Podcast Ep 99 | The Brilliant Jerk

The bril­liant jerk is a phrase that was made famous in the Net­flix cul­ture deck, is also known as a Tox­ic A‑Player. The bril­liant jerk refers to peo­ple on your team who are high­ly pro­duc­tive in their role, but they don’t fit the cul­ture. They don’t align with the behav­iours or core val­ues, and they come at a high cost to the team.

In this pod­cast episode, Kevin Lawrence and Brad Giles talk about how to deal with bril­liant jerks, and why it is essen­tial for lead­ers to deal with them, and also to pre­vent hir­ing them in the first place. Because the cost to the team is sim­ply too high. Not tak­ing action endors­es the behav­ior — and under­mines your cul­ture and the val­ue that you’re show­ing towards oth­er people.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Kevin Lawrence 00:12

Wel­come to the Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast where every­thing we talk about is about build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies. That’s some­thing that myself, Kevin Lawrence, and my part­ner here, Brad Giles, we’re pas­sion­ate about. Brad, how’re you doing today?

Brad Giles 00:26

I’m doing excel­lent. Thank you. Very good in this part of the world. How are you doing Kevin?

Kevin Lawrence 00:36

Things are going great here, too. So what are we on for today? Brad? What are we gonna dig into and have some inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion about?

Brad Giles 00:53

Today we’re talk­ing about the bril­liant jerk — we’ve all served along­side bril­liant jerks. Before that, we always like to say phrase of the day, we advo­cate for it when you run meet­ings as well, just a sim­ple way to start and per­haps break the ice. So I’ll start off on that, Kevin. And I do that because there’s a look at your face, I’m think­ing he’s still think­ing about one. So mine is reset. Because every time we run a quar­ter­ly or an annu­al meet­ing, I have a slide and it’s reset, because we are reset­ting, it does­n’t mat­ter what’s hap­pened. It does­n’t mat­ter, the suc­cess­es or the fail­ures, every­thing stops and gets reset, so that we can build our next busi­ness plan for the next 90 days. Reset. So Kevin, what might be your word or phrase of the day?

Kevin Lawrence 02:02

Well, mine is resilience. Inter­est­ing­ly, because I’m feel­ing damn good. I did a keynote this morn­ing for a large orga­ni­za­tion that a glob­al orga­ni­za­tion on resilience, and so it’s fresh on my mind. I’ve writ­ten lots about it, and we’ve talked a lot about it. You know how impor­tant resilience is. Resilience is your abil­i­ty to bounce back from what­ev­er life or work throws at you. So reset, and resilience, and that those two words tie nice­ly togeth­er. We’re doing a lit­tle resilience reset today, Brad?

Brad Giles 02:49

Well, let’s try and reset some bril­liant jerks because they need it.

Kevin Lawrence 02:51

I want to make a dis­claimer. I think there’s a num­ber of times in my life that I might have been that jerk. Well, maybe not the bril­liant part. But I def­i­nite­ly could have been a jerk part, you know, as an aggres­sive per­son­al­i­ty, I can think of a num­ber of times when peo­ple prob­a­bly called me a jerk. And I prob­a­bly earned it. Actu­al­ly, no, I def­i­nite­ly earned it. So like, we all have moments where our behav­ior is not great. Whether a but­ton gets pushed, or we get trig­ger who or we’re in a bad way, it does­n’t mat­ter. We all have it. But that’s not what we’re talk­ing about. Lit­tle things that go a bit side­ways — we are talk­ing about the ter­mi­nal cas­es. Yeah. The peo­ple who are gen­er­al­ly con­sis­tent­ly, always just real­ly frus­trat­ing to be around and it does­n’t seem to change.

Brad Giles 03:44

We all have good days. And we all have bad days. It’s part of the human con­di­tion. Maybe we did­n’t get enough sleep, maybe some­thing is affect­ing us. Maybe we were you know, wor­ried or we’ve got our oth­er pres­sures. So every­one has good and bad days. But wor­ry, where are you at your aver­age? That’s kind of what we’re say­ing here. So you may have, you know, been a bril­liant jerk, or I might have at some point or even just a jerk, but where do you reset to the aver­age? In terms of your being able to deal with oth­er peo­ple? That’s what we’re say­ing. Because bril­liant jerks. When they reset to the aver­age, the aver­age is bril­liant jerk. It’s not, you know, the aver­age is they’re a jerk, you know, they don’t play well with oth­ers. They upset their team mem­bers, they don’t align with our core val­ues in the orga­ni­za­tion. So assist con­sis­tent­ly is the key. Yeah, so you get a bit of a leave pass as it were for hav­ing a bad day. Every­body does. And that’s okay. But where do you where’s your aver­age? That’s what we’re real­ly say­ing, is it your trend line?

