New Year’s Resolutions – An Easy One!

I don’t know about you but I’m in the habit of not only making New Year’s Resolutions, but writing them down.  One of my dual purpose business and professional resolutions for 2013 was – “Be On Time” and seeing it regularly on page one of my 2013 journal helped me improve my punctuality throughout the year.  For 2014 my dual purpose resolution is “Read More”, meaning more books, so I thought sharing excerpts from current and previous reads would be helpful in keeping my resolution and giving you some thought provoking ideas during 2014.

I read this book twice during 2013 because I liked it so much – how could you not be intrigued by a book titled The No Asshole Rule.  The author, Robert I. Sutton, PhD, a Stanford University professor begins by stating we may call these people by other more polite names but “asshole best captures the fear and loathing I have for these nasty people.”  I didn’t agree with all of his “Ten Steps for Enforcing the No Asshole Rule” but here are two that hit home with me when it comes to hiring and managing professionals:

Step 2)  Assholes will hire other assholes.  Keep your resident jerks out of the hiring process, or if you can’t, involve as many “civilized” people in interviews and decisions to offset the predilection of people to hire “jerks like me.” 

Step 3) Organizations usually wait too long to get rid of certified and incorrigible assholes and once they do the reaction is usually, “Why did we wait so long to do that?”

I hope your year is off to an excellent start and your New Year’s Resolutions are still intact!

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