Imran Syed: Hi, welcome back to another episode of Work Measured. I am so excited today ⁓ with our guest, Tessa West. She's a professor of psychology from the New York University and one of the leading researchers on how people actually interact at work. She wrote Jerks at Work. I can't wait to dive into that. The field guide for difficult coworkers and job therapy on the hidden emotional relationships people have with their careers. Her work has appeared everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to the Today Show.
Tessa West: Mm-hmm.
Imran Syed: ⁓ She studies the awkward, uncoverable, measurable reality of workplace interactions that most companies pretend don't exist. Tessa, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you here.
Tessa West: Yes, I am too. Thank you for having me.
Imran Syed: So f the theme today is kind of like that science of difficult people at work. And I know our audience, like immediately an image pops to your head or multiple ones, of who those folks are. You've kind of cataloged this as the jerks at work. I and I and I love this framing. The kiss-up, kick downer, the credit stealer, the gaslighter. First and foremost, like tell us more about this cataloging the jerks at work. What's the type of damage that can they can create in performance? And how come they survive so long?
Tessa West: Yeah, I think this is a good question. When I was writing this book, I wanted to come up with categories where people could think to themselves, ⁓ I know that person, or maybe an inner panic of, am I that person? And the answer is probably both are true. ⁓ I think we're all very familiar with dealing with someone who kisses up and kicks down, who the boss loves and is a good performer, yet they torture everybody at the same level or beneath them, who steals credit, who micromanages, who neglects, who gaslights.
Imran Syed: Yeah.
Tessa West: And these individuals can absolutely wreak havoc on the workplace. And I think we know now how important relationships are at work. And I think in a way that we probably weren't thinking so seriously about maybe 10 years ago. People leave jobs all the time because of bad relationships. They perform worse because of bad relationships. And I think relational skills, being good at relationships, are probably just as important as having technical skills in the workplace. And I think when you have a jerk at work, or when you have a workplace that encourages this, or at least sort of like creatively disengages from it, pretends like it doesn't happen, it really leads people to feel like there's no justice at work, there's no fairness at work. No matter how hard they try, things aren't gonna work out for them. And that kind of negativity can spread really like wildfire in the workplace. And I think that's often what we see now when people do things like quietly quit and you know, just say like, I'm not gonna be part of this culture. And so they absolutely can destroy the workplace locally as well as globally, and whole industries have been negatively affected because of it.
Imran Syed: Why why why do they survive so long?
Tessa West: Often they're good at their jobs, I think. And I think often the people who are harmed by them aren't harmed enough to affect the bottom line of a company in ways that are immediately perceivable. So if I have a boss who it credits deals, for instance, that boss might climb climb up and do really well at work. And the fact that I'm not getting credit isn't gonna harm the company in any perceivable way.
Imran Syed: Mm.
Tessa West: I might disengage or leave, but the company's not gonna feel that, at least not immediately. And so it can take a really long time for those negative effects to be cumulative enough for an organization to see them. But honestly, a lot of these organizations encourage this, and these people tend to be pretty good performers in the ways that we are used to measuring performance historically.
Imran Syed: You know, it's interesting as a founder, I feel like there's all these attributes of a founder that we we celebrate. even in the venture community, right? Like they're looking for almost, you know, sometimes a little bit of a jerk, right? And it it kind of comes across that way. And some of the the folks we idolize out there in the marketplace, like an Elon, ⁓ may exhibit some of these behaviors and and we kind of put ⁓ on a pedestal. Why do you think we're so obsessed with the jerk, like as the outline? The person who gets shit done. is there something in our culture that kind of feeds to it?
Tessa West: Yeah, there's something in our culture that's attracted to extreme personality traits. And I think the venture is a perfect example. There's a bit of a culture of a genius mentality when it comes to founders, that the weirder you are, the more unrelatable you are. ⁓ The stranger your habits, the more of a genius you must be. And the people who work for these founders often complain that they can't relate to them, that they have communication issues, they can't kind of explain. Hair on fire problems and so forth. And we think that this kind of strangeness is part of what makes somebody creative and interesting and must make them successful. There's something very boring about saying, in order to be successful, you should be nice and you should just work hard and do the same thing day in and day out. No, there's an exoticism that I think we're attracted to, and part of that is. Weird social behavior that we then incentivize. And I think Elon Musk is kind of classic example, but I know lots of founders who experience this. And it's definitely within, I'm in academia. We definitely think being weird and socially off is something that we incentivize. And that often means kind of torturing the people who are beneath you. And we we put these people on a pedestal. We make it, it's like sexy to be strange in in a weird way that like most people don't actually like.
Imran Syed: Ha ha ha.
Tessa West: But it it it makes for good storytelling at least.
Imran Syed: Yeah, it's interesting. I I know some founders that I've gotten a a chance to get to know ⁓ and ⁓ their outward persona and their inward persona are two totally different people. And sometimes I'm like, you know, why are you communicating that way? Why are you acting that way? And
Tessa West: Mm.
Imran Syed: kind of feel like they have to put it on and that's who they have to be. And yeah, it's it's really strange to me. ⁓ Most performance problems get treated as sort of skills problems in the workplace. And ⁓ how often are they actually more relationship problems? And ⁓ in terms of the manager, I'm really curious about this. How would most managers actually be able to tell the difference between a skills problem and a relationship problem?
Tessa West: Yeah, I think we we tend tend to think of these as orthogonal. I actually think they're very difficult to disentangle because when I talk to a manager and they say someone can't do something, and then I talk to the person who can't do the thing, it's almost always not even clear what they're arguing about, what that thing in question is. ⁓ and there's a lot of research in the relationships literature showing that when it comes to conflict, we almost don't even agree on what we're fighting about. That's the hardest thing to come to agreement about. And so when we blame it on a skill, yeah. Yeah, like we spend a hundred hours going, What are we fighting about? Did they steal the idea? Or were you supposed to line item that edit that in the way that we said? And so 90% of the time should be spent figuring out what were you supposed to have done in the first place? What was the exact behavior that that manager was expecting out of you? And what was the behavior that you thought you were executing on?
