The ARSE test has provoked a new round of "asshole stories," especially about asshole bosses. Leslie at Burns Auto Parts Consulting wrote a great post that asks "Are You an Asshole? Note that Leslie isn't a car parts designer, she is a photographer and consults to people who do creative work... she just uses cars as a metaphor for what she does.
Leslie's story abut the asshole boss and the Audi shows to me -- although surveys and the like are useful -- that there are just some things that assholes do that can only be captured through stories, not by checking boxes that say "true" and "false" or 1 to 5 (although the best of all is to combine stories with quantitative data). Check out her full post, but the themes I see running through reflect the nasty things that happen to people when you give them a little power, like :
I personally had a boss (owner) who told his workers
(about 6 of us) that there needed to be “belt-tightening” in the
company. We all needed to “pull together” to get through the financial
bad times, and vague promises of profit sharing in the future were
offered. A few days later he showed up with (and showed off!) his new
Audi. Interesting that he lost two key players (including me) not long
after that.
I think that is a clear asshole move and this boss qualifies as an asshole -- and it is consistent with that research on power dynamics that shows how, once people get in positions of power, they focus on satisfying their own needs and wants and become insensitive to the the perspective and feelings of others. I would also add, however, that Leslie's boss might have been an asshole, but he was an amateur compared to the salesman who wrote me "Had Lukemia, Bullied by a Bad Manager."
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