We’ve all encountered difficult people in our careers. And we’ll probably face them again. So how do you go about dealing with jerks at work?
My guest today knows exactly how. Tessa West is an associate professor of psychology at New York University and the author of the new book “Jerks at Work.” Tessa’s research focuses on awkward interactions at work. Her book is intended as a resource to help you avoid interactions with terrible people and, more importantly, to help you avoid becoming a terrible person yourself.
In this episode, Tessa and I discuss her book, how to identify jerks at work, how to spot these attributes in yourself and how to move forward. Tessa has a unique working experience that has fueled her passion for studying and understanding how people react to challenging workplace situations.
“I just think it’s really fascinating from a scientific perspective to bring people in and actually put them in these real-life situations and see how they unfold,” she says.
Punk Rock HR is proudly underwritten by The Starr Conspiracy. The Starr Conspiracy is a B2B marketing agency for innovative brands creating the future of workplace solutions. For more information, head over to thestarrconspiracy.com.
Spotting the Jerk 101
Tessa says that many people aren’t sure how to handle toxicity when they encounter it. This realization helped inspire the book.
“We kind of learn about the really egregious stuff, but we don’t learn how to handle everyday low-level conflict,” she says. “The stuff that makes going to work stressful and hard but often doesn’t rise to the level of getting someone fired or even making you quit your job. And I felt like it could be useful for people to get a little bit of training in this area.”
The training can go a long way in reducing the number of jerks in the workplace. But another challenge is that not all jerks are treated the same. Sometimes, the jerk is fired or demoted, but in other cases, it’s difficult to get anyone in power to recognize there’s a problem.
“I think one of the most difficult jerks I’ve dealt with is the ‘kiss up, kick downer.’ So this is that person who kind of tortures everyone who’s at the same level as them or beneath them. They’re mean, they’re sabotaging, but the boss really likes them, and these types of behaviors often make us feel really terrible about ourselves,” Tessa says.
Learning How to Deal
The “kiss up, kick downer” is just one kind of workplace jerk. This type can be difficult to deal with because the obvious pathways — confrontation or complaining to the boss or HR — are often ineffective.
“I think we have an instinct to try to use this lesson we learned in second or third grade, which is stand up to the bully. Tell them, ‘Leave me alone. Go find another victim.’ And that actually doesn’t work very well for people like that because they’re very conniving. They’ll find a way to up their game,” Tessa says.
Going to your boss isn’t necessarily the most effective option, at least not immediately. “The best thing that you can actually do is to kind of stop and think about who you really need on your side, who could actually help you convince your boss to care,” Tessa says.
While getting a higher-up as an ally is important, your argument will still be less powerful if it’s predominantly based on feelings, as those differ from person to person. “instead, you have to focus on the specific behavior and how it’s disruptive to not only you but to other people at work,” Tessa says. “Focusing on actions, not on feelings. The more specific, the more you can back it up, the better.”
The worst kind of jerk, however, is what Tessa calls the “gaslighter.” These people are powerful, embedded within work structures and also willing to cheat, lie and act unethically.
“What these folks do is they lie with the intent of deceiving on a very big scale. They isolate people socially, and then they end up involving them in often unethical things that are very hard for them to pull out of,” Tessa says. The damaging effects of gaslighters can be extensive and long-lasting to individuals and to overall morale.
Being the Jerk
Let’s flip the switch. Maybe you’re the jerk at work, or perhaps you’re made to believe that you are acting this way.
“I do think there are cases where people get accused of being a jerk, like a micromanager, where the person needs to be micromanaged because they’ve messed up so many times at work. So, I’m all about asking for feedback broadly, frequently and after specific behaviors,” Tessa shares.
Asking for this feedback can feel awkward, and people aren’t always forthcoming. The secret is in how you approach this conversation.
“Ask other individuals who work with you if they have similar issues,” Tessa says. “And when you ask for that feedback, don’t say, ‘Am I a jerk? How do you feel about me?’ Ask about the very specific things you did that make them think you’re a jerk.
“‘Did I give you enough turnaround time on that project? Was it too much turnaround time?’ Tessa continues. “These kinds of specific things, you’ll get more honest answers.”
