bob Sutton:
Yep. My, my perspective is everybody doesn't need to be a generalist, which I think is a misguided thing. You just, you just need enough generalists to be able to glue the whole thing together 'cause I, I, I do love specialists who know really a lot about something in massive detail.

[00:11:03] Adam Grant:
I do think there's something to be said for in important leadership roles, people having that breadth to be able to, to connect dots and also to stretch each division in new directions.

[00:11:13] Bob Sutton:
I think that that's right 'cause they, they see the connections.

[00:11:15] Adam Grant:
One of the things this makes me think about a little bit is you're critical of the idea of management by walking around in this book. Um, and you bring some nuance to it that I think is often missing from the conversation. I can't tell you, Bob, how many times I've heard a leader say, like, “Well, I just manage by walking around,” and you, you write about the Tucker and Singer Research, which one, I think complicates it in interesting ways, which I wanna talk about.

But two, also, I just think that's a smokescreen for micromanaging. That so many leaders, who claim to manage by walking around, just don't trust their people and they're trying to spy on them, and that's their excuse.

[00:11:49] Bob Sutton:
I mean, there's multiple problems. One, is it’s a sign they're, uh, they're spying on people. Another one, I'm old enough to have lived through when In Search of Excellence came out, and, and Tom Peters, and he still says everybody should always do management by walking around. Well, one of the problems is, well, there's some leaders who are kind of socially inept.

And I remember one guy saying to me, “Oh, my manager, I just wish she would stay in her office. She just wastes our time. And, and she annoys us.” But the Tucker and Singer research, which you're talking about, it's sort of like a, a quasi experiment. I won't go into the details, but, but essentially what they found was, on the whole, management by walking around was less effective. And there's an important distinction that for large, complex, difficult problems, is, is when it was especially bad, be, because a leader couldn't figure out how to fix that just by briefly talking to someone. And they tended to be ongoing sorts of problems that people knew had existed for years.

[00:12:44] Adam Grant:
There's a case to be made that when, as a leader, if you're, you know, if you're wandering around and people see that you're there, it can be a sign that you care.

[00:12:51] Bob Sutton:
Right.

[00:12:51] Adam Grant:
It can be a way to get off your pedestal and build connections with people. But on the other hand, it does leave people feeling like they're being watched. And I think the evidence you're describing suggests that sometimes leaders just get in the way and distract people. It may even give them bad ideas because they, they haven't diagnosed the problem, and that means they're not equipped to solve it.

[00:13:11] Bob Sutton:
At one point I, I did a little bit of work with Disneyland. It's one thing for, sort of like, the leaders to walk around and occasionally see what's going on. It's another thing for, you know, one leader I knew who several times a year she'd get dressed in, like, full costume. Uh, that's a sign that like, you're, you're really in touch with the people.

And, and then, and then there was another guy who we talked about in the book who, uh, was running, uh, the largest hotel that Disney has in Florida, and he worked alongside the house cleaners for two weeks to try to figure out best practices. That's not just light observation, that's really sort of digging in. So there's a difference between that and just sort of being, if you will, sort of an annoying tourist.

[00:13:52] Adam Grant:
Yeah, and I think one of the things that the leaders you're describing are doing differently is they're going to learn, not just to run the show. To gain that kind of knowledge, I think one of your most immediately practical suggestions is that leaders should be auditing their ratio of questions to statements.

I think this is brilliant. Uh, it's, it's so simple and yet it's not something I've ever seen anybody think to do. How did you come up with this idea?

[00:14:21] Bob Sutton:
There's a woman, Catherine Welch is her name. She's a PhD in communications and, uh, we teach together at the design school. And we had a little class that was six CEOs of startups, and as one venture capitalist put it, “They were all babies with loaded guns.” They were first time CEOs, all men, all under 30, who had a lot of venture capital money and they'd never been in a leadership position of any kind. I don't know, maybe in in high school or something.

And so our students started auditing their meetings and in particular, I remember one CEO, young male, CEO, he'd have about a 15 minute standup meeting every day. And initially he'd do 80% of the talking, sometimes 90% of the talking, and then he'd only make statements, maybe. And, and what our students did, to the young CEO's credit, was they showed him, he had a disproportionate number of uh, of statements versus questions. And as time went on, people started fading away.

