No Assholes: Managing with Soul
Or, How Psychological Safety Drives Peak Performance
When did you Peak?
Think about a time at work when you felt most alive, proud, fulfilled, when your work felt meaningful, when you felt like you were doing what you were meant to do.
What made it meaningful: impact, teamwork, recognition? And what made it possible: people, purpose, environment?
Those answers reveal your values, strengths, and the kind of workplace you thrive in. Shared in a team setting, they expose common values and show how much relationships and collaboration shape meaning at work. They also hint at how to recreate “peak moments” on the job, or anywhere for that matter.
My Tinker Bell experience at Disney last week was a form of peak experience, and it has gotten me thinking about similar experiences. It also sent me back to the time my old team hit its stride: inclusive, high-performing, and bonded. How did we build that culture so quickly, and what role, if any, did my leadership style play?
Maslow on Management
Digging into the theory behind peak experiences led me to Abraham Maslow. Now, I’m obsessed. His theories on psychology and management perfectly described my approach to leadership, or at least what I aspire to.
Maslow is most famous for Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a theory of psychological health culminating in what he called self-actualization, using our talents fully. He found that the experience of self-actualization sparks meaning, insight, and motivation. He called the feeling a peak experience.
Less known is his later work on management. Maslow believed that the manager’s role isn’t solely to control or direct others, but rather, to create conditions in which they can grow into their fullest, truest selves. He believed that a key role of a manager was to create conditions of psychological safety. He found that when people feel accepted for who they are, they gain the confidence to pursue self-expression, innovation, and growth. He called this approach, Eupsychian (literally “good-soul”) management,
Practicing Soulful Management
As a manager, I saw my primary job as creating the conditions for my team to succeed. To create psychological safety, I tried to be gentle in my criticisms, understanding of employees’ sometimes messy lives, and celebrated their strengths. I downplayed titles and awards, and spotlighted examples of what I saw as meaningful impact, teamwork, and collaboration. This created a feeling of psychological safety and a sense of shared purpose. People took risks, shared ideas, and celebrated each other’s strengths and accomplishments.
I left when I could no longer protect that climate. Looming layoffs, gutted support systems, even a personnel chief who bragged about “inflicting trauma” made it impossible. Fear now paralyzes agencies already prone to caution, leaving managers in a minefield with no map. It’s no wonder that very little is moving forward.
Companies like Google have reached the same conclusion as Maslow: the most important factor for team performance is psychological safety. Yet many public-sector leaders still preach risk-taking while running offices that punish it. Authoritarian, “scientific management” habits run deep in government. Compliance, eclipses purpose, starving employees of the autonomy and meaning. Process becomes the product, distancing public servants from the people they serve. Savvy managers fight this creep: they reduce rules to principles, focus on outcomes that matter (many of them un-measurable), and build trust so staff excel from intrinsic drives rather than the fear of an audit or a bad performance review.
No Assholes
As a manager, one of my principles, was a strict “no assholes” policy. I told my team that I would have zero tolerate assholes or assholery. In performance reviews, I emphasized that the primary criteria for teamwork was “don’t be an asshole.” And in hiring people, I tried my best to screen out assholes.
On that last point, I wasn’t always successful. I had hired someone for specific set of hard-to-find skills and expertise. Early on I could tell it wasn’t working out. The person fought with peers, talked down to junior staff, and didn’t listen to clients. Most troubling, he seemed to have more problems with women. Initially, I tried to gently explain our collaborative culture, I tried to clarify his role and give him a sense of psychological safety. But it wasn’t working. One day one of my employees came to me and said. Aaron I thought you had a no asshole policy, what’s this guy still doing here? What could I say? She was right. The next performance review, I was much more blunt. I told him he had to start getting along with his colleagues or there would be serious consequences. I think he heard it from his peers as well. Within a couple of months he left for another job.
Good leaders recognize and address toxic behavior quickly and a good culture can become its own immune system. My team internalized my no asshole policy, they held me accountable to it, and they weren’t afraid to call it out. The internalization of that principle on my team was exponentially stronger than any rule or performance criteria.
If we want more of those peak moments, we need to do more to build the conditions for them. That means finding ways to build organizations and develop leaders that give people a sense of purpose, safety, autonomy, and self-actualization.
What have been your peak experiences? Are there organizations or leaders that you feel do this well? I’d love to hear your experiences or suggestions.