[bctt tweet=”‘Most of us are taught that if we are good at articulating how somebody makes us feel at work, then people in power will care, but they often just get bored and roll their eyes.’ ~ @TessaWestNYU. Tune in to the latest episode of #PunkRockHR!” via=”no”]
People in This Episode
- Tessa West: Website, LinkedIn, Twitter, Book: “Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and What to Do About Them”
Full Transcript
Laurie Ruettimann:
This episode of Punk Rock HR is sponsored by The Starr Conspiracy. The Starr Conspiracy is the B2B marketing agency for innovative brands creating the future of workplace solutions. For more information, head on over to thestarrconspiracy.com.
Hey everybody. I’m Laurie Ruettimann. Welcome back to Punk Rock HR. My guest today is Tessa West. She’s an associate professor of psychology at NYU and the author of the new book “Jerks at Work.” Tessa’s research focuses on awkward interactions at work, and she’s channeled all of her research, all of her experience in academia into this book, “Jerks at Work,” to help you avoid interactions with terrible people — but, more importantly, to help you avoid becoming a terrible person yourself. And in this book, “Jerks at Work,” she gives resources on how to identify people, how to identify these attributes in yourselves and how to move forward. So if you work with difficult people — and who doesn’t — I hope you sit back and enjoy this conversation with Tessa West on this week’s Punk Rock HR.
Hey Tessa, welcome to the podcast.
Tessa West:
Hi, thanks for having me.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Sure. It’s my pleasure. I’m just enamored with the work that you do in your new book, and we’re going to talk about all of that. But before we do that, why don’t you tell us who you are and what you’re all about?
Tessa West:
Sure. So I am a social psychology professor at New York University, and I study the ways that people communicate with each other, and often when they’re feeling really uncomfortable and stressed out. So everything from how you go from a really tough interaction with your boss, you take that stress with you to interacting with co-workers, to how you negotiate with someone who’s an expert and you feel like a novice, to even how you ask for a raise or promotion. So if it’s a tough situation at work, I do research on it.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I love it. Amazing. Why do you do what you do?
Tessa West:
I don’t know. I’ve had a lot of really weird jobs over the years. I used to sell men’s shoes at Nordstrom, and I just loved watching the dynamics between people. I loved watching people trying to power-grab and people trying to deal with tough situations. And I just think it’s really fascinating from a scientific perspective to bring people in and actually put them in these real-life situations and see how they unfold.
Laurie Ruettimann:
So you’ve written a new book about jerks at work. Can you tell us a little bit about the book?
Tessa West:
So I think most of us deal with difficult people at work. It’s definitely in the air these days to have toxicity and not know how to handle it or what to do about it. I wrote this book because what I found is that most of us get a lot of technical training at work and we even learn about HR, and we kind of learn about the really egregious stuff, but we don’t learn how to handle everyday low-level conflict. The stuff that makes going to work stressful and hard but often doesn’t rise to the level of getting someone fired or even making you quit your job. And I felt like it could be useful for people to get a little bit of training in this area. And I try to have a little bit of humor around it because I think anything tough is made easier if it’s funny. And that’s really what my motivation was, just to give people some skills and tools to empower them in the workplace.
Laurie Ruettimann:
So can you give us an example of a scenario where someone’s a jerk, but it’s not enough to get fired?
Tessa West:
I think one of the most difficult jerks I’ve dealt with is the “kiss up, kick downer.” So this is that person who kind of tortures everyone who’s at the same level as them or beneath them. They’re mean, they’re sabotaging, but the boss really likes them, and these types of behaviors often make us feel really terrible about ourselves. So, for example, I worked with someone who would say little things like, “I would love to have said hi to Tessa this morning, but you know what? She’s late again. That’s too bad. It would’ve been nice to have coffee with her.” Or, “She’s not the best shoe salesperson on the floor. She doesn’t really know what she’s doing. You should come work with me instead.” So small acts of sabotaging, you see this everywhere — from hair salons to academia, to even in the C-suite. But these are not the kinds of things that make other people care, especially management. And so people really struggle with these low-level types of things. And they don’t know how to talk about it with people who hold power in a way to get them to invest in the problem.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I’m struck by how common these daily interactions are with people who are jerks. This is just humanity. And yet, so few of us have any training to deal with it and yet we all deal with the same thing. It’s so commonplace. I feel like it’s a universal problem that no one to this day is really effectively addressed. Why aren’t school systems addressing this or universities or management training? Why does this not exist just as part of humanity?
