This article has been reworked from an original post published in 2019. The topic of brilliant jerks – those experienced or high performing team members, who are culturally misaligned and demonstrate unhelpful behaviours – has raised its head several times recently. I have seen the negative impact of brilliant jerks in full destructive technicolour, and this article looks at what you can do to deal with this challenge if you face it. .
One of the biggest dilemmas you are likely to face in your leadership career comes when you’re faced with the disruptive – and often destructive – behaviour of a brilliant jerk. Do you fuel their ego? Do you hold onto them for as long as they produce outstanding results hoping that the rest of the team accept that their knowledge and experience make the pain worthwhile? Or do you create the opportunity for them to leave your team as soon as possible?
Over the years I’ve worked with teams in FTSE top 250 companies, as well as football teams in the English Premier League and English Football League. I’ve built the culture in County Championship cricket teams, universities and multi-billion pound organisations across the world. My experience in all of those environments is that brilliant jerks must evolve and align with the culture or leave.
Here are three reasons why tolerating a brilliant jerk will ruin your team:
Brilliant jerks will ruin your reputation
Let’s go back to the foundations of leadership. The number one characteristic that followers want from their leaders is honesty. More accurately, as anyone who has experienced a leadership event with us will know, we need our leaders to be congruent, authentic and for their words and actions to align. You can’t demonstrate this crucial characteristic if you accept the misaligned behaviour of a brilliant jerk.
A brilliant jerk will ruin your reputation because you will always make allowances for them. Those allowances and inconsistencies in standards will leave others feeling that if they do that then why can’t I? Or even worse they will lose faith in you and leave.
You lose the rarest breed of them all – genius team players
Several years ago I was working with former Wales manager Chris Coleman and his Assistant Kit Symons. Another member of the coaching staff asked how Welsh superstar footballer Gareth Bale had fitted in with the rest of the national squad. Coleman answered in an instant, “Gareth isn’t just a brilliant player in a team, he’s a brilliant team player.”
Whether in business or sport, people like Bale – outstandingly talented, incredibly hard-working and culturally brilliant – don’t come along often. If they join a team dominated by a brilliant jerk they don’t hang around for very long. Why? Because their high standards apply in all areas of their work and life and, while they’ll make allowances for others who might not be as talented, they refuse to be held back by anyone who doesn’t share their ethics or attitude.
Your brilliant jerk will shape the next generation
Who is more likely to get noticed: a steady, good performer who maintains good relationships, or the brilliant jerk with their great results and toxic relationships? You know which you want to be noticed… and you know which one actually is noticed. The brilliant jerk inadvertently models the way for new people who join the team. More junior people who are promoted assume the behaviours this outlier demonstrates are the norm. They adopt this way of being and the culture of your team shifts again… for the worse.
How do you handle a brilliant jerk?
Moving the brilliant jerk from where they are to where they need to be can be a complex process, but my go-to first step is always to include a behavioural objective as part of their performance measures.
One of my executive coaching clients recently added an objective to all of her team’s KPIs. It simply reads ‘and you do all of the above in a values-led way’. This organisation has a strong culture and their values are alive and breathing. The inclusion of this simple objective means that no matter how well someone performs technically or results-wise, if they aren’t behaviourally aligned they can’t be classed as a high-performer.
By finding the appropriate way to introduce a similar measure in your team, you create a platform upon which your conversations about behaviour and culture can be built.
To find out more about our ALIGNED®️ methodology and how it can help your team to be even more effective, email me now.