And, and you can see the energy that they look at their phones, 'cause it's like Silicon Valley, once they look at their phones, you've lost them. Or they'd start ribbing each other or they'd space out and, and to this guy's credit, he got much, much better.

[00:15:33] Adam Grant:
I do like the, the idea a lot and it, it comes up in Peter Coleman's research on having more complex and nuanced conversations about charged issues. It's basically a measure of inquiry relative to advocacy. And a sign that a conversation is gonna break some new ground as opposed to dividing people is, you know, dialing up your inquiry as opposed to just advocating over and over again. So what do you think is the ideal ratio of questions to statements?

[00:15:58] Bob Sutton:
My perspective is once it gets below 50-50, I start worrying. There's some leaders who ask questions to give themselves a break, not to actually listen. So you actually have to listen to the answer. And I remember we're in this meeting, just terrible meeting, where this guy would talk on and on and on. He was the most senior person in the room, and he finally was quiet, and I looked at him and he said to me, “It looks like I'm listening, but I'm just reloading."

[00:16:26] Adam Grant:
Brutal.

[00:16:26] Bob Sutton:
Brutal! So if you're gonna ask questions or be quiet, you actually need to listen too.

[00:16:32] Adam Grant:
I, I don't know if I respect him more or less for admitting that.

[00:16:36] Bob Sutton:
Yeah! Yeah, That’s… Yeah. Well.

[00:16:38] Adam Grant:
You can't decide.

[00:16:39] Bob Sutton:
He knew he was. Anyway.

[00:16:43] Adam Grant:
Wow. Wow. Okay. So that, you, you actually have a term for that in the book; you call it Sham Participation.

[00:16:50] Bob Sutton:
There's this thing that what leaders do after they make a decision, they sometimes will feel as if they've gotta pretend to listen to everybody else. So the example used in the book is my colleague, Steve Barley, he was on a committee to, to come up with the interior design of what the, the Jen-Hsun Huang Building of Nvidia fame.

That's the, that's the building that, that I sit in at Sanford. And, and, and Steve Barley came up with all this research, in particular, the research on the negative effects of open offices. That we had PhD students who did things like, writing behavioral science like I do, or did really, really hard math problems and operations research, and they needed quiet. This was the number one thing that came out. And then, uh, the architects has, had already made the decision that we were gonna be just like Google and Facebook and have open offices and be like a modern engineering building.

And so of course what ended up happening is none of the PhD students came into the offices because it was impossible for them to concentrate on their research. And the staff members disliked it as well, because as you and I both know Adam, the evidence is yes, open offices are usually cheaper and probably more green, but the evidence that they do anything good for productivity, collaboration…. Well, physical health, it's like, you know, an open office, disease spreads more easily, contagious diseases.

Steve brought all that evidence and we were basically told that the decision had already been made and Steve, to his credit, got upset and quit the committee. But that's a classic sort of thing that, that you call these meetings and stuff and, and again, it's pretending to listen and you're just wasting people's time and, and people figure it out pretty quickly when, after you do that to them.
It, it's not something that, that leaders get away with very much, even though they think they do. So that's Sham Participation: another source of destructive organizational friction that we impose on employees. And, and well, even good leaders do it unwittingly, but bad leaders do it more.

[00:18:45] Adam Grant:
Ugh. It's such a shame to see the sham. I couldn’t resist.

Let me suggest then we go to a lightning round now, before we brought it out for some other topics.

[00:19:00] Bob Sutton:
Oh, an Adam Grant lightning round! What could be more fun than that? And, and in this case, potentially embarrassing too, since you know me pretty well. So let's go for it.

[00:19:07] Adam Grant:
Oh, I, I have definitely good material to draw on here. What is something you've rethought lately?

[00:19:15] Bob Sutton:
One of the things that, that I really have been thinking a lot about lately and, and Ed Catmull got me thinking about this about a year ago, is that leaders who are really quick to fire people to give them warnings, tend to be the best bosses because they're giving people negative feedback. They’re removing the bad from the system.