Tessa West:
I think it’s a great question. I think so many of us are outcome-focused. We’re performance-focused. So in the school system, it’s how do you get good grades? Or if it’s collaboration, it’s how do you work together to build the thing or to be more creative? In the workplace, it’s very much what is the financial bottom line. In so far as these things affect turnover, they affect how committed people are to work, management, leaders, they’ll start to care a little bit. But overall, it’s a really hard concept to grasp. And one of the reasons why is because it’s hard to measure, it’s hard to gain traction on — much harder than measuring things like performance, engagement even.
Laurie Ruettimann:
And those are hard to measure, by the way.
Tessa West:
Any time it becomes fuzzy, a construct that’s fuzzy, it’s difficult. It’s intangible. People in the workplace just kind of throw their arms up and say, “We can’t measure it, therefore we can’t do anything about it. We can’t track it. We can’t fix it.” And that tends to be the attitude around this stuff.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I also think about how, when there’s someone in our life who’s going through this situation, all they do is talk about it. And the last thing we want to do is hear about it. And yet when we’re going through it, all we do is talk about it. And the last thing other people want to do is listen. So can you talk to me a little bit about that dynamic? It’s just exhausting, isn’t it?
Tessa West:
It’s really exhausting. I did an interview once on energy vampires, these people who kind of suck you dry at work. And we do know that experiencing this makes people very self-involved, ourselves included. And what we want to do is reach out to those closest to us at work, our friends, our confidants, and just complain about it whenever it’s convenient for us. But what that does is causes stress contagion at work. It actually makes other people more stressed out. It makes it harder for them to focus. And then there’s this kind of negative effect that cascades through the workplace.
But when we’re the ones experiencing that, it’s very hard for us to take a step back and think, “Should I go approach my friend Laurie right now? Or she looks like she has a deadline. Maybe I should not do that.” And I think most of us have a perspective-taking gap. Even the most well-intentioned among us tend to not spontaneously think about how our actions will be perceived through the lens of another person or whether it’s convenient for them to deal with us kind of unloading on them right now.
And I think that’s a natural consequence of experiencing negative emotion at work. You think about yourself and what it will take for you to get that motion down, to get your productivity back. You don’t think about the person on the receiving end of that emotion.
Laurie Ruettimann:
So true. I myself have been in that situation where I’ve dealt with jerks at work, and all I do is complain, and you can almost see people repel from you. They take a step back.
Tessa West:
They hear your shoes walking down the hall, and then they slowly turn the light off and you can see it because it’s an open-concept office. They hide for me.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Just listen to me, please. I would love that. Well, you gave a really great example of someone who kisses up or kicks down. If I work with someone like that, what do I do? How do I manage that person? How do I make myself feel better about being around them?
Tessa West:
I think it’s really tough. I think we have an instinct to try to use this lesson we learned in second or third grade, which is stand up to the bully. Tell them, “Leave me alone, go find another victim.” And that actually doesn’t work very well for people like that because they’re very conniving. They’ll find a way to up their game. The best thing that you can actually do is to kind of stop and think about who you really need on your side. Who could actually help you convince your boss to care? And it’s often not the people that you like to complain to when you feel badly, it’s people who have some kind of knowledge around this person in the workplace, have some institutional memory, they’ve been there for a while. They not only know how widespread the problem is with this individual, but they also know how to get your boss to care. And kind of one of my favorite tactics isn’t to just complain to the boss or the boss’s boss. It’s to go up and over. It’s to find someone who’s worked with your boss for a while.
It could be in a parallel position. It could be in HR, if they’re in management. Talk to them: “What makes them care? What will make them listen to me?” Get some advice, and bring that advice with you. The other thing you have to do is not focus on your feelings. And this is really, really hard. Most of us are taught that if we are good at articulating how somebody makes us feel at work, then people in power will care, but they often just get bored and roll their eyes. And instead you have to focus on the specific behavior and how it’s disruptive to not only you, but to other people at work. Focusing on actions, not on feelings. The more specific, the more you can back it up, the better. Feelings tend to vary from person to person, and they’re really hard to corroborate. Everyone has their own feelings, and so it’s very easy to be dismissed when you do that.
Laurie Ruettimann:
You gave a really great example of one jerk, but you have seven in your book. So give us another jerk at work, who else are we working with?
