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Three Archetypes
One of the tricky things to learn as a leader is, you know, it’s always great to have smart people around you, and you always get a lot of advice. You know, hire, like, really smart people, people who are better than yourself and so forth. And that’s all very true. But smart people aren’t always good employees. And there’s, a variety of smart people who are bad employees.
The Heretic
You know, one type is the heretic. Somebody you hire, they’re very, very smart. But, you know, either through youth or by nature, they’re only happy being a rebel. Whatever the direction of the organization is, they just want to fight against it. It could theoretically, you know, if they have good critiques, come to you. You know, you could have that conversation and, you know, maybe change, maybe not. But they don’t wanna do that. They just want to basically create a rebellion in the organization. And, of course, the smarter they are, the more attractive they are to the other employees, the more likely you’re going to have full out revolt on your hands. That’s a tricky kind of character to deal with.
Look. If you have a heretic, the best thing you can try to do is to you know, you can bring them in very close. Now it’s hard if they’re, you know, three levels down the organization or something like that. But, you know, if you can align them with you, then, you know, you can maybe turn them to use their powers for good instead of rebellion.
The Flake
Second kind of very, very smart employee that might be tricky is the flake. You know, so somebody who shows up does brilliant work, but then, you can’t count on them. They may disappear, and there’s a lot of reasons that this could be. It could be a personality thing. It could be drugs. It could be an actual mental health condition. I had an employee who was, an absolutely brilliant engineer, could do things in days that, others couldn’t do in months, but he was bipolar, and you know, he would just disappear for a month, you know, on a bipolar manic episode. So you really have to diagnose it and, you know, figure out, okay, what’s causing the behavior, and is it possible to fix?
The Jerk
The third kind is the jerk, meaning, like, somebody who just is only happy if they can make themselves look smart by making other people look stupid. These kinds of people will always stop communication, which is vital to an organization. It’s really, really important that you have high quality fluid communication. There’s somebody who, every time somebody else talks, you know, makes them look stupid, that kills communication, and that’s very detrimental to the organization. With a jerk, you just you know, you’ve got to be very clear. Like, there’s going to be no reward for making yourself look smart by putting others down. With clear enough direction, somebody might change in that scenario, but oftentimes not. You have to be able to carry through on your threats.
When to “Hold the Bus”
The old football coach, John Madden, used to say, I would sometimes have one person who was so good on the team that I would hold the bus for them. But you can’t hold the bus for everybody because you’ll never make it to the game. Sometimes you have somebody who’s so smart that you work around their issues, and you kind of integrate them in as best you can.
Great example of this was Phil Jackson when he coached the Chicago Bulls had a player named Dennis Rodman who was, you know, quite a chaotic character but very talented. And, you know, he would miss practice, and the reporter said, well, like, can everybody miss practice now? Can Michael Jordan miss practice and you still play him? And Phil Jackson’s answer were, what are you stupid? Like, no. You can’t have any player on the team miss practice. We’d never practice. Only Dennis Rodman can miss practice. And you can only not only have only one Dennis Rodman on a team, you can only have one Dennis Rodman in society. Otherwise, you have just complete anarchy. And this is where you need to think about it. You know, you can have one of those, but they have to be super talented in order to justify it.