Imran Syed: I think anybody who's been in a personal relationship knows what that is, right?
Tessa West: And it's almost never aligned. And so the lack of skill is more in the lack of communication. You can blame either side of what the thing was that they were supposed to produce. Like, were they supp supposed to paint the wall red or the door red? And they fight for hours and hours about whether they're good at painting things red. And that one thing is just never actually clarified because they assume they're on the same page with what the outcome was supposed to be. So I'd say they're not orthogonal. Fight about that first thing first. And you'll find that the person probably has the skill. You just aren't on the same page with what exactly they were supposed to do to execute that skill. ⁓ And, you know, then at the end of the day, you'll figure out, could they actually do the thing? But almost always there's a fight over whether they were supposed to do the thing that they you thought they were supposed to be doing.
Imran Syed: Ha ha. Yeah, I ⁓ I'm super curious about how you think AI is is impacting social relationships ⁓ in the workplace. You know, we've we've all sort of heard of behavior companions ⁓ entering into the workplace, the role of the manager versus the role of AI to sort of coach and develop. How is that shaping up in the academic world? And I'd I'd love to get your lens on that.
Tessa West: Yeah, ⁓ I recently wrote a Wall Street Journal piece on this. I think AI is throwing a big wrench in our social relationships. I think basically what it's doing is it's taking ambiguous relationship issues like, did you do the work yourself? ⁓ can I ask you if you outsourced it to AI? What am I allowed to use it on, or is it cheating? And it's adding just another layer of ambiguity and complexity and uncertainty to it. So Most of the time it's making things worse because people don't communicate what they should be using it for, what the rules are. And there's a lot of gray area there. as an academic, I run into this all the time. Not just students cheating, but how to use it in science. You know, when is it okay to have it, you know, code your data versus interpret your data? When does it count as thinking for you? and when do you know enough to know that you're using it properly? And I think that's a big problem that managers are facing is saying. The people who are using it the most are the ones who don't shouldn't be using it because they don't know what they don't know. And that's just creating a ton of ambiguity around who's doing what and can I confront them? And if they didn't do the thing, can I rely on them to say present to a client next week because they outsourced their work to AI? Or maybe they did. I don't know. I feel uncomfortable asking them. So it's creating a giant mess. And it's a mess that we don't like to talk about because it's awkward. To ask someone if they used AI in the same way it's awkward to ask someone if they cheated in other ways. ⁓ and yet we're all doing it, and we negatively stereotype people all the time for doing it. We think they're lazy, we think they have no morals, yet, like 90% of us are doing it. So we're not super self-reflective about it, but we're super hard on other people for doing it. And it's it's not good. And I think the whole companion thing is is a big disaster, personally.
Imran Syed: Ha ha ha ⁓ I was it
Tessa West: Yeah, it's bad. Don't talk to your chat bot for your relationship expertise. That's not great.
Imran Syed: It it might only see it your way. 'Cause it just wants to please you.
Tessa West: You also can't ask it about itself. So you're not gonna learn to be an interesting person when all it does is talk to you about you. Like you don't learn how to ask it interesting questions about its perspective. You don't learn perspective taking because it doesn't have a perspective, it doesn't have experiences in the same way that human beings do.
Imran Syed: Yeah, ⁓ that's that's that's super cool. One of the things that you know at Hatch we're working on is so we measure human performance and agent performance. And I get asked this question all the time, like as more agents enter the workforce than humans, that job description task list might kind of go away and you might have your agent doing a lot of that. So what's the human left with in terms of the value that they're providing in the My answer to that is judgment, point of view, ⁓ understanding context, which is really difficult inside an organization. How do you sort of see that? And like what's the leading thoughts in the academic world of like where where individuals go in this agent and human world?
Tessa West: Yeah, taste, taste making is another huge thing that we can't rely agents on. ⁓ who who should get promoted, who should climb up, what leadership structure should look like. And so we know ⁓ relational intelligence matters a lot. And so you can't let agents make decisions about structures of teams, who should be on a team, who should be the leaders, who should be on boards, who should be on the C-suite, who you should hire as an external consultant and a coach, and what those coaches should be saying.
Imran Syed: ⁓ yeah, that's great. Yeah.
Tessa West: Because those are skills that that ⁓ the agents don't pass the Turing test on. You really need people to come in. And I know a lot of AI companies are actually going a little analog on that, and they're actually using humans to do their to do their training data and look at their training data to make sure that the way that these These LLMs are working and these kind of these other AI tools are working are actually informed by people as much as possible and putting them back into the pipeline. Because anything that requires relational intelligence, I wouldn't plug in AI into that. And I think in academia, we use it for coding. We try not to use it for interpretation of data because it's sycophantic and it will tell you your hypothesis is supported. And ⁓ no writing because it's it just It's bad. And we all now have contracts for that sort of thing. So I mean, that's what I would say. Anything that requires relational intelligence, team building, ⁓ climbing up who you should promote, that type of stuff, I think you really need the human to weigh in on.
Imran Syed: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I keep describing it as you remember like math textbooks or calculus textbooks and they'd always have the answers in the back, but you'd have to go through the work to to understand it. And ⁓ now we're kind of just jumping to the answers in the back and most folks don't actually know how to do the work to get there. we call that experience and kind of learning. Making a lot of mistakes. Yeah. Making a ton of mistakes.
Tessa West: Yeah. Yeah. We call we call that learning. Yeah, exactly.
