Tessa West

speaker

187 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2023 last heard Sep 2024

Tessa West’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · How to Deal With the Office Jerk · 26 Jun 2023 podcast

Eventually, we disengage from the workplace.

We have revolving doors of talent.

So people in management really need to care about kind of seeing these things when they're

first starting, detecting them early so that they don't get out of hand.

And they absolutely add up over time.

And I think the accumulation of the stress in your body as well is also something we shouldn't underestimate.

As someone who studies stress for a living, I know that when you're experiencing these chronic stressors from jerks, eventually you're going to see consequences like poor sleep, poor eating, and even heart disease and cardiovascular issues, things like that.

If you think you're a jerk, first off, you're in good company.

Most of us have the potential to be an office jerk.

What you want to do is actually sidestep the kind of jerk questions completely.

Ask about your specific behaviors.

If the person who you're worried you're a jerk to is someone who's underneath you in some capacity, you hold power over them, don't even ask about your behaviors.

Ask about what an ideal behavior would look like for that person.

So you're really getting around kind of jerk language, jerk accusations and say, you know, what would the ideal amount of time to turn around this document be?

Or do you want me to call on you or do you feel comfortable speaking up?

Sometimes you can detect that you're a jerk by just looking at the discrepancy between what you're doing and what the people around you say they would love to see in a person in your position.

So I'm a big fan of kind of the more indirect path of detecting that you're the actual jerk at work.

What I do is learn where the Achilles heel is in people's ability to give feedback and the ability to ask for it.

So there's kind of both this combination of if you don't ask the right way, no one will tell you that you're a jerk.

And if you deliver it poorly, people are going to get extremely defensive.

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