Kevin Lawrence 04:51

So what makes some­one a bril­liant jerk? Our first kind of point we want to dig into and real­ly, this is some­one they’re nor­mal­ly real­ly good at their job, like they are very effec­tive. But they’ve got this bad atti­tude and it cost a lot of fric­tion around them. And nor­mal­ly, usu­al­ly the ones that keep their jobs for a while the fric­tions, inter­nal, what­ev­er they do exter­nal­ly seems to be good. And in the book, I wrote Your Oxy­gen Mask First, we call them a tox­ic a play­er, which means, you know, a per­for­mance on get­ting the results in a role, but tox­ic because they don’t fit the culture.

Brad Giles 05:37

And they’re gen­er­al­ly vio­lat­ing a few core key or key core val­ues, upset­ting the peo­ple around them on a reg­u­lar basis. So if you’re a leader, and you’re hav­ing reg­u­lar chats about one par­tic­u­lar indi­vid­ual, and maybe there’s a bit of a chance around that, so I remem­ber, there’s one CEO who will go unnamed, and I would have to say for four, maybe even five years, every time we would be talk­ing about this par­tic­u­lar indi­vid­ual. And he would always say the same thing. If Dave leaves, then we are going to lose some of our most impor­tant cus­tomers. And I was like, but what is it cost­ing us?

Kevin Lawrence 06:21

There’s a cost if he stays now.

Brad Giles 06:27

And we tried to rec­on­cile that. But it was yeah, it was a real­ly, real­ly tough con­ver­sa­tion. And of course, as is always the case, Dave end­ed up going in a hor­ri­bly messy sit­u­a­tion. And after­wards, it was par­tial­ly, you know, the doing of the leader. And it was par­tial­ly not, but because the pres­sure began to build on the frus­tra­tion. Yeah. And so as we got towards the end, or and then we pass the end, the CEO was say­ing, I wish I’d done it years ago, as is always the case, we say that, yes.

Kevin Lawrence 07:06

And nor­mal­ly, you don’t lose the cus­tomers you think you’re going to lose? Right? Yeah, they own key rela­tion­ships, and they’re in a rev­enue gen­er­a­tion, there can be an impact. But gen­er­al­ly, we begin to build it to be big­ger in our head. I’m not say­ing there aren’t cas­es, there are cas­es where we’ve had to deal with this, and have a plan over a year or two years before because we did­n’t want to take the chance of over­ly dis­rupt­ing, you know, the rev­enue line of the company.

Brad Giles 07:35

This guy we were, we were at a two day annu­al meet­ing. And we went out for din­ner. And this guy dom­i­nat­ed the con­ver­sa­tion for like an hour or two with­out any­one get­ting anoth­er word in edge­wise to the point that peo­ple pre­tend­ed they need­ed to go to the bath­room. So they could just go out­side and be able to form their own con­ver­sa­tions. It was typ­i­cal, bril­liant jerk behavior.

Kevin Lawrence 08:01

So I had one a com­pa­ny I was work­ing with in the US, been work­ing with them a cou­ple of years, we had a tight exec­u­tive team mas­sive momen­tum, great growth, every­thing was great. And we had a new CFO. And this is before I was forc­ing my clients to top grade all the key hires. I come in the room, he’d been in a com­pa­ny 42 days, this is a quar­ter­ly, we’re at the cof­fee break, and I go to the CEO. So do we want to fire him at lunch? Or do we wait till tomor­row with­out even talk­ing to the CEO? I was lis­ten­ing to the con­ver­sa­tion on the break. I saw him in action. And I went, this is atro­cious. And it almost broke down all the health and har­mo­ny of the exec team in 42 days. Now we wait. You know, this is Thurs­day? We actu­al­ly we did­n’t fire him that lunch. We did­n’t fire him on Fri­day. But we did Mon­day morn­ing. Yes, we wait until after the week­end. Which is it because it was just a wrong hire and the dam­age these peo­ple can do. I have anoth­er one. sim­i­lar sce­nario. And I had a bit of a talk I gave the CEO a bit of a talk­ing to he hired this guy. This is 10 years ago, we hired him over the phone with­out ever meet­ing him. And it was a sales guy and we weren’t using zoom back then. We’re in a very con­ser­v­a­tive com­pa­ny. He’s telling lock­er room jokes that are insane­ly inap­pro­pri­ate in front of the mixed crowd at the cof­fee break. And I said to the CEO, you need to fire him and you should do it at lunchtime. We need to get this guy out of here. We did at the end of the day. We let the meet­ing run out. We don’t want to dis­rupt the minute we fired him at five o’clock. Because this it’s just I mean those are extreme but not anoth­er one I’ve seen some exam­ples are kind of our point to over talk­ers. One of my clients had one who was their best truck dri­ver and I’ve shared this sto­ry in the past, they were in Van­cou­ver and their own fleet of trucks that they had to get across the moun­tain pass to anoth­er place called Cal­gary. And these are extreme moun­tain pass even they made this show about this high­way in the win­ter called the high­way through hell. It did not mat­ter what the weath­er was, he would always get through on time most reli­able truck dri­ver main­tained his truck per­fect­ly, clean­est truck, just a lit­tle prob­lem, they would get one or two com­plaints every week from peo­ple on the road, because of his aggres­sive dri­ving and how we would cut peo­ple off and be an ass on the road. Now, because their com­pa­ny name was on the trail­ers and trucks Yeah. So you know, it just it was hard, because he was so damn good. And, you know, I’m sure you’ve got oth­er exam­ples to grab. But these are, they’re real­ly good at their job. They’re just a lia­bil­i­ty. And like a tick­ing time bomb.

