How Not to Be a Dick (Part 1: The Origin Story)

How I Learned Everything I Needed to Know About Working Under a Bad Leader

I've been playing around with the idea of writing a book for a while now. Unfortunately, I can't find the overall theme that I want the book to focus on. I thought it was going to be labor relations and unions, but I'm not feeling that. Then I thought it might be positive employee relations, but everything I've had to say seems to feel trite in my imposter syndrome-driven mind. 

What I have come up with that I have found amusing is a series of sh!t-show stories about bad managers that I have encountered during my working career. That doesn't feel like a book I want to write, but they might make some hilariously wild blog posts. With that in mind, and in the spirit of Bob Sutton, and the No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, I give the first installment in the How Not to be a Dick leadership series. 

Meet Dick

Not all villains wear capes. Some of them wear company-logo polos, have a finger they use like a weapon, and treat ethics like something HR made up to ruin their Fridays.

When people ask me how I got into HR, I usually give the tidy, LinkedIn-ready version: I had union experience, thought about law school, and went to grad school to study labor relations instead. All true. All pretty boring.

The real story? My crash course in HR came from working for a guy named Dick. 

Yes, that was his actual name. And yes, it fit him like a tailored lawsuit.

Dick owned a small manufacturing company. I was the HR Director. He was the founder, CEO, alpha dog, and self-declared god of the plant floor. 

What follows isn’t a memoir. It’s a cautionary tale. A handbook of leadership behaviors you should recognize immediately and run from even faster.

First Impressions: Not Hired… by Choice 

The very first time I met Dick, he walked into my office unannounced and asked: 

 “Are you the HR guy I didn’t think we should hire?” 

 Strong start. Then he added,

 “We’ve been getting along fine without HR for 20 years.” 

 

 Translation: We’ve been getting away with a lot of crap, and I don’t want you screwing it up.

Poke First, Ask Questions Never 

Dick had a signature move: the chest poke. Not figurative. Literal. When angry, assertive, or just bored, he’d jab people in the chest with his index finger...repeatedly. Eventually, he poked me. I backed away several times. He followed me, repeatedly poking my chest. Finally, I warned him: 

 “If you poke me one more time, I will knock you out.” 

 He laughed, slapped me on the shoulder, and said: 

 “I like you, kid. You got balls.”

Leadership, apparently, is best done by physical harassment. 

The Court of Dick

 Another time, he dragged me into his office and said,

 “I need a witness. Someone’s going to lose their job today.” 

 He then had two department heads, engineering and operations, join us and argue their case while he played judge, jury, and executioner. After dismissing them, he turned to me and dropped this Hallmark-worthy quote: 

 “I wasn’t put on this planet to suffer stress. I was put on this planet to inflict stress. And someone is going to be very stressed after lunch.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

The Lesson 

Leadership by intimidation isn’t leadership. It’s theater. Bad, toxic theater. And Dick was running a full-time repertory company. 

Next time: The line between unethical and downright illegal, and how Dick managed to cross it more than once.