And Ed made this really interesting argument. So Ed Catmull, for your listeners who don't know, was president of Pixar for 26 years. He built the modern Pixar. He met with Steve Jobs, you know, once a week for 25 years and so on and so forth. And I remember saying this to Ed and Ed looking at me and saying, “No, that's, that's not how I think about it, especially if I'm firing a director of a film.” He said, “I tend to see the pattern before everybody else, but I wait for everybody to come to me to tell me how bad the director is and it's time to get rid of them. And the reason I do that is otherwise it creates a climate of fear. Because if I fire the director before everybody else has come to me, they think that their jobs are threatened, but if I wait till they've all come to me, then they think it's their idea and there's not a climate of fear.”

And now, now if you think about how much money this costs and, and this is exactly what he did with Ratatouille, which had a different director other than Brad Bird for a long time, I bet you that cost, maybe five, $10 million, that decision. And I kind of said, “is that worth it?” And he said, “Yes, because having an organization where there's not a climate of fear is something you can't put a price on.” That idea of slowing down, that, that’s one of the things I've really been thinking about, that sometimes acting rationally does create a climate of fear.

And I do think if the board members of OpenAI had slowed down a little bit and gotten everybody on board, that's an example of maybe they wouldn't have wanted to fired Sam Altman so quickly, if at all.

[00:21:06] Adam Grant:
Seriously. I, I love the rethinking on this one and I am strongly in favor of leaders being slower to fire. That being said, I was with a tech company a few years ago and people were complaining that by the time the CEO finally fired the most toxic selfish member of the organization, they'd already seen a bunch of their biggest stars quit because nobody could tolerate it anymore. So I guess you can't wait too long?

[00:21:33] Bob Sutton:
But, but you asked me what I was rethinking, and I just always think that faster was better. And, and one of, a good friend of mine and a friend of yours, Patty McCord, who was head of HR, basically of Netflix for the first 14 years, I mean, they don't have performance improvement plans at Netflix. They just fire you.

And that's sort of the understanding and, and that seemed to work there. It's just one of those things that, that I've rethought, that this idea about sometimes you gotta slow down and, and both to analyze things in more detail. So that's sort of adding, um, constructive friction, and also to avoid creating a climate of fear.

[00:22:08] Adam Grant:
Love it. Uh, we both had a chance to study with one of the giants of organizational psychology, Karl Weick. What's your favorite Weickian lesson?

[00:22:16] Bob Sutton:
First of all, and I don't even know if he said this, and I asked him if he said it and he thought he did, but he said he wasn't sure. “But argue as if you're right, listen as if you're wrong. I think that's Wykeian and I’m not even sure of it. And one thing, so I'm gonna cheat since we're doing the lightning round. The, the other thing that he said that I love, which is just one paragraph buried in this really obscure piece. He expected that specialists were grumpy because people who’re specialists have really narrow focus and view everything as an interruption. And optimists and generalists are optimists and are happy because every new thing they meet, they're excited to learn about. And I, and I just love this. I, I don't even know, it's just like a random paragraph in something that, that he wrote.

[00:22:59] Adam Grant:
You immediately captured my favorite. The “Argue like you're right, listen, like you're wrong” mantra. I've also wondered, was it really his? But I consider it Wykeian. You are known to be a fan of just walking out if a, if a meeting or an event is a waste of your time.

[00:23:14] Bob Sutton:
Yes.

[00:23:15] Adam Grant:
What are the top few things you've walked out on lately?

[00:23:18] Bob Sutton:
Just to preface it, dear listeners, there are some things if you walk out of you're being incompetent or you're gonna get fired. And, and by the way, if you're a flight attendant, you probably can't walk outta the airplane too, so it may be impossible, but I've walked out of many faculty meetings. I, it's, it's better just not even to say why. It's better just, just to leave. The, the other thing that I've walked out of, which by the way, my wife and I do not always agree on this, is, is I have walked out of movies at movie theaters when I thought they were bad movies. I try not to walk out of family gatherings when they're not going well. I don't think I've ever done that. So there, there are times when you have to be careful, but faculty meetings, movies, things where I, I feel as if I have discretion.

[00:24:02] Adam Grant:
You are on the record saying quote, “Indifference is as important as passion.” What does that mean?

[00:24:09] Bob Sutton:
Oh. Well, so this is the notion that if you really, really care about absolutely everything, this isn't an original idea, by the way, you are gonna completely wear yourself out. You have to sort of pick the places to focus your energy and focus your passion.

