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The reason the kiss up kick downer keeps getting promoted is not that nobody notices. It is that the people they damage are not damaged enough to show up in the numbers. By the time the cumulative cost is visible in a P&L, that person has been promoted twice.
Who is on this episode
Tessa West is a professor of psychology at New York University and one of the leading researchers on how people actually interact at work. She wrote Jerks at Work, a field guide to difficult colleagues, and Job Therapy, on the hidden emotional relationship people have with their careers. Her work has appeared everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to the Today Show. Her current research is on communication inside founder and startup teams, trying to predict early which ones will make it.
What they covered
Tessa built her taxonomy of workplace jerks so that readers would recognise both a colleague and, uncomfortably, themselves: the kiss up kick downer, the credit stealer, the micromanager, the neglecter, the gaslighter. Her argument is that these people survive for two reasons. They are usually good at the job in the ways performance has historically been measured, and the harm lands on individuals rather than on revenue. The employee disengages or leaves. The company does not feel it, at least not yet.
Imran pushes on the founder version of this: venture culture rewards extreme personality, and the strangeness gets read as genius. Tessa agrees and says academia does exactly the same thing. Being socially off becomes evidence of brilliance, and the people underneath pay for it.
The most immediately usable part of the conversation is her claim that most performance problems are not skills problems. When she interviews a manager and then the person they say cannot do the job, the two are usually not even arguing about the same thing. Her instruction is to spend the first 90% of the effort establishing what the person was actually supposed to produce, because once you do, you often find the skill was there all along.
"Like, were they 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."
Tessa West
On AI, Tessa is pointed. It has injected ambiguity into the one thing teams could previously take for granted, which is who did the work. Nobody wants to ask, asking feels like an accusation, and meanwhile people judge others harshly for using it while using it themselves. She also argues against handing relational decisions to a model: who gets promoted, who should lead, who belongs on a team, who you hire as a coach. Those are taste, and taste does not pass the test.
She and Imran also get into friction, and what happens to a generation that engineered it out of daily life. The practical consequence, she says, is that people no longer pick up social norms on the normal timeline, so they arrive at a new job without the instincts for how formal to be, who to listen to and who not to interrupt.
"People start weird and they stay weird."
Tessa West
The last stretch is her Job Therapy material: why "I have a bad boss" is the most common and least informative complaint in working life, and usually a stand in for something more existential and more expensive to admit.
Key insights
- Toxic performers survive because the cost is slow and diffuse. If you want to catch them, you need a measure that picks up disengagement and attrition around a person before it reaches the revenue line.
- Before you treat a performance problem as a skills gap, establish what the person believed they were asked to do. Tessa says the two sides almost never agree on the thing itself, and the disagreement is the problem.
- Keep relational intelligence in human hands. Team composition, promotion, leadership structure and taste are the decisions Tessa would not plug AI into.
- You learn transferable skills from a process, not from an answer. Skip the process and the next time the problem appears in a new context you are starting from zero.
- If you want behaviour to change, appeal to the other person's self interest, not to fairness. Tessa calls this her single most useful finding, and concedes it is cynical and true.
- Her number: two years. If you still hate it after two years, whether it is a job, a relationship or a venture, move on.
Watch the full conversation on YouTube, or listen to the audio version on Apple Podcasts.
