Wall Street Journal Hits Bradults Where It Hurts

For those who do not subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, you missed a terrific article today by columnist Jared Sandberg. Titled “Colleagues You Wish You Didn’t Have Seem The Most Secure,” the article paints a perfect picture of how bradults (adult brats) who produce results, i.e., productivity and profit, are allowed to ride roughshod over workers who display decent behavior. Sandberg concludes that job security rewards the producing bradult over other employees even though the bradult leaves havoc in his wake.

Described as untouchables who “manage to commit job-losing offenses without ever losing their jobs,” Sandberg also calls them “prima donnas, hotheads and toxic revenue-generators who management thinks possess special powers.” If you’ve been in the workplace long enough, you know some of these untouchable characters.

Listen to what he says about these bradults.

The durability of these colleagues is a mystery to the rest of us who witness unchecked corporate misdemeanors in plain sight. Stopping short of pointing a did-you-see-that finger, even pushovers fantasize about firing them.

In fact, a fall 2005 extensive Rasmussen survey for Hudson Highland found that 31% of the American workforce has witnessed coworkers commit unethical acts of business conduct. That’s roughly 46.5 million workers. Yet nearly half those fail to report the violation to their superiors. Belief in the reporting system is broken thanks to those who coddle the bradult, choosing results over character, profit over values.

Continues Sandberg,

Yet, they (bradults) get away with it because of politics, broken performance-appraisal systems, or managers and peers who don't hold the offender accountable, respondents say. And making the job-applicant pool seem alarmingly shallow, more than half said the untouchable has been that way for more than four years.

Do you hear that? The problem is an engrained, long term one. More than half saying the bradult has been getting away with his behavior for over 4 years.

There are those who argue, “What’s the problem? No harm, no foul. After all, bad actors do make company profits during their bad acting times. Don’t sweat it.” Listen to what Sandberg says next.

Untouchables at the top of companies can create even more devastating problems than their lowly counterparts. The bad-behavior exception becomes the rule -- and they get highly paid for it. Michael Urlocker, who worked for various financial companies, saw a lot of frat-house antics, enabled by the following rule: "Anyone bringing home the bacon could behave any way they wanted in the investment world," he says.

Mr. Urlocker says one executive did to a CEO's leg what a dog does to a hydrant. Even if the story sounds apocryphal -- and Mr. Urlocker insists he got it from a credible source -- that kind of behavior "was deemed so routine that nobody else thought it was sociopathic," he says. "Within 15 minutes everybody forgot about it."

And they will forget about it, until HR hears about it and decides that sociopathic behavior is too much of a risk. (That would involve operations listening to HR. What a fantasy thought.) Or the CEO decides that the company mission statement, which boasts about the importance of personal values, is more important than profits. Or the Board of Directors wakes up to a newscast describing how the bradult, though his behavior, has implicated the company in scandal.

Here’s your toss up question on sociopathic behavior. What separates urinating on a CEO’s leg from punching the CEO in the face? One’s a criminal offense, you say, and the other isn’t. Think again.

One of these days we’ll wake up and realize that unchecked bradult behavior carries a price that outweighs profit. Ask Patricia Dunn. As Sandberg suggests, part of the answer to reigning in bradult behavior lies in implementing performance measures based on human decency. It hurts me to think that we’ve gone past that basic barrier of behavior in the name of profit.

Sandberg ends his insightful column by citing a production manager who once worked for a company that tolerated bradult behavior, but now works for a company where,

“. . . even the most productive salespeople are penalized in their performance-review scores if ‘they discount any carnage they may have left in the corporate halls.”

Hallelujah. It’s about time.