Imran Syed: The process, and you know, you you're you're closer to this like coming generation with your role at New York University, and ⁓ how like describe to me what you think the next five years is gonna look like in terms of if we skip these essential steps that we we have felt are essential and and we've had them to learn it. What what what do we produce five years from now in in the minds of tomorrow?
Tessa West: Yeah. Yeah. It's bad. I mean, there's a lot of papers that have come out of universities about how bad it is. So, so, you know, there's the lack of skills because they don't want to learn. But I think the real problem is a lack of di willingness to be uncomfortable with the slowness of learning and with being wrong and with the process of not having an answer right away. And so, like learning to be bored, learning to be imp you know, just getting rid of this kind of impatience issue. Is often what we're seeing with younger generations that want the answer right away that say, Why would I try to figure it out myself when it can be done more easily by a machine? They don't want the discomfort. And so I often use metaphors. I mean, this works on my son because he's a baseball player of you can't outsource baseball training to a machine. Why would you outsource other forms of learning to a machine? And that metaphor at least kind of works on him. But The the discomfort that comes along with that learning and then the reward feeling that comes along with that process. And then what we end up missing is those transferable skills that you get from the learning process that they then can bring into a new job or a new team or a new task. You learn transferable skills when you learn a process, not when you learn an answer. And so if you can't learn how to do something and you just get the answer and then you have to do it again in a new context, it's starting over again. And that's the skill we're missing. ⁓ in educ higher education today, we're teaching relational skills. Like my close relationships class is how to make eye contact. It used to be like, let's deep dive theories of close relationships, and now it's how to have a conversation for five minutes and then how to get out of that conversation. It's like super low-level relational skills ⁓ because of this issue as well. So I mean, I I think more of like the psychological pieces of discomfort that we need to get people to grow back. And those are really the things that we're missing and the transferable skills that come along with being. Going through that discomfort of the learning.
Imran Syed: Yeah, that's that's super fascinating because it seems so second nature to me. but you know, I worked with a lot of sort of new grads coming out of the pandemic at my previous company and ⁓ I remember shifting from Zoom to in person And in-person meetings, Tessa, they they just jump right into it and you know, be on the agenda, which you know, you're like, okay, great, we're we're getting right into work. But I used to spend like 10-15 minutes like learning their kids' names, do they play baseball, you know, and ⁓ establishing all of this rapport. And I noticed with folks during the pandemic, especially that kind of came out of it that went straight into business, you know, business as usual. and I feel like some of this affects.
Tessa West: Yeah.
Imran Syed: Of like having conversations. I was walking around San Francisco the other day and ⁓ everybody just walks past you. And you know, even when you're in line, like nobody really talks to each other, like we've almost removed all friction out of our lives.
Tessa West: Yes. Yep.
Imran Syed: Right. And the friction was the beautiful stuff, like having a conversation with a cashier or ⁓ you know, talking to somebody at a dealership or, you know, something like that. What do you think the long term effects of that is and like can we go back to actually having those sort of interactions? Are they still important?
Tessa West: Yes, I think we have removed friction. We have put things in place in our low level day-to-day lives to take that away, like walking around with ⁓ noise canceling headphones to remove what what we're now calling noise pollution, what we used to just call hearing other people talk. ⁓ you know, there's a younger generation calls it pollution. You know, and we don't have informal conversations because younger people I'm gonna just people, maybe not just young people.
Imran Syed: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Tessa West: Think they're a waste of time. And so people have lost an appetite for that. We don't use third spaces anymore. Like we don't sit in coffee shops and and and parks. What was what's now happened is we're no longer learning social norms in the ways that we've used to. And so you see people coming in at work or going into romantic relationships, and they're not learning the norms of how to behave quickly in ⁓ in local ways, but because they've lost that friction in their day-to-day lives. And so You get a job, you sort of learn where you can sit at the table, how informal you can be on email versus in person, who the smart people in the room are, who you should listen to, who you can interrupt and not interrupt. Those are the kinds of things you learn when you start a job. And when we had friction in our day-to-day lives, we learned that stuff on a normal timeline. Now, because we have removed all of that and have no friction, no one's learning those things in the spaces where they actually need them. And we're seeing just like a flat line. ⁓ across the board, ⁓ it work in the dating world with friendships, people stare they start weird and they stay weird. And I think that is really the consequence of us walking around with those headphones on and not making eye contact and having a phone, you know, in our face instead and not talking to the cashier is it's eroding our ability to create w normal social norms in those other spaces and an appetite for relationships. Like younger people aren't dating, they're not having friendships in real life. ⁓ and they're not interested in going into the job to form those network connections. So I think those are those are the main consequences of that frictionless world that you described.
Imran Syed: Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. I was ⁓ waiting in line for a restaurant in the city the other day and ⁓ it was cold, you know, in San Francisco and I could tell this person was from out of town and I just asked him, Hey, what'd you order? and he just wouldn't stop talking for twenty minutes ⁓ past that point and I was thinking, how do I escape this? ⁓ at this point, right? So it went to the other extreme, but ⁓ I'm a little bit over overly friendly. I l I love ⁓ the job therapy ⁓ piece, ⁓ where you sort of argue that people misdiagnose why they're unhappy at work and ⁓ what's some of the most common misdiagnosis ⁓
Tessa West: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Imran Syed: that you hear and like how do you sort of get to the real cause? Cause I I think I talk to a lot of folks. Right now there's a lot of job hugging going on where people are so they don't want to leave, even though they're unhappy. so w tell me more about that and what are sort of the root causes?