And this might be also a self warning 'cause we're talking about generalists versus specialists. I tend to get interested in everything, and that's one reason why it probably takes me so long to finish my books. It's, it's like, I'll go down so many different rabbit holes, it’s ridiculous. But yes, learning what not to give a shit about in life and what you can't have any control over.

And by the way, situations where you make things worse just by, uh, your intervention. 'Cause where I have actually, uh, decided to, um, interject myself in a discussion, and what ends up happening is, is that I annoy a bunch of people and nothing changes, and maybe I never should have gotten involved. For example, the debate about open offices versus closed offices in the building I'm in. I, I just dug up more and more and more research, and it didn't change anything. I knew it wasn't gonna change anything. I was just tilting at a windmill and it was just wearing me out and annoying my superiors who had always already made the decision.

[00:25:22] Adam Grant:
Okay. One of my favorite ideas you've ever captured is the suggestion that occasionally being boring is a useful skill for leaders.

[00:25:31] Bob Sutton:
Oh, I'm really excited about this idea of boredom. I was working on a book called Weird Ideas That Work, and, and this guy named Don Peterson, who had just finished his stint as CEO of Ford Motor Company, came into my office and he told me this story about when he was CEO and he basically didn't want anybody to notice Ford, and he got invited to give a speech at the National Press Club. And, uh, at first he said no, but his publicist said “Yes, and our job is to make it so that you're such a boring person that nobody wants to write anything about Ford.” So he said, “I, I picked a boring topic, which was safety.” And he said, “I put all these really hard to read charts. And I practiced delivering it in the most boring possible way.” And he said, “It did help. We did not have much press attention.” And that actually was one of the times when the Ford Motor Company got saved.

And to me this, this, this notion that sometimes you don't want to be noticed, uh, is really important. And, and I even learned this in high school 'cause Adam, I think I had half a high school grade point average that you did. And, and one of the reasons was that when I misbehaved, I would smirk, I'd get loud, and I had a bunch of friends who would get away with all sorts of stuff, including just walking outta class, by the way, and not being noticed. But the teachers never paid any attention to them 'cause they were less interesting than I was and probably less obnoxious.

So the power of not being noticed can be, can be really, really useful. And there's stuff in the sociology of work that if you wanna screw around or if you wanna be incompetent, that being sort of invisible to your supervisor does work as well. So if you're incompetent, at least be kind of boring and unnoticeable.

[00:27:14] Adam Grant:
Well, you, you definitely anticipated my next question, which is, you're a tenured professor at Stanford. You have a PhD, you're a bestselling author, you've been highly successful in life. What was your GPA in high school?

[00:27:29] Bob Sutton:
1.9 after my junior year, and then I figured out, whew, that's when, you know, the college applications go in, and I had almost no C’s. It was almost all B's and D's and some A's and F’s. And then I figured out that pottery was something you could do when you were stoned. So I took pottery and I got my grade point average up to 2.1. I'm not blaming my teachers. If, if I had a student like me in class, I would be very unhappy.

[00:27:53] Adam Grant:
You're known as, uh, the asshole expert in a lot of places. Would you call your younger self an asshole?

[00:28:00] Bob Sutton:
Oh, well, so there's, there's certified versus/and temporary assholes. I would definitely say that my certified asshole score was higher when I was younger. But, I think that I had something when I was younger, which was that, uh, I don't think I was ever nasty to people who were similar and less, if there was anybody of less status than me. I, I've always been somebody who has kicked up, and which does get you in trouble, um, especially among authority figures that I don't respect. So I think that at least I didn't kick down, which is one characteristic of people who tend to be assholes. But yeah, my teachers would definitely say Bob Sutton, comma, that asshole. I think that in the teacher's lounge, that might've been my full name.

[00:28:40] Adam Grant:
Well, and now, now I know why one of your, your other memorable quotes has so much relevance. You've said we should be a little bit slower to label other people assholes and maybe a bit quicker to consider ourselves in that category.