Tessa West:
I think the credit stealer is someone that most people have experienced. And when you think of a credit stealer, you probably think, if you haven’t experienced this yet, “Well I’m going to see this person coming. They’re going to have a lot of bravado. They’re going to talk a lot.” Not so! They’re usually your boss. It’s someone in middle management who’s trying to prove themselves so that they can get promoted. And we tend to be really surprised and hurt by credit stealing because it happens to us by someone who is close to us. And I think that can be really heartbreaking for people to kind of go through that feeling of “our relationship wasn’t what I thought it was.”
And it can even be really hard to detect that’s even happening to you because a credit stealing often happens when you’re not in the room, when your boss is bragging about all of their productivity in these kinds of things. So I think dealing with some of these jerks is really having to reevaluate the relationships you thought you had with these people and realizing that maybe they’re not as great as you thought they were.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I love that example of credit stealing because when it’s your boss, they often think that your accomplishments are their accomplishments. So it’s not even like a jerk move, it’s just an institutional way we see power in a lot of these corporations. And I don’t know how you fight that because if someone in a position of authority has that POV — that your success is their success — what do you do except learn to feel OK about it, knowing that’s your culture?
Tessa West:
I think this sort of hierarchy is a really terrible way in which credit granting can get shifted around. In fact, there’s a great example. My husband is a professor and when he first wrote his dissertation, everyone attributed the work to his adviser, who was this guy Will Cunningham. Will Cunningham’s work is so great, but once Jay finally made it, then they shifted to him. And so this funny thing can happen that we can kind of re-get credit for things as we climb the ladder at work. And so I think it’s really critical for people to realize at the top that this process happens, that credit granting is associated with status and power, not necessarily associated with work put in. And to have these very frank conversations at the very beginning of a project of how you’re going to grant credit and how you’re going to take the “we” out of group projects.
And so in the workplace, we talk a lot about the benefit of having, this kind of group identity. “We did this together,” all the time. Let’s just wear a big “we.” But for when it comes to credit granting, it can be very dangerous because you can get lost in that “we,” especially if you’re low in status or low in power. So one thing I’ve noticed for successful groups and organizations is they’ll do things like say, “Tessa came up with a problem. Laurie had the solution and John came up with this innovative way of combining X, Y, and Z to do the following.” And it’s by giving individuals credit for the different pieces, you actually then combine into a “we” that everyone is on board with versus “we found X and then we did Y” when everybody knows “we” really means the boss. So I really recommend that.
Laurie Ruettimann:
And that system that you just described has helped people of color, women, members of marginalized communities. It’s a known thing that people have to do, but they struggle with it. They’re like, “Why do we have to make the extra effort to get credit?” I don’t have a good answer. Work sucks. I don’t know what to tell you. What do you say?
Tessa West:
Work sucks. And I think the main mistake people make is wait until the meeting to try to get voice at work. They wait, and they show up, and then they try to gain voice in the moment. You can’t do that. You have to be a little more conniving and actually plan ahead of who’s going to echo your contributions. Pick people in the group and say, “When I say something, can you echo me?” And this can help with bulldozers, as well, — people who talk over everyone. But there has to be an organization and a planning that goes into those meetings where you know credit is going to be granted, where you know there’s a potential bulldozer. If you wait until the moment to try to solve the problem, then you’re going to be in trouble. It’s like doing a vote where you don’t know the outcome when you’re a leader. You should never hold a vote if you don’t know what the outcome of the vote’s going to be before you walk into that room.
And the same is true for us when it comes to getting voice or getting credit for ideas. You have to plan ahead to make sure people echo your contributions.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I just wonder if you can tell us the worst type of jerk at work. Who just ranks as No. 1, who is awful? Who is that?
Tessa West:
Number one is the gaslighter, and I think it’s because they cause the most psychological damage. What these folks do is they lie with the intent of deceiving on a very big scale. They isolate people socially, and then they end up involving them in often unethical things that are very hard for them to pull out of. Lying and cheating and stealing and these kinds of behaviors where they’re a small piece of the big puzzle. And the reason why they’re so damaging is because they can corrode morale at work, and it’s very hard to pull them out.