Tessa West: Yeah, I think it's very easy to point to structural problems at work. ⁓ and those often can be there, but the number one thing I hear is I have a bad boss. And ⁓ that can mean anything. That that can be literally anything. you could have a micromanager or you're or you're in a culture that is just too blunt for of a feedback culture for what you're used to. And When I hear I have a bad boss or ⁓ they make me come in and I don't want to come in, ⁓ those are kind of like those are the main things I hear as people's big gripes in the workplace. Usually what that means is something along the lines of like the feedback structure isn't clear, or they're making me come in, but they're not making it clear why, right? So I work an organization that doesn't have procedures, they demand things or an authoritarian way without explaining. why I should do it. And so I feel like I'm working for a place that makes me do things for no reason whatsoever. Like I'm in a Kafka novel. and it's hard for people to deep dive their relationship with their own career. think of it like a romantic partner. Like what is it about that boss relationship that you hate? Because it often means there's something about you that you maybe don't like or you have to discover. ⁓ And one of those big things is you just
Imran Syed: ⁓ no, it's it's never us. It's never us, Dessa.
Tessa West: It's never us, yeah. You spent too much you spend too much damn time on it. It's like you spent too much time, too much money, and your spouse will absolutely kill you if you leave this thing. And admitting that you have an existential crisis with your job or you have a a boredom that just can't ever go away, ⁓ even if you get rid of the bad boss, is just very threatening for people. And I get that. And so it's easier to say, like, it's the bad boss or it's the work from home policy that I don't like if they just got rid of those two things. It would all be solved, but usually it's something much more existential and costly, literally, and to your other relationships in your life.
Imran Syed: Yeah, and you know, I think the stat it's it varies somewhere between sixty and ninety percent of folks kind of cite the boss ⁓ as a piece of this. And if that relationship is so important then ⁓ the boss is the number one and and I imagine this is your immediate boss, it may not be the CEO of the company unless that's your boss, ⁓ but the person you're interacting with day in and day out, if this person is so critical, And, you know, assuming that that same person was involved in the hiring process, why do you think we w we get it so wrong? Is it is it we're not truly being honest with each other ⁓ at the at the dating point to take some of your personal relationships, you know, before we say we're we're we're going steady and we're gonna join this organization.
Tessa West: Yeah, I think it's easier to attribute things to a person who has control over you than it is to yourself in some way. and then when I ask people what boss they're referring to, they don't always refer to the person they report to. Sometimes it is the CEO or like a metaphorical boss that they don't even really have a real boss, right? They are the boss. it's so it's this funny thing of like finding whoever it is that could have.
Imran Syed: Hmm. Huh. Yeah. Yeah.
Tessa West: Power over you in that job, it's their problem, ⁓ you know, that is created the structure or system that you are within. ⁓ maybe it's human resources who's created that system that you hate and they're the boss in that scenario. So ⁓ you know, we like to blame the person in charge in the same way that our kids blame us when they get an F on their test or whatever, ⁓ like my kid does. He blames me for everything that goes wrong with his life, like never himself.
Imran Syed: Hm.
Tessa West: You know, it's it's easier to blame someone else for for our issues and you know, and blame the boss when the relationship goes wrong because it's up to them to fix it, not up to us. They're the ones in charge and giving upward feedback is nearly impossible. Therefore, I feel like I have no control over the situation. How could I actually have any agency here? So therefore it's my boss's fault and problem and job to fix all in one.
Imran Syed: Right. Yeah, yeah. I I I agree with the HR comment as well. I think, you know, whether it's ⁓ Toby on the office, it's just like we we have that ingrained on us a little bit. ⁓ you know, you've got so much great research that's out there, but if you could ⁓ take one of your findings and put it in front of every manager, every boss out there in America, which one would move the needle the most for you?
Tessa West: Yeah. ⁓ that's a good question. I would say that if you want to change someone's behavior, ⁓ or if you want to get them to do something for you, you have to appeal to their self-interest. I think that'd be my number one piece of advice. When people complain that they're not getting a raise, that they're not being respected at work, that they're not whatever, they try to appeal to the person through their own self-interest, and that almost never works. Whether that's a peer or a boss or a whatever, you have to find a reason why that other person should change to benefit themselves, even if you don't like them. And that is the appeal. if someone doesn't do that, they almost never get behavior change out of the person that they're having a conflict with, or they never get the raise or they the promotion or the whatever, because they almost always frame things purely out of why they deserve it. ⁓ why they're being treated unfairly, why they should get respect, why their emotions should be heard. Nobody cares about that stuff. They they change because it it's good for them to change. And if you can convince them that they will save time or money or a headache or whatever, then they will change. So focus on that ⁓ when you want someone to actually change their their real behavior ⁓ to benefit you. It's cynical, it's dark, it's mock evaluant, but it's true.
Imran Syed: Mm. That's f Yeah, yeah. I I couldn't agree more with you. ⁓ tell tell folks where they can find you, what are you working on? ⁓ how can I how can we plug you some more?
Tessa West: You can find me ⁓ at Tessawestauthor.com, Tessa Westlab.com, I'm on LinkedIn, Instagram, and the work I'm doing now is actually looking at communication among founders and startup teams and trying to understand what goes wrong early on and how we can predict whether they'll make it in the future.
Imran Syed: ⁓ I I could ⁓ I I could send you a lot of founders, including myself, to to be a part of the
Tessa West: Yeah. There's a lot there's a lot to work with there. And I think something like seventy percent of founders high, you know, really, really good companies just dissolve because of communication issues between co-founders. So that that's a juicy place to live and that's where most of my communication research is going right now.
Imran Syed: Yeah, luckily solo founder. ⁓ I recognized that before. So ⁓ i I couldn't agree with you more there. we have a tradition on the show, kinda leaving with the last question and tell me tell me about a number that changed your mind.
Tessa West: A number that changed my mind? ⁓ gosh.
Imran Syed: Yeah, yeah. In in line with work measured, yeah.
Tessa West: Ooh. That changed my mind. I'd say two years is a number that changed my mind. If you if if you hate something after two years, give up on it. That that would be my advice to people.
Imran Syed: Tell me more just leave it at that actually. Just leave it hanging. Okay. I love it. ⁓
Tessa West: Two years is my magic number of like after two years, if you can't find love, relationships, work, whatever the thing, time to move on. Fail fail within two years. That's my number. Thank you for having me.
