Good Boss, Bad Boss Quotes

“The case for reforming or, failing that, expelling the worst offenders is bolstered by Will Felps’s research on ‘bad apples’. Felps and his colleagues studied what I call deadbeats (‘withholders of effort’), downers (who ‘express pessimism, anxiety, insecurity, and irritation’, a toxic breed of de-energizer), and assholes (who violate ‘interpersonal norms of respect’). Felps estimates that teams with just one deadbeat, downer, or asshole suffer a performance disadvantage of 30 to 40 percent compared to teams that have no bad apples. These rotten apples are so destructive because ‘bad is stronger than good’. For most people, negative thoughts, feelings, and events produce larger and longer-lasting effects than positive ones.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst

“The second way was explained to me by a group of General Electric executives a few years back. I pressed them about their rather extreme ‘rank and yank’ system (which has been modified recently, but not much), where each year the bottom 10 percent of employees (‘C players’) are fired, the top 20 percent (‘A players’) get the lion’s share – about 80 percent – of the bonus money, and the mediocre middle 70 percent (‘B players’) get the remaining crumbs. I pressed them because a pile of studies shows that giving a few top performers most of the goodies damages team and organizational performance. This happens because people have no incentive to help others – but do have an incentive to undermine, bad-mouth, and demoralize coworkers, because pushing down others decreases the competition they face. Performance also suffers because hard workers who aren’t anointed A players become bitter and withhold effort.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst

“Connective talents are useless, of course, if people can’t perform the work. And the most talented people in every occupation have huge advantages over their ordinary peers. Dean Keith Simonton, who studies greatness and genius, finds that whether it comes to songwriters, composers, scientists, programmers, or filmmakers, the top 10 percent generate as much or more output than the other 90 percent. The superiority of great bosses is seen in a summary of eighty-five years of research on employee selection methods. Frank Schmidt and John Hunter found that the top 15 percent of professionals and managers produced nearly 50 percent more output than their average peers. The strongest predictors of performance included general mental ability (IQ and similar measures), job sample tests (having people prove they can do the work), and evaluations by peers; other useful predictors included structured employment interviews (where each candidate is asked the same questions in the same order) and conscientiousness (self-discipline and follow-through, similar to grit). These findings provide ammunition for bosses who stock up on the best talent and believe that little else is required. Yet without constructive connections among people, collective performance and humanity is tough to achieve – no matter how many superstars are in the fold.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst

“And the most talented people in every occupation have huge advantages over their ordinary peers. Dean Keith Simonton, who studies greatness and genius, finds that whether it comes to songwriters, composers, scientists, programmers, or filmmakers, the top 10 percent generate as much or more output than the other 90 percent.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst

“Diego Rodriguez (who also teaches at Stanford and writes the blog Metacool) asks bosses who want more creativity: ‘Where is your place for failing?’ I adore this question because creativity requires generating many ideas – most of which are bad. It requires judging ideas honestly and openly and then discarding most. In the hands of a bad boss, this process embarrasses and stifles people who develop ideas that don’t make the cut – and degrades the quality of those that are selected, developed, and thrown into the marketplace.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst

“As this VP discovered, being a boss is much like being a high-status primate in any group: the creatures beneath you in the pecking order watch every move you make – and so they know a lot more about you than you know about them.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst

“What you “learn” from Steve Jobs tells more about yourself than about him!”
― Robert I. Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst

“a host of cost-cutting moves, and one of the changes was that although employees”
― Robert I. Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst

“better to shoot the messenger than to learn about—and fix—the problems. In contrast to such constructive defiance, I know bosses who employ the opposite strategy to undermine and drive out incompetent superiors. One called it “malicious compliance,” following idiotic orders from”
― Robert I. Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst

“on outside the meeting and agree on a steward to be responsible for it. With frequent, crisp stand-up meetings, there can never be the excuse that the opportunity to communicate was not there. We insist that bad news travels just as fast”
― Robert I. Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst

“My rule of thumb is that no work team should have membership in the double digits (and my preferred size is six), since our research has shown that the number of performance problems a team encounters increases exponentially as team size increases.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst

“Countries with hot climates suffer higher murder rates and more political violence; more violent crimes occur in hot years;”
― Robert I. Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst