Performance Management Archives - Caras Consulting Inc.

How to Deal With a High Performing Jerk

You know and the type. They’re the ones who solve the biggest problems or have the best sales records, but everyone inside your company hates them. They’re quite simply high performing jerks.
Here’s an example I encountered recently. A customer called saying the order they received was faulty. They said the salesperson misrepresented what they were going to get, and they wanted to return everything and get their money back. The company’s COO swooped in, spoke to the customer, empathized with them, and told them that the company was committed to full customer satisfaction or money back. He ended up replacing the product to the customer’s specification, somehow brought them back from the brink of losing them, and they ended up being a repeat customer.
Then the CEO heard the other side of the story. The COO went to the “misrepresenting” salesperson and gave him crap in front of his colleagues. He then went to the purchasing department and berated the manager there, telling her that he had to deal with her poor buying abilities and warned her that she had twenty-four hours to rectify the issue. He didn’t care how she did it, she needed to find replacement products, quality check them herself and get back to him. Then he left to go play a round of golf with a big customer he was courting.
This left the CEO with a dilemma. Should he praise him for his superior ability to do whatever it took to keep the customer? Or reprimand him for his methods?

This happens more often than you can imagine. Probably one of the most public scandals in recent years was the Uber disaster. Uber did a number of things wrong, which the CEO supposedly condoned. In one example, A former employee wrote a blog post about her experience at the company. HR said they couldn’t fire the manager who was allegedly harassing employees because he was a top performer. After the story became public, I can’t tell you how many people scoffed at Uber HR’s response and inability to act. But I can tell you that the Uber story is not the first and neither will it be the last. It was more shocking than others, but I can tell you that it happens all the time.

Take a hard look at your employees. Do any of them demonstrate poor behaviour? Here are 6 things you can do to ensure your company is safe from the potential reputational damage of a high performing jerk.

Look at Your Values

Do your values support only performance or do they also support team work and collaboration? I can’t tell you how many times leaders complain to me about their high performers’ bad behaviour. Then when I ask them what their bonus is based on, they tell me it’s 100% on the sales numbers, or on budget numbers.

If you want your employees to behave in a manner that exemplifies a sharing and collaborative environment, make sure your values reflect that. And, please, if you have good values, make sure your company follows them.

Evaluate on Results and Methods

One of the easiest ways to ensure your employees are not just driven towards the targets, but also towards team work, is to evaluate them on that. I’m a big proponent of measuring results and competencies. So, measure the what and the how. What did they achieve over the period, and how did they achieve those results?

Reward performance, but not at the expense of good behaviour.

Conduct 360 Evaluations

Most high performing employees manage upward very well. In other words, they make you and the rest of the management team look good. But the high performing jerks will make only the management team feel good. They will treat their staff horribly. I knew of one top c-suite executive who consistently berated people in large meetings. He got results and the board members and shareholders loved him for it, but he treated people very badly.

At least once a quarter (more often for shorter sales cycles), make sure you ask everyone the employee deals with to evaluate their performance. This includes their managers, their peers, their employees, and that their customers. Don’t assume that just because a manager loves her high performer, that the employee is not a jerk.

Talk to Them About Their Jerk Behaviour

I always find it amazing how many leaders will ignore the “talk” about a top performer’s behaviour for fear of losing them. “I can’t talk to him about his behaviour because he might leave, and I’ll lose my best employee.” Well, I ask you this: Is that person really your best employee if he makes everyone else feel like crap? And is that the type of culture you want for your company? Have you looked at how many other people have left because of him, or how many other people have lost their enthusiasm for the company because of him?

Don’t be afraid to talk to your high performer about behaviour. Praise their performance, but talk about the behaviour issues. Yes, there’s a risk of them getting upset and leaving, but that means they are not open to feedback. A high performer who is not open to feedback has stopped learning and has capped her abilities. Basically, that’s the best you will ever get out of them. On the other hand, if she takes the feedback in stride and improves her interactions with the team, think of the stellar employee you’ll have then!

When Talking Doesn’t Work

This happens quite often. A lot of high performers are high performers because they have immense amounts of confidence. When their boss points out that they need improvement in an area, they may choose to dismiss it, especially if the feedback was given in a casual, cursory manner. The performance continues, and so does the behaviour. It’s very easy at this point for managers and business owners to say, “She’s just like that and she’ll never change.”