Imran Syed: Thank you so much for being on the show, Tessa.
Tessa West: Mm-hmm.
Imran Syed: ⁓ She studies the awkward, uncoverable, measurable reality of workplace interactions that most companies pretend don't exist. Tessa, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you here.
Tessa West: Yes, I am too. Thank you for having me.
Imran Syed: So f the theme today is kind of like that science of difficult people at work. And I know our audience, like immediately an image pops to your head or multiple ones, of who those folks are. You've kind of cataloged this as the jerks at work. I and I and I love this framing. The kiss-up, kick downer, the credit stealer, the gaslighter. First and foremost, like tell us more about this cataloging the jerks at work. What's the type of damage that can they can create in performance? And how come they survive so long?
Tessa West: Yeah, I think this is a good question. When I was writing this book, I wanted to come up with categories where people could think to themselves, ⁓ I know that person, or maybe an inner panic of, am I that person? And the answer is probably both are true. ⁓ I think we're all very familiar with dealing with someone who kisses up and kicks down, who the boss loves and is a good performer, yet they torture everybody at the same level or beneath them, who steals credit, who micromanages, who neglects, who gaslights.
Imran Syed: Yeah.
Tessa West: And these individuals can absolutely wreak havoc on the workplace. And I think we know now how important relationships are at work. And I think in a way that we probably weren't thinking so seriously about maybe 10 years ago. People leave jobs all the time because of bad relationships. They perform worse because of bad relationships. And I think relational skills, being good at relationships, are probably just as important as having technical skills in the workplace. And I think when you have a jerk at work, or when you have a workplace that encourages this, or at least sort of like creatively disengages from it, pretends like it doesn't happen, it really leads people to feel like there's no justice at work, there's no fairness at work. No matter how hard they try, things aren't gonna work out for them. And that kind of negativity can spread really like wildfire in the workplace. And I think that's often what we see now when people do things like quietly quit and you know, just say like, I'm not gonna be part of this culture. And so they absolutely can destroy the workplace locally as well as globally, and whole industries have been negatively affected because of it.
Imran Syed: Why why why do they survive so long?
Tessa West: Often they're good at their jobs, I think. And I think often the people who are harmed by them aren't harmed enough to affect the bottom line of a company in ways that are immediately perceivable. So if I have a boss who it credits deals, for instance, that boss might climb climb up and do really well at work. And the fact that I'm not getting credit isn't gonna harm the company in any perceivable way.
Imran Syed: Mm.
Tessa West: I might disengage or leave, but the company's not gonna feel that, at least not immediately. And so it can take a really long time for those negative effects to be cumulative enough for an organization to see them. But honestly, a lot of these organizations encourage this, and these people tend to be pretty good performers in the ways that we are used to measuring performance historically.
Imran Syed: You know, it's interesting as a founder, I feel like there's all these attributes of a founder that we we celebrate. even in the venture community, right? Like they're looking for almost, you know, sometimes a little bit of a jerk, right? And it it kind of comes across that way. And some of the the folks we idolize out there in the marketplace, like an Elon, ⁓ may exhibit some of these behaviors and and we kind of put ⁓ on a pedestal. Why do you think we're so obsessed with the jerk, like as the outline? The person who gets shit done. is there something in our culture that kind of feeds to it?
Tessa West: Yeah, there's something in our culture that's attracted to extreme personality traits. And I think the venture is a perfect example. There's a bit of a culture of a genius mentality when it comes to founders, that the weirder you are, the more unrelatable you are. ⁓ The stranger your habits, the more of a genius you must be. And the people who work for these founders often complain that they can't relate to them, that they have communication issues, they can't kind of explain. Hair on fire problems and so forth. And we think that this kind of strangeness is part of what makes somebody creative and interesting and must make them successful. There's something very boring about saying, in order to be successful, you should be nice and you should just work hard and do the same thing day in and day out. No, there's an exoticism that I think we're attracted to, and part of that is. Weird social behavior that we then incentivize. And I think Elon Musk is kind of classic example, but I know lots of founders who experience this. And it's definitely within, I'm in academia. We definitely think being weird and socially off is something that we incentivize. And that often means kind of torturing the people who are beneath you. And we we put these people on a pedestal. We make it, it's like sexy to be strange in in a weird way that like most people don't actually like.
Imran Syed: Ha ha ha.
Tessa West: But it it it makes for good storytelling at least.
Imran Syed: Yeah, it's interesting. I I know some founders that I've gotten a a chance to get to know ⁓ and ⁓ their outward persona and their inward persona are two totally different people. And sometimes I'm like, you know, why are you communicating that way? Why are you acting that way? And
Tessa West: Mm.
Imran Syed: kind of feel like they have to put it on and that's who they have to be. And yeah, it's it's really strange to me. ⁓ Most performance problems get treated as sort of skills problems in the workplace. And ⁓ how often are they actually more relationship problems? And ⁓ in terms of the manager, I'm really curious about this. How would most managers actually be able to tell the difference between a skills problem and a relationship problem?
Tessa West: Yeah, I think we we tend tend to think of these as orthogonal. I actually think they're very difficult to disentangle because when I talk to a manager and they say someone can't do something, and then I talk to the person who can't do the thing, it's almost always not even clear what they're arguing about, what that thing in question is. ⁓ and there's a lot of research in the relationships literature showing that when it comes to conflict, we almost don't even agree on what we're fighting about. That's the hardest thing to come to agreement about. And so when we blame it on a skill, yeah. Yeah, like we spend a hundred hours going, What are we fighting about? Did they steal the idea? Or were you supposed to line item that edit that in the way that we said? And so 90% of the time should be spent figuring out what were you supposed to have done in the first place? What was the exact behavior that that manager was expecting out of you? And what was the behavior that you thought you were executing on?
