The Waiter Rule

Here's an interesting story. It seems that CEO's almost all agree on one thing: you can judge a person's character by the way they treat a waiter. I had no idea that the CEO of Raytheon, Bill Swanson, wrote that rule down in a short booklet called Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management.

The CEO who came up with it, or at least first wrote it down, is Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson. He wrote a booklet of 33 short leadership observations called Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management. Raytheon has given away 250,000 of the books.

Among those 33 rules is only one that Swanson says never fails: "A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person."

Swanson says he first noticed this in the 1970s when he was eating with a man who became "absolutely obnoxious" to a waiter because the restaurant did not stock a particular wine.

"Watch out for people who have a situational value system, who can turn the charm on and off depending on the status of the person they are interacting with," Swanson writes. "Be especially wary of those who are rude to people perceived to be in subordinate roles."

I had noticed this myself quite a long time ago. It basically applies to more than waiters as well. People who are rude and nasty to store clerks, bank tellers or almost any "lower level" service jobs are, generally speaking, not folks you'll like in the long run.

It's not just service people, either. I had a boss once who, on a company outing to a fun park, got into a go-cart and ruthlessly ran his competition into the guard rails to 'win' the race. His competition consisted of kids for the most part. He celebrated when he ran the last boy, probably about 10 years old, into the rails and finished first.

Absolutely the worst boss I ever had, bar none.