Brad Giles 11:08

The impor­tant part is not just that he does­n’t play well with oth­ers inside the firm, because he was not play­ing well with oth­ers on the pub­lic roads. And yeah, and so it’s in gen­er­al does­n’t play well with oth­ers. So let’s talk about the def­i­n­i­tion, the brute jerk. Now you and I might inter­change that with a tox­ic a play­er. And that comes from the book, top grad­ing as well, the def­i­n­i­tion of a play­er, some­one who’s in the top 10% of avail­able can­di­dates at the pay rate that you pro­vide. So this is some­one who is pro­duc­ing the num­bers, they’re pret­ty con­sis­tent at hit­ting the num­bers for their role, but they don’t leave the core val­ues, you know, no one wants to sit next to them. No one wants to hang out with them or get into some kind of lunch time ban­ter with them. Because they’re a jerk.

Kevin Lawrence 12:08

They might not be a bad human being. They’re just in the wrong darn place. Like the guy that we did fire at the end of the day, the sales guy who got hired on the phone. There’s places where he actu­al­ly prob­a­bly because he was a per­son­able guy, he just was crude in a con­ser­v­a­tive envi­ron­ment. So there, there are envi­ron­ments that aren’t con­ser­v­a­tive that he could have been great in.

Brad Giles 12:52

But he could­n’t. My read­ing the sit­u­a­tion, he could­n’t rec­og­nize that that was inap­pro­pri­ate. He did­n’t have the EQ to rec­og­nize this is not a lock­er room. This is a mixed envi­ron­ment where in a pro­fes­sion­al set­ting where it’s not real­ly appro­pri­ate. Exact­ly. And so the big thing about tox­ic guys or bril­liant jerks is that you’ve got to take action, no mat­ter what it is it you know, it may be easy for us to say get them out fire them. But that’s one option. But you can’t just if they’re tox­ic, you can’t just let them sit and fes­ter. Because the cost to the team is sim­ply too high.

Kevin Lawrence 13:39

But why do peo­ple let that sit and fes­ter? Because they’re wor­ried about pro­duc­tiv­i­ty loss?

Brad Giles 13:43

Because bril­liant jerks. They’re bril­liant. They’re high pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, okay, but they’re low on the behav­ioral or the cul­tur­al side. And so they’re fear­ful that we won’t like the exam­ple I pro­vid­ed we won’t be able to replace those cus­tomers, or those sales.

Kevin Lawrence 14:05

Yes, they’re fear­ful and, and a scarci­ty of you know, if we do some­thing bad is gonna hap­pen. That’s the root of it. And it’s, it’s unfound­ed. You might take your time, and you might be smart about it. But you can always work your way around. We had one in anoth­er com­pa­ny that that, unfor­tu­nate­ly did­n’t work out recent­ly. And there’s a lot of con­cern about the addi­tion­al work­load and strain on the team. If you got if you only had three peo­ple, maybe, yeah, we got 500 peo­ple, the sys­tem han­dles it. And they’re often relieved because the stress and the ten­sion is out of the environment.

Brad Giles 14:51

So you’ve got to take action, inac­tion is per­haps where your gut will take you moti­vat­ed by fear, as you said, but you’ve got to take some kind of action on this. And for many peo­ple, though, we like the fear says I don’t want to fire them, it’s your read on the sit­u­a­tion, if that’s the case, then try to move into some kind of coach­ing sit­u­a­tion with them to help them to under­stand the prob­lems. I mean, we gen­uine­ly want to give every­one a fair chance at help­ing them­selves to become bet­ter to be able to align, it won’t, it won’t always hap­pen. But if you want to, it’s appro­pri­ate to give them a good chance.