[00:28:53] Bob Sutton:
Well, Adam, you, you being a famous psychologist, you do know that given the biases that we tend to have self-serving biases, and I, I think that that's part of it. And there's some interesting national surveys done by the Workplace Bullying Institute in the last, the percentage of people who have ever worked with or observed basically ongoing bullying in their workplace, and it’s well over 50% of the workforce. And they'll ask people, “Have you ever been that person?” It's something like one half of 1%. So, and, and we know that it's larger, it’s larger than that.

But yes, I think that especially being quick to label yourself as a temporary asshole, I shouldn't have done that. And that’s, you know, I should not have behaved like that in that situation. I think that's one of the defenses against becoming a certified asshole 'cause you can nip your own behavior in the bud.

[00:29:40] Adam Grant:
Related to that while we're on profanity, you, you said something to me recently that I thought was profound and that I ended up quoting to our kids, among others. You said that when you throw shit, some always lands on you.

[00:29:54] Bob Sutton:
Yeah. This came from my wife when she was a young lawyer, when she was a young litigator, and one of her mentors said that to her about litigation. Because very often when people get attacked in the press, when they get attacked privately, they wanna lash out against that person and just sort of squish 'em like a bug.

And, and, and this idea that when you insult people or say nasty things about people, you have to expect some to come back to you. Now this doesn't mean that it isn’t always called for. There are some people who do deserve to be called out for their terrible behavior. I'm not saying that shouldn't happen.

It does take some courage. And, and we're definitely seeing this in society at the moment, that, that, that if your knee jerk reaction is to, is to just say something nasty about someone, I think that that's something that, uh, a little bit of, of mindfulness is necessary to avoid hurting other people. And by the way, to avoid having that shit come sort of back at you as well.

[00:30:45] Adam Grant:
This is an example of something that you've described so eloquently that I talk about in class every year, which is the Knowing-Doing Gap. So much of what we do as psychologists is labeling and describing and trying to make sense of things that people already know, but don't put into practice on a regular basis.

[00:31:03] Bob Sutton:
So we got interested in this idea of, of why would smart people know something, say other people should do it, and then not do it themselves or not implement it into their organizations. And of course there's all sorts of explanations. If I would pick my favorite one, just 'cause it's, it stood the test of time, is in life there are often many rewards for saying things but not doing them. Unfortunately, when we look at the, what is it? The history of management movements, uh, what happens is that the people who are really good at talking, they get a bunch of credit for a while until the movement sort of fades away. And, uh, they've had no impact. So there's a problem with that.

[00:31:43] Adam Grant:
You spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley companies, and you've studied many of them. You've interacted with a lot of the leaders over many decades. I've been frustrated watching people consistently learn the wrong lessons from influential tech leaders. We've talked about the Steve Jobs problem of, you know, ‘wow, he's really successful and therefore I think I have to be an asshole,’ and I'm like, “Then you're probably an asshole.” Talk to me about how we learn the right lessons from successful leaders.

[00:32:11] Bob Sutton:
The way you, you do it is, to me, there's, there’s two ways. One is that you go through a period of doubt and pain that actually teach you the right lessons. That's, that's the hard way. I think the board of Open AI learned that about how to fire a CEO. That's not how you fire a CEO. You have to bring everybody on board and, and you also have to sort of, you know, build an ongoing sort of case in public. So one is to go through the painful lesson. The other one is to have people in your life who you can trust to tell you the truth, even if you don't like it.

[00:32:47] Adam Grant:
When, when you study leaders, when you interact with them, how do you isolate what things they're doing in spite of their success and what actions and practices are driving their success?

[00:33:00] Bob Sutton:
There are many people we know who are rich and famous despite, rather than because of, what they and their companies do.

But the main thing I do is I try to find as much evidence about how people around them react as opposed to them. And you can do that just informally by watching how they, they treat their staff. And you've written about this too, is, is that although gossip is a dirty word, I really believe in, in having good gossip networks.

And, and if you can talk to the people confidentially who work for them now, and even better, talking to the people who used to work with them or for them and what they actually think of them, those are very powerful indicators. Those of tudents, people who’re switching jobs. Of course, we know one of the best things to do is, is to find somebody who used to work for your new boss, not who doesn't work for them anymore, or find as many people as possible to find out the, the truth of working for them. So it's the people surround them. It's not the person it-itself.