Imran Syed: I think anybody who's been in a personal relationship knows what that is, right?
Tessa West: And it's almost never aligned. And so the lack of skill is more in the lack of communication. You can blame either side of what the thing was that they were supposed to produce. Like, were they supp supposed to paint the wall red or the door red? And they fight for hours and hours about whether they're good at painting things red. And that one thing is just never actually clarified because they assume they're on the same page with what the outcome was supposed to be. So I'd say they're not orthogonal. Fight about that first thing first. And you'll find that the person probably has the skill. You just aren't on the same page with what exactly they were supposed to do to execute that skill. ⁓ And, you know, then at the end of the day, you'll figure out, could they actually do the thing? But almost always there's a fight over whether they were supposed to do the thing that they you thought they were supposed to be doing.
Imran Syed: Ha ha. Yeah, I ⁓ I'm super curious about how you think AI is is impacting social relationships ⁓ in the workplace. You know, we've we've all sort of heard of behavior companions ⁓ entering into the workplace, the role of the manager versus the role of AI to sort of coach and develop. How is that shaping up in the academic world? And I'd I'd love to get your lens on that.
Tessa West: Yeah, ⁓ I recently wrote a Wall Street Journal piece on this. I think AI is throwing a big wrench in our social relationships. I think basically what it's doing is it's taking ambiguous relationship issues like, did you do the work yourself? ⁓ can I ask you if you outsourced it to AI? What am I allowed to use it on, or is it cheating? And it's adding just another layer of ambiguity and complexity and uncertainty to it. So Most of the time it's making things worse because people don't communicate what they should be using it for, what the rules are. And there's a lot of gray area there. as an academic, I run into this all the time. Not just students cheating, but how to use it in science. You know, when is it okay to have it, you know, code your data versus interpret your data? When does it count as thinking for you? and when do you know enough to know that you're using it properly? And I think that's a big problem that managers are facing is saying. The people who are using it the most are the ones who don't shouldn't be using it because they don't know what they don't know. And that's just creating a ton of ambiguity around who's doing what and can I confront them? And if they didn't do the thing, can I rely on them to say present to a client next week because they outsourced their work to AI? Or maybe they did. I don't know. I feel uncomfortable asking them. So it's creating a giant mess. And it's a mess that we don't like to talk about because it's awkward. To ask someone if they used AI in the same way it's awkward to ask someone if they cheated in other ways. ⁓ and yet we're all doing it, and we negatively stereotype people all the time for doing it. We think they're lazy, we think they have no morals, yet, like 90% of us are doing it. So we're not super self-reflective about it, but we're super hard on other people for doing it. And it's it's not good. And I think the whole companion thing is is a big disaster, personally.
Imran Syed: Ha ha ha ⁓ I was it
Tessa West: Yeah, it's bad. Don't talk to your chat bot for your relationship expertise. That's not great.
Imran Syed: It it might only see it your way. 'Cause it just wants to please you.
Tessa West: You also can't ask it about itself. So you're not gonna learn to be an interesting person when all it does is talk to you about you. Like you don't learn how to ask it interesting questions about its perspective. You don't learn perspective taking because it doesn't have a perspective, it doesn't have experiences in the same way that human beings do.
Imran Syed: Yeah, ⁓ that's that's that's super cool. One of the things that you know at Hatch we're working on is so we measure human performance and agent performance. And I get asked this question all the time, like as more agents enter the workforce than humans, that job description task list might kind of go away and you might have your agent doing a lot of that. So what's the human left with in terms of the value that they're providing in the My answer to that is judgment, point of view, ⁓ understanding context, which is really difficult inside an organization. How do you sort of see that? And like what's the leading thoughts in the academic world of like where where individuals go in this agent and human world?
Tessa West: Yeah, taste, taste making is another huge thing that we can't rely agents on. ⁓ who who should get promoted, who should climb up, what leadership structure should look like. And so we know ⁓ relational intelligence matters a lot. And so you can't let agents make decisions about structures of teams, who should be on a team, who should be the leaders, who should be on boards, who should be on the C-suite, who you should hire as an external consultant and a coach, and what those coaches should be saying.
Imran Syed: ⁓ yeah, that's great. Yeah.
Tessa West: Because those are skills that that ⁓ the agents don't pass the Turing test on. You really need people to come in. And I know a lot of AI companies are actually going a little analog on that, and they're actually using humans to do their to do their training data and look at their training data to make sure that the way that these These LLMs are working and these kind of these other AI tools are working are actually informed by people as much as possible and putting them back into the pipeline. Because anything that requires relational intelligence, I wouldn't plug in AI into that. And I think in academia, we use it for coding. We try not to use it for interpretation of data because it's sycophantic and it will tell you your hypothesis is supported. And ⁓ no writing because it's it just It's bad. And we all now have contracts for that sort of thing. So I mean, that's what I would say. Anything that requires relational intelligence, team building, ⁓ climbing up who you should promote, that type of stuff, I think you really need the human to weigh in on.
Imran Syed: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I keep describing it as you remember like math textbooks or calculus textbooks and they'd always have the answers in the back, but you'd have to go through the work to to understand it. And ⁓ now we're kind of just jumping to the answers in the back and most folks don't actually know how to do the work to get there. we call that experience and kind of learning. Making a lot of mistakes. Yeah. Making a ton of mistakes.
Tessa West: Yeah. Yeah. We call we call that learning. Yeah, exactly.
Imran Syed: The process, and you know, you you're you're closer to this like coming generation with your role at New York University, and ⁓ how like describe to me what you think the next five years is gonna look like in terms of if we skip these essential steps that we we have felt are essential and and we've had them to learn it. What what what do we produce five years from now in in the minds of tomorrow?