Be persistent. Keep having those conversations and keep pressing the issues. Going back to my second point about evaluating on methods, if the behaviour continues, make sure it’s reflected in her bonus or salary increase. Sorry, but there is never a good enough excuse to be a jerk!

Lead by Example

Lastly, but most importantly, but make sure you’re leading by example. Are you, as the business owner or CEO, getting the 360 feedback? Are you demonstrating the right behaviours? Are you watching how you treat your employees? Sometimes jerk behaviour is learned behaviour and the top most leaders are setting a bad example. It’s not always intentional, so you need to take a close look at how you come across to your employees and model the behaviour you want to see from them.

How do I Get My Employees to Go Above and Beyond

Treatment of new ideas

How you respond to ideas plays a huge role in how often your employees come up with new ideas. I’ve worked with many clients who lament the fact that their employees don’t innovate, but when I observe these leaders in meetings, they shoot down every new idea that employees bring up. The worst part is that they don’t even realize they’re doing it. The truth is some leaders are fearful of the unknown and want an airtight plan before even considering an idea. The thing is, when we’re going into unchartered territory, there’s always an element of risk involved, and there will be more wrinkles than you’re comfortable with. You need to be open to new ideas, and even if they’re outrageous, don’t dismiss them. Have your employees bring a plan together and explore the contingencies. When employees have a chance to implement their own ideas, they’re more likely to take ownership and do whatever needs to be done to prove their idea works.

Compensation Plans

Look at the way your compensation plans are structured. Do you only pay your employees a base salary and a Holiday bonus at the end of the year? If so, there’s no incentive for people to do more. Motivation is an intriguing concept. While we’d all like our employees to be self-motivated, the truth of the matter is, human beings’ behavior is dependent on outcomes. Generally, rewards for good behavior produce continued good behavior. So, if you want your employees to go beyond their job description, give them a portion of the company profits. Or, if you already give them an annual performance-based bonus, make sure a portion of that comes from some business metric such as profit, revenue, or growth rate. Going back to the previous point, perhaps consider an award for the most innovative idea of the year.

Treatment of failure

The manner in which leaders deal with failure is a huge indicator of how likely employees are to bring new ideas forward. Almost every leader I’ve spoken to says that they are accepting of mistakes. They go on to tell me how they continue to support employees even when they make mistakes because mistakes are learning opportunities. In reality, these same leaders make a huge deal when things go wrong. They don’t let mistakes go as easily as they think they do. Employees are generally called into a large meeting, the problem (and the mistake) are dissected along with what happened and exactly when and by whom. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with retracing your steps to see where things went wrong so that you don’t repeat those mistakes. It’s an altogether whole other thing to isolate the people who messed up and rake them over the coals. What’s worse, when an employee makes a mistake, that mistake is held against them for the rest of their working career at the company, especially if it’s a high-profile mistake. You might think this is an exaggeration, but I have seen this with every single one of my clients.

When an employee or a team makes a mistake, ask them to tell you how they would handle it differently next time. Don’t ask them to give you a play by play of what happened and how. When you focus on moving forward, rather than reliving the past, employees know that you’re really forgiving their mistakes and are trusting that they’ve learned from the behavior. And, they’re more likely to take risks and bring forward innovative ideas in the future.

Involvement in setting strategy

Including employees in your journey to take the company to new levels is crucial in getting them to over-contribute. When employees have had a say in the direction of the company, they are more likely to work harder to get to the destination. Most companies will have their senior leadership team at the strategy table. The senior-most people decide where the company is going and how it will get there. Then they cascade that message to the rest of the employees. The reason, they say, is that they have the experience and are best equipped to make those decisions. But, think for a moment. Who in your company is actually dealing with your customers, doing the research, and handling sales and customer service? Who is actually meeting your customers face to face on a daily basis? Shouldn’t those people, then, at least have a say in where the company should go. Shouldn’t they be given an opportunity to tell you what customers tell them every day?

If you’re a small company, it’s easy enough to have everyone invited to the meeting to have a broad discussion. If you’re on the larger side of a small company (more than 15 employees), it might be easier to have people submit their suggestions and ideas beforehand. Whichever way you decide to do this, when employees are involved in strategy setting, they’re more likely to feel a sense of ownership in the direction of the company and excel.

Every small business is different, and this isn’t an exhaustive list, but exploring each of these factors will move you toward the “above and beyond” culture you want. Implementing all 4 ideas will guarantee results.

I’d love to hear of things you’ve done to move your employees from good to great.