[00:33:58] Adam Grant:
There is a little bit of a survivorship bias there in that the people who are disgruntled are more likely to leave.

[00:34:04] Bob Sutton:
Yeah, I, I agree that the people who are disgruntled are more likely to leave. And, and, and back to the notion you can't please anybody in any role that you're in in life. But, um, the other bias you're gonna get is people within the company, they're mostly gonna only tell you good stuff. So, so you can get a sort of a balanced perspective if you will.

[00:34:23] Adam Grant:
Got it. Okay. What's a question you have for me?

[00:34:26] Bob Sutton:
How do you, like, sustain your, your mental and physical health given all the demands on your time? The Jewish mother in me worries about you. So how do you take care of yourself?

[00:34:35] Adam Grant:
Thank you? Uh, I don’t, I don't find that that complicated, honestly. I feel like I'm really clear on my priorities. And those priorities are family, health, writing, students….

[00:34:48] Bob Sutton:
Okay, good for you.

[00:34:49] Adam Grant:
I make time for the things that matter to me. I don’t know! I, I don't have a good answer to that question.

[00:34:53] Bob Sutton:
Well, well, you just gave a pretty good answer, which is that your priorities are clear, which, which does help in life. And I just, you know, being older than you, whenever I forget my priorities is when I've screwed up. But that, that's probably advice you would give other people too, that you're giving to yourself.

[00:35:08] Adam Grant:
I think always, yes. Okay. Lastly, we started talking about friction. We're gonna end on friction.

[00:35:15] Bob Sutton:
Sure.

[00:35:15] Adam Grant:
What is your favorite advice for getting rid of the bad friction around you?

[00:35:21] Bob Sutton:
Just remember as human beings and, uh, there's a, a team from University of Virginia did a whole bunch of studies of this. We, as human beings, our default way of solving problems is just to add more complexity, to add more people, to add more stuff.

And by the way, our organizations even reward us for doing that stuff, for having bigger staffs, for starting new initiatives. And just think more, uh, of yourself as sort of an editor in chief. What do great editors do? They cross things out, they make things shorter. So I would just start by, anytime you're going to solve a problem, start something new, pause and remember that you are wired to want to add complexity rather than to subtract it or not add it in the first place.

[00:36:07] Adam Grant:
I'm gonna follow your advice and shorten that answer. We're gonna subtract some words.

[00:36:10] Bob Sutton:
Okay.

[00:36:12] Adam Grant:
Thank you, Bob. This was so much fun as always.

[00:36:15] Bob Sutton:
It, it was really fun to talk to you, and you do say unexpected things. I mean, you do say things that surprise me sometimes, so.

[00:36:21] Adam Grant:
Do I?

[00:36:22] Bob Sutton:
Probably because, because you argue with me. Well, I'll say stuff and you'll say “Actually the evidence is….” So you, so that, that's being what, what'd you call, a logic bully? Is that what you’re…? Speaking of wives.

[00:36:31] Adam Grant:
Yeah. And you're, you're one of the people who, who not only tolerates it, but seems to savor it and crave it.

[00:36:37] Bob Sutton:
You're so good at arguing. Oh, I don't want, I actually wish you'd get a little worse, selfishly, because you win most arguments with me. I want you to be worse, not better.

[00:36:47] Adam Grant:
I just think you cave, you cave too easily. Your instinct is, uh, to, to trust the next generation of organizational psychologists.

[00:36:54] Bob Sutton:
Yeah. Well I trust you more than my generation, but that's another story. Okay. Well thanks so much.

[00:37:00] Adam Grant:
Thanks Bob.

My biggest takeaway from Bob is that there might be an optimal zone of consensus. If no one agrees with you, you might be missing the mark. But if everyone agrees with you, you're probably not challenging people enough.

ReThinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. This show is part of the TEDAudio Collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley-Ma and Aja Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Hsu and Allison Leyton-Brown.

Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winik, Samiah Adams, Michelle Quint, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rodgers.

[00:37:55] Bob Sutton:
The book that we're talking about, The Friction Project, was actually named The Shit Fixers for about a year after you and I had a conversation. And I'm not sure whether you came up with The Shit Fixers or I did, but in any, in any event, that did not survive the editing process, nor should it have.

[00:38:12] Adam Grant:
Understandable.