Tessa West: Yeah. Yeah. It's bad. I mean, there's a lot of papers that have come out of universities about how bad it is. So, so, you know, there's the lack of skills because they don't want to learn. But I think the real problem is a lack of di willingness to be uncomfortable with the slowness of learning and with being wrong and with the process of not having an answer right away. And so, like learning to be bored, learning to be imp you know, just getting rid of this kind of impatience issue. Is often what we're seeing with younger generations that want the answer right away that say, Why would I try to figure it out myself when it can be done more easily by a machine? They don't want the discomfort. And so I often use metaphors. I mean, this works on my son because he's a baseball player of you can't outsource baseball training to a machine. Why would you outsource other forms of learning to a machine? And that metaphor at least kind of works on him. But The the discomfort that comes along with that learning and then the reward feeling that comes along with that process. And then what we end up missing is those transferable skills that you get from the learning process that they then can bring into a new job or a new team or a new task. You learn transferable skills when you learn a process, not when you learn an answer. And so if you can't learn how to do something and you just get the answer and then you have to do it again in a new context, it's starting over again. And that's the skill we're missing. ⁓ in educ higher education today, we're teaching relational skills. Like my close relationships class is how to make eye contact. It used to be like, let's deep dive theories of close relationships, and now it's how to have a conversation for five minutes and then how to get out of that conversation. It's like super low-level relational skills ⁓ because of this issue as well. So I mean, I I think more of like the psychological pieces of discomfort that we need to get people to grow back. And those are really the things that we're missing and the transferable skills that come along with being. Going through that discomfort of the learning.
Imran Syed: Yeah, that's that's super fascinating because it seems so second nature to me. but you know, I worked with a lot of sort of new grads coming out of the pandemic at my previous company and ⁓ I remember shifting from Zoom to in person And in-person meetings, Tessa, they they just jump right into it and you know, be on the agenda, which you know, you're like, okay, great, we're we're getting right into work. But I used to spend like 10-15 minutes like learning their kids' names, do they play baseball, you know, and ⁓ establishing all of this rapport. And I noticed with folks during the pandemic, especially that kind of came out of it that went straight into business, you know, business as usual. and I feel like some of this affects.
Tessa West: Yeah.
Imran Syed: Of like having conversations. I was walking around San Francisco the other day and ⁓ everybody just walks past you. And you know, even when you're in line, like nobody really talks to each other, like we've almost removed all friction out of our lives.
Tessa West: Yes. Yep.
Imran Syed: Right. And the friction was the beautiful stuff, like having a conversation with a cashier or ⁓ you know, talking to somebody at a dealership or, you know, something like that. What do you think the long term effects of that is and like can we go back to actually having those sort of interactions? Are they still important?
Tessa West: Yes, I think we have removed friction. We have put things in place in our low level day-to-day lives to take that away, like walking around with ⁓ noise canceling headphones to remove what what we're now calling noise pollution, what we used to just call hearing other people talk. ⁓ you know, there's a younger generation calls it pollution. You know, and we don't have informal conversations because younger people I'm gonna just people, maybe not just young people.
Imran Syed: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Tessa West: Think they're a waste of time. And so people have lost an appetite for that. We don't use third spaces anymore. Like we don't sit in coffee shops and and and parks. What was what's now happened is we're no longer learning social norms in the ways that we've used to. And so you see people coming in at work or going into romantic relationships, and they're not learning the norms of how to behave quickly in ⁓ in local ways, but because they've lost that friction in their day-to-day lives. And so You get a job, you sort of learn where you can sit at the table, how informal you can be on email versus in person, who the smart people in the room are, who you should listen to, who you can interrupt and not interrupt. Those are the kinds of things you learn when you start a job. And when we had friction in our day-to-day lives, we learned that stuff on a normal timeline. Now, because we have removed all of that and have no friction, no one's learning those things in the spaces where they actually need them. And we're seeing just like a flat line. ⁓ across the board, ⁓ it work in the dating world with friendships, people stare they start weird and they stay weird. And I think that is really the consequence of us walking around with those headphones on and not making eye contact and having a phone, you know, in our face instead and not talking to the cashier is it's eroding our ability to create w normal social norms in those other spaces and an appetite for relationships. Like younger people aren't dating, they're not having friendships in real life. ⁓ and they're not interested in going into the job to form those network connections. So I think those are those are the main consequences of that frictionless world that you described.
Imran Syed: Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. I was ⁓ waiting in line for a restaurant in the city the other day and ⁓ it was cold, you know, in San Francisco and I could tell this person was from out of town and I just asked him, Hey, what'd you order? and he just wouldn't stop talking for twenty minutes ⁓ past that point and I was thinking, how do I escape this? ⁓ at this point, right? So it went to the other extreme, but ⁓ I'm a little bit over overly friendly. I l I love ⁓ the job therapy ⁓ piece, ⁓ where you sort of argue that people misdiagnose why they're unhappy at work and ⁓ what's some of the most common misdiagnosis ⁓
Tessa West: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Imran Syed: that you hear and like how do you sort of get to the real cause? Cause I I think I talk to a lot of folks. Right now there's a lot of job hugging going on where people are so they don't want to leave, even though they're unhappy. so w tell me more about that and what are sort of the root causes?
Tessa West: Yeah, I think it's very easy to point to structural problems at work. ⁓ and those often can be there, but the number one thing I hear is I have a bad boss. And ⁓ that can mean anything. That that can be literally anything. you could have a micromanager or you're or you're in a culture that is just too blunt for of a feedback culture for what you're used to. And When I hear I have a bad boss or ⁓ they make me come in and I don't want to come in, ⁓ those are kind of like those are the main things I hear as people's big gripes in the workplace. Usually what that means is something along the lines of like the feedback structure isn't clear, or they're making me come in, but they're not making it clear why, right? So I work an organization that doesn't have procedures, they demand things or an authoritarian way without explaining. why I should do it. And so I feel like I'm working for a place that makes me do things for no reason whatsoever. Like I'm in a Kafka novel. and it's hard for people to deep dive their relationship with their own career. think of it like a romantic partner. Like what is it about that boss relationship that you hate? Because it often means there's something about you that you maybe don't like or you have to discover. ⁓ And one of those big things is you just
Imran Syed: ⁓ no, it's it's never us. It's never us, Dessa.
