An excellent policy to have.

You have them, the company you work for has them, your children’s school has them too, in fact any organization and institution has them: Policies.

Special criteria the helps organizations guide how the behavior and interaction between members, clients and suppliers should be. They have different policies about dress codes, work schedules, requests and usage of work equipment and even policies on how meetings ought to be run.

But what I very seldom see in them is a “No a**holes policy”.

Yes! A policy with which organizations can create an “a**holes free” environment. That is, a work place free of people who instead of positively and productively contribute, not only to the profitability of the company but also to create a space where the members of the team can work better and contribute more by growing their personal and professional skills; contaminate their peers and colleagues, creating a feeling of unnecessary tension and stress among everybody, leaving all without wanting to do any work at all.

There are in fact a lot of a**holes who interact with your team every day. It can very well be a manager, a key executive or any other member who feels or thinks he has special attributes and rights, or it can be an abusive client or a vendor who is not delivering like he should. 
But be it whom it may, the impact that these people can have on your organization could be bigger than you think.

This is why it is so important for companies and, why not, individuals too, to have a no a**holes policy in place, that prevents them of hiring, purchasing or selling to an a**hole, even if the immediate cost of it seems big, because believe me, the cost of sticking with an a**hole in the lung run could very well be a log bigger.

I mean, how important to acknowledge this is, that thought leaders with the likes of Guy Kawasaky and Bob Sutton have work on this subject too! (Do take a couple of minutes and watch his video)

Of course it would be very easy to point fingers and arbitrarily classify the people around us, thinking that we are no a**holes at all. So Professor of Management Science and Engineering atStandford University, Bob Sutton, shares with us, as an offshoot of his book “The no Asshole Rule”, the “Are you a certified a**hole? On-line test.

And even though none of you might get a higher note than 5 (I got 1 by the way), you might know someone who can even break the record!