Rule Nazis and Other Petty Tyrants: The Toxic Blend of Influence Without Prestige

I've been thinking a lot about petty tyrants lately. Last week's episode of my Friction Podcast at Stanford focused on on these frustrating and sometimes sadistic assholes. My new book, The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal With People Who Treat You Like Dirt, digs into why petty tyrants do their dirty work, how to outwit them, and sometimes, turn them into allies. This piece is based on the book.

There are people with modest but real power—and who take sick satisfaction from frustrating and pushing others around. In The Fire from Within, for example, author and anthropologist Carlos Castaneda expressed disdain for “minor petty tyrants”—people with limited power who are determined to “persecute and inflict misery.” Petty tyrants wield power over some narrow but unavoidable domain and lord it over victims in small-minded, uncaring, and demeaning ways. The “Rule Nazi” is a common and especially vexing breed. As Columbia University’s Heidi Grant Halvorson wrote on the Harvard Business Review’s website in 2016: “They cling to the rules like Leonardo DiCaprio clung to that door in Titanic —as if their lives depend on it. And they make sure everyone else does too, even when the rule doesn’t make sense or stands in the way of productivity.”

 I think of that bank clerk who insisted that I complete a long form all over again because I made one small mistake—rather than allowing me to simply correct it and initial it. Or the administrators at Stanford who wrote, and enforced, their rigid rules with such gusto that I was required to write a personal check to Stanford for $14.12 after spending too much money on wine at a recruiting dinner for a faculty candidate (four people attended and we each had a single glass of the cheapest wine on the menu). As another, more flexible, administrator pointed out to me, it probably cost Stanford $25 to process my check.

 A hallmark of petty tyrants—including many Rule Nazis—is that their power over a narrow domain is coupled with low prestige; they simmer and sulk about the lack of respect they get. This mix of power and low social status creates a deadly brew—it provokes them to take out their frustration and resentment on others. Nathanael Fast of the University of Southern California and his colleagues did an experiment that triggered this brand of abuse by university students. The researchers labeled some students “Workers,” told them that their role would entail menial tasks, and that fellow students “tend to look down on the Worker role and don’t have admiration or respect for it.”

 Other students were anointed “Idea Producers” and told they would be performing important tasks and that fellow students looked up to and respected the position. Students in both groups were then asked to dictate which “hoops” their partner (who was imaginary, but they believed was real) would have to jump through to qualify for a $50 drawing. The “hoops” ranged from activities that weren’t demeaning at all (e.g., “tell the experimenter a funny joke”) to creepy and humiliating (e.g., “say ‘I am filthy’ five times” and “bark like a dog three times”).

 The results? The lowly “Workers” took out their resentment on their imaginary partners by selecting far more demeaning acts for them to perform. In short, petty tyrants are rarely in a position to ruin your life, but often use their limited authority to make you suffer (and to make themselves feel more important).

 What can you do about Petty Tyrants?  Sometimes direct confrontation works, especially if you have the power to bring them down a notch.  Like the California sales rep who wrote me about a peer who claimed that he monitored exactly what time she and others arrived at work each morning because he was acting on behalf of senior management. He often berated and even cussed colleagues out for being just a minute or two late. 

It took the sales rep a while to figure out that management didn’t want him or anyone else to be so picky or disrespectful. She finally confronted this jerk, asking, “Since when are you the self- appointed hall monitor/time clock here?” He was “truly shocked” and stammered out that he was just assisting coworkers as a “mentor.” The sales rep said, “I immediately replied and got very close to him, looking straight into his eyes, ‘Well it is more like torr-mentor. So knock it off.’” It worked. After that, he stopped acting like the local Rule Nazi.

Although confrontation can bring down petty tyrants and other bullies, as I show in The Asshole Survival Guide, it can backfire, provoking anger and revenge; it’s especially dangerous if that asshole has more power than you. And in the case of petty tyrants, there is an added twist. As Nathanael Fast’s research suggests, petty tyrants often treat other people like dirt because they feel disrespected and underappreciated, and so they take out their anxiety and insecurities on others. They crave respect. So rather than paying attention to them, showering them with respect and appreciation, and even false flattery, just might turn these kinds of haters into friends. 

My daughter Claire used this tactic to tame the local petty tyrant when she worked as a hostess in a tequila bar. The cook glared and growled at her and the servers night after night. Claire decided to “kill him with kindness.” No matter how unpleasant the cook was, she smiled at him, offered compliments about his great food and how hard he worked, and responded to his barbs with warmth and understanding. This “love bombing” campaign eventually “wore him down” and within a few months, she said, “He was very nice to me and even gave me free food.” Claire concluded, “He was just a guy who needed a friend.” And, I would add, some respect and appreciation.

I am a Stanford Professor who studies and writes about leadership, organizational change, and navigating organizational life. Check out my new"All Things Bob Sutton" site, which includes a place to sign up for a free monthly newsletter, videos, and links to my other work. Follow me on Twitter@work_matters, and see my other posts on LinkedIn. My most recent book (with Huggy Rao) is Scaling Up Excellence. My next book, The Asshole Survival Guide: How To Deal With People Who Treat You Like Dirt, will be published in Fall of 2017. 

Note this piece first appeared in my June 2017 newsletter