Tessa West: It's never us, yeah. You spent too much you spend too much damn time on it. It's like you spent too much time, too much money, and your spouse will absolutely kill you if you leave this thing. And admitting that you have an existential crisis with your job or you have a a boredom that just can't ever go away, ⁓ even if you get rid of the bad boss, is just very threatening for people. And I get that. And so it's easier to say, like, it's the bad boss or it's the work from home policy that I don't like if they just got rid of those two things. It would all be solved, but usually it's something much more existential and costly, literally, and to your other relationships in your life.
Imran Syed: Yeah, and you know, I think the stat it's it varies somewhere between sixty and ninety percent of folks kind of cite the boss ⁓ as a piece of this. And if that relationship is so important then ⁓ the boss is the number one and and I imagine this is your immediate boss, it may not be the CEO of the company unless that's your boss, ⁓ but the person you're interacting with day in and day out, if this person is so critical, And, you know, assuming that that same person was involved in the hiring process, why do you think we w we get it so wrong? Is it is it we're not truly being honest with each other ⁓ at the at the dating point to take some of your personal relationships, you know, before we say we're we're we're going steady and we're gonna join this organization.
Tessa West: Yeah, I think it's easier to attribute things to a person who has control over you than it is to yourself in some way. and then when I ask people what boss they're referring to, they don't always refer to the person they report to. Sometimes it is the CEO or like a metaphorical boss that they don't even really have a real boss, right? They are the boss. it's so it's this funny thing of like finding whoever it is that could have.
Imran Syed: Hmm. Huh. Yeah. Yeah.
Tessa West: Power over you in that job, it's their problem, ⁓ you know, that is created the structure or system that you are within. ⁓ maybe it's human resources who's created that system that you hate and they're the boss in that scenario. So ⁓ you know, we like to blame the person in charge in the same way that our kids blame us when they get an F on their test or whatever, ⁓ like my kid does. He blames me for everything that goes wrong with his life, like never himself.
Imran Syed: Hm.
Tessa West: You know, it's it's easier to blame someone else for for our issues and you know, and blame the boss when the relationship goes wrong because it's up to them to fix it, not up to us. They're the ones in charge and giving upward feedback is nearly impossible. Therefore, I feel like I have no control over the situation. How could I actually have any agency here? So therefore it's my boss's fault and problem and job to fix all in one.
Imran Syed: Right. Yeah, yeah. I I I agree with the HR comment as well. I think, you know, whether it's ⁓ Toby on the office, it's just like we we have that ingrained on us a little bit. ⁓ you know, you've got so much great research that's out there, but if you could ⁓ take one of your findings and put it in front of every manager, every boss out there in America, which one would move the needle the most for you?
Tessa West: Yeah. ⁓ that's a good question. I would say that if you want to change someone's behavior, ⁓ or if you want to get them to do something for you, you have to appeal to their self-interest. I think that'd be my number one piece of advice. When people complain that they're not getting a raise, that they're not being respected at work, that they're not whatever, they try to appeal to the person through their own self-interest, and that almost never works. Whether that's a peer or a boss or a whatever, you have to find a reason why that other person should change to benefit themselves, even if you don't like them. And that is the appeal. if someone doesn't do that, they almost never get behavior change out of the person that they're having a conflict with, or they never get the raise or they the promotion or the whatever, because they almost always frame things purely out of why they deserve it. ⁓ why they're being treated unfairly, why they should get respect, why their emotions should be heard. Nobody cares about that stuff. They they change because it it's good for them to change. And if you can convince them that they will save time or money or a headache or whatever, then they will change. So focus on that ⁓ when you want someone to actually change their their real behavior ⁓ to benefit you. It's cynical, it's dark, it's mock evaluant, but it's true.
Imran Syed: Mm. That's f Yeah, yeah. I I couldn't agree more with you. ⁓ tell tell folks where they can find you, what are you working on? ⁓ how can I how can we plug you some more?
Tessa West: You can find me ⁓ at Tessawestauthor.com, Tessa Westlab.com, I'm on LinkedIn, Instagram, and the work I'm doing now is actually looking at communication among founders and startup teams and trying to understand what goes wrong early on and how we can predict whether they'll make it in the future.
Imran Syed: ⁓ I I could ⁓ I I could send you a lot of founders, including myself, to to be a part of the
Tessa West: Yeah. There's a lot there's a lot to work with there. And I think something like seventy percent of founders high, you know, really, really good companies just dissolve because of communication issues between co-founders. So that that's a juicy place to live and that's where most of my communication research is going right now.
Imran Syed: Yeah, luckily solo founder. ⁓ I recognized that before. So ⁓ i I couldn't agree with you more there. we have a tradition on the show, kinda leaving with the last question and tell me tell me about a number that changed your mind.
Tessa West: A number that changed my mind? ⁓ gosh.
Imran Syed: Yeah, yeah. In in line with work measured, yeah.
Tessa West: Ooh. That changed my mind. I'd say two years is a number that changed my mind. If you if if you hate something after two years, give up on it. That that would be my advice to people.
Imran Syed: Tell me more just leave it at that actually. Just leave it hanging. Okay. I love it. ⁓
Tessa West: Two years is my magic number of like after two years, if you can't find love, relationships, work, whatever the thing, time to move on. Fail fail within two years. That's my number. Thank you for having me.
Imran Syed: Thank you so much for being on the show, Tessa.