So people who are gaslighters tend to be very well-situated within social networks. They have a lot of power. They’re highly embedded at work. They’re not just kind of respected and liked, but they’re part of the context. They are the ones that create the context, and so firing them and getting rid of them is something that often doesn’t happen. And the people who suffer this, suffer for years and years after. Takes a really long time to get over this. So I’d say they are actually the most damaging for all of these reasons. Where the other ones can kind of be handled bits and pieces, with little, small behaviors. Gaslighters really damage kind of the whole self.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, years ago I met a professor by the name of Bob Sutton. World-famous, Bob Sutton. He’s become a de facto mentor to me. And he has been very adamant in his career that if you work in an organization with a gaslighter, with someone whose toxic — whatever the definitions are — It’s more likely that they’re going to change you than you’re going to fix the organization, and it’s time for you to leave. So that has been on my mind in this conversation because now the common advice is if you’re struggling at work and you need to work, practice professional detachment. But I think if you can, you quit. I don’t know. Where do you fall on any of this?
Tessa West:
I am starting to think that more and more. In fact, I want to write my next book on how to quit, because Bob is right. So the workplace will change you more than you are going to change the workplace. And he has great examples of people in power, where everyone says, “I’m going to fight this. I’m going to fight this. I’m going to fight this.” And then they wake up, and they’ve become that. It is very wise for you to think that organizational structure, culture, is more likely to change the individual than an individual is likely to change the culture, even detach from that culture. And in fact, the detachment isn’t a good strategy because it will impede your progress at work. It will actually make it really hard for you to form social connections and networks. You won’t be embedded in the way that you should be.
It’s like being detached in a marriage. Could you technically stay married with someone you’re detached from? Sure. Is that the best strategy? Probably not. The more I think about this, the more I’m taking Bob’s approach to this, that at some point you have to pull away.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I like the flow of the conversation because, in dealing with jerks at work, at what point do we deal with them, and at what point do we hope we defeat them? Or at what point do they defeat us? That’s kind of where I’m thinking with the conversation. So what are your thoughts on that? What’s the normal progression here? Is it possible to defeat a jerk at work?
Tessa West:
I think it is, but I think you have to have a couple things on your side. So first you have to have motivation to change. So if, when confronting that person or confronting your boss about that person, there’s a real resistance to change, to altering their behavior, you’re not going to get anywhere. So we know from the science of goal pursuit, that if you’re not committed to the goal, the goal’s never going to happen. So you have to have someone who’s actually willing to recognize that change and then act on it. The second is there needs to be institutional structure to support you. It can’t just be one person who cares, because that person can leave. They can take off and take another job. If there isn’t a system in place of people to actually create change and make these things happen, those two things are done. And I say to people, once you have no locus of control and once you have no predictability at work, those two psychological states are critical just for your wellbeing and your productivity.
Once those are gone, that’s when you need to think, “It’s time to bounce. It’s time to look for a new job.”
Laurie Ruettimann:
So can you give us an example from the book of people who’ve worked for jerks or worked with jerks and the situation has improved.
Tessa West:
I’ll give myself as an example. I’ve been a jerk many times, but I’ll talk about myself as a victim in one of these and maybe as the jerk in another. So I worked with someone who was very much a conniving bulldozer. In academia, we do job searches like once every 10 years. We had one of these. He tried to bulldoze the process by going behind the scenes and questioning the way in which we made the decision. So smart bulldozers will do this. They’ll say, “No one really felt comfortable speaking up. We didn’t know what we were voting on.” Going to the people in power and questioning process is the best way to override a group decision. And he did this, but I had learned from the past that his behavior was very predictable. I knew he didn’t like the outcome. I knew he was going to go do this.
So I learned in the next meeting to just take very good notes, to get a bunch of people on my side to say exactly what had happened and to do votes by documentation instead of by hand. Those three things together made it impossible for him to bulldoze us again. He was shamed into submission, and he didn’t try it. So it’s all about learning to predict people’s behavior from their past. The best predictor for future behavior is past behavior. And then altering how you’re then going to respond to that — often by aligning yourself with other people in the room so that it’s not just one voice, there’s a consensus behind it. So those little things actually prevented him from doing it again. I got bulldozed once, but I learned my lesson. I put these small steps in place. I didn’t get bulldozed again.
