“Tom, you’re not useless. We can always use you as a bad example.”

Have you ever seen a want add for a bad example?
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HELP WANTED
Badly flawed, underqualified, low-motivated, mid-level manager to take responsibility for counter-intuitive training and institutionalized scape-goating for corporate inadequacies. No-experience needed. Apply in person. First in line gets the job. Tenure and top level salary with full benefits on day one.
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There now may be some scientific basis for that light hearted insult.

How do we use this in our own self-management? Are there some skills we can introduce?

Or might it be better to set a high bar and expect the best from all?

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We’re more likely to behave ethically when we see rivals behaving badly : Cognitive Daily – from 09/24/2009 by Dave Munger

“As an undergraduate, at my school it was practically a requirement to steal silverware from the campus cafeteria. There were students who’d commandeered full sets of china. The desk clerk at my dorm used to say that the only thing we were learning from our college education was ‘how to steal.’”

“Somehow it didn’t seem wrong to us to steal from the cafeteria (though I drew the line at a single setting of silverware). Plus, we’d heard that at other schools, students used the cafeteria trays as sleds after the first winter snow. At least we weren’t doing that (though arguably this was only because there are no hills in Chicago).”

READ MORE AT: https://web.archive.org/web/20120508205104/http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2009/09/were_more_likely_to_behave_eth.php