And I think that’s critical. I’ve also been the bulldozer, not quite so conniving, but annoying, loud, trying to override everyone. I learned that lesson just by paying attention to the kinds of feedback I was getting. It’s never direct. No one ever tells you, “You suck, nobody likes you here.” But my neighbor, one of my good friends whose office was next to me, started crying because she hated the space I had put her in during a move. And to me, I had to look at that and think of it as a red flag, not OK. Well, she has emotion-regulation issues, but what am I doing that’s so bad? I’ve actually made somebody cry at work. So kind of reading those signs and then reevaluating my own behavior and then learning to ask for the right feedback so that I didn’t become a jerk again. So I do think it’s all about kind of making those small little tweaks to how you interact with people so that they can’t do the same thing to you again that they’ve done in the past.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I like your example of being a jerk because it’s not like a moral Scarlet A that you’ve put on yourself. It’s a moment in time. You did something that wasn’t terrific. You were behaving in a way that wasn’t great for anybody and you recognized it and you moved on. It’s not a thing that haunted you forever, and I think that’s an interesting way of looking at this. Because a lot of times when we experienced a jerk at work, we think this person must be mean to animals.
Tessa West:
They torture squirrels.
Laurie Ruettimann:
This is in every aspect of their lives. And a lot of times, it’s just this one little thing that they’re doing or big thing, but it’s this one moment in time. Am I right about the jerk behavior here?
Tessa West:
I think de-stigmatizing it and taking the scarlet letter off of it is really critical for us improving jerk behavior. Because when we’re just pointing fingers, people’s defenses go up. And we know from social neuroscience — I study psychophysiology — that once someone starts criticizing, you can come up with a million defenses to protect your self-esteem. So there’s this art to criticizing, but there’s also an art to sort of learning that you can screw up, as well, and that’s OK. It’s not the end of the world. Most of us can improve these things. And I tried to go with jerk behaviors that are a little bit ambiguous, that all of us should be able to see ourselves in and feel a little bit uncomfortable hearing about because we can kind of — it resonates with us what some of these jerks look like.
So I do think that kind of removing that stigma is really important. And leaders who are open about their own work jerkery are the most well-liked. The ones that are like, “I screwed up and I was a jerk at work.” People really like that because it shows they can grow and they have some kind of appreciation for their own behaviors.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I have one final question and that is this, if somebody tells me I’m a jerk at work, how do I know that they’re right? Or how do I know that they might be the jerk? How do I figure this out? Because I think so many times the jerk tries to make other people feel like they’ve done something wrong. So how do we navigate this minefield here?
Tessa West:
And I do think there are cases where people get accused of being a jerk, like a micromanager, where the person needs to be micromanaged because they’ve messed up so many times at work. So, I’m all about asking for feedback broadly, frequently and after specific behaviors. So if one person complains about you, fine, but you want to know how widespread the problem is. Ask other individuals who work with you if they have similar issues. And when you ask for that feedback, don’t say, “Am I a jerk? How do you feel about me?” Ask about the very specific things you did that make them think you’re a jerk. “Did I give you enough turnaround time on that project? Was it too much turnaround time?” These kinds of specific things, you’ll get more honest answers. People lie when they give upward feedback. So don’t ask people to tell you how they feel about you. You won’t get an honest answer. So if you want to know if you are the jerk or they’re the jerk ask broadly, ask frequently, and ask very specifically about your behaviors.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I learned a lot about being a jerk and now I’m super-paranoid about all my behaviors. I like myself though, so we’re going to start there. Tessa, I really enjoyed the conversation. If people want to learn more about you, your work, your research, your book, what’s the best place for them to go?
Tessa West:
Go to tessawestauthor.com. So you can find all my media stuff, the quizzes that are in the back of my book — “Are you a jerk at work?” You can take it, get immediate feedback. There’re links to my book, as well. That’s the best place to go.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Amazing. Well, I don’t believe that you are a jerk at work. You were really lovely to speak with today, and Tessa, thanks again for being a guest on today’s show.
Tessa West:
Thank you so much.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Hey everybody, I hope you enjoyed this episode of Punk Rock HR. We are proudly underwritten by The Starr Conspiracy. The Starr Conspiracy is the B2B marketing agency for innovative brands, creating the future of workplace solutions. For more information, head on over to thestarrconspiracy.com. Punk Rock HR is produced and edited by Rep Cap, with special help from Michael Thibodeaux and Devon McGrath. For more information, show notes, links, and resources, head on over to punkrockhr.com. Now, that’s all for today, and I hope you enjoyed it. We’ll see you next time on Punk Rock HR.