Kevin Lawrence 15:35

I agree. And you’ll always owe it to him because they might not have been made aware about it, they might have been like that their whole life, their man­ag­er might not be doing it. If they don’t report to you, you might not be giv­en the feed­back. So there is truth. The oth­er thing that’s impor­tant, not tak­ing action endors­es the behav­ior. Oh, yeah. So you know, your cul­ture isn’t the words in the wall. And we said it is your cul­ture is your hir­ing and your pro­mo­tion deci­sions. When you pro­mote these bril­liant jerks, what you’re say­ing is core val­ues don’t mean any­thing. If you’re high­ly pro­duc­tive, you’re it’s okay to be a jerk. No mat­ter what we say you’re endors­ing it, if you allow them to stay in their posi­tions, you’re endors­ing it, which under­mines your cul­ture and your val­ue that you’re show­ing towards oth­er people.

Brad Giles 16:22

And peo­ple look at you as the leader and think that you just don’t care, right? And that’s direct are the real prob­lem. Because they would think I total­ly aligned with these val­ues of this com­pa­ny or the behav­ioral expec­ta­tions. And then they would look at the tox­ic a the bril­liant jerk, and they would say, This per­son is not act­ing in the way in which every­body talks about the coachee here. And then they look at the leader, and they say, well, obvi­ous­ly this per­son does­n’t real­ly care about these val­ues Cor­rect? Or these behaviors?

Kevin Lawrence 16:59

They think why would I work so hard to be effec­tive with this per­son, you can get away with all that. So it’s stuff so so you got­ta address it. And, and, and there’s lots of dif­fer­ent things you can do. But the biggest thing is to make sure they get the straight goods, and we often get brought in to help turn these peo­ple around. Good lead­ers want to give them a chance and make sure they haven’t missed it and missed some­thing. And so nor­mal­ly, where we start is the man­ag­er mak­ing sure they’re actu­al­ly giv­ing them the real tough feed­back, that’s, you know, some­times, you know, we’ll do in depth, we do a very, very thor­ough deep in depth 360, where you’re inter­view­ing peo­ple get­ting lots of details of what it is mea­sur­ing them on a few dif­fer­ent rat­ings of lead­er­ship, debrief­ing with them, and their man­ag­er com­ing up with action plans of how they’re going to get bet­ter at the behav­ior, that can help you that can get through them. exit inter­views when peo­ple leave, because nor­mal­ly peo­ple that work with or for these peo­ple, there will be car­nage peo­ple, you know, it’ll cause car­nage. So even some of that are clients, even what­ev­er data you can put in front of them to try and give them a wake up call, like, hey, this isn’t work­ing, things need to change. And here’s why. And this is where HR has an amaz­ing, impor­tant role in com­pa­nies is to make sure that it is crys­tal clear the feed­back they’ve been giv­en. Because a lot of man­agers are not very good at lay­ing out the truth in a way where it’s like, if this does­n’t change, you’re gonna lose your job.

Brad Giles 18:41

Yeah. And they may, through fear or what­ev­er, be reluc­tant, espe­cial­ly because of the per­for­mance, they’re achiev­ing the num­bers day you got it, they believe they’re help­ing the man­ag­er to achieve their num­bers. Maybe they’re even one of the high­est per­form­ers on the team. And so the man­ag­er is think­ing, if that per­son goes, and that’s a hit to the over­all pro­duc­tiv­i­ty or per­for­mance of the team, then that’s going to make my job so much hard­er. And so they kind of tend to turn a bit of a blind eye toward the behav­ior, but not real­ly appre­ci­at­ing the over­all neg­a­tive cost that it’s bring­ing. Yeah. Go ahead. Yep. But after you’ve had those con­ver­sa­tions, I mean, the exam­ple I pro­vid­ed we gave that guy almost a year’s worth of coach­ing, one on one coach­ing with a coach to dig into it. Some­times it just won’t work. Some­times. They are such a bril­liant jerk of excel­lent pro­por­tions, that they’re not going to be able to change who they are. They’re got hard wired emo­tion­al issues. that you will not be able to dis­en­tan­gle. And if that’s the case, you need to take action, you can­not let this per­son con­tin­ue to be tox­ic inside the team.

Kevin Lawrence 20:11

Yeah, and that’s, that’s the hard part, you just need to make sure you’ve giv­en them chances, make sure that they have clear writ­ten goals, maybe it’s a per­for­mance improve­ment plan, maybe you get them a coach, maybe you send them on a train­ing or per­son­al growth pro­gram, you know, you know, often peo­ple want to make sure they’ve giv­en them the chances and give them all the chances to con­tin­ue to earn the role in the com­pa­ny. And then if it does­n’t, it’s time to move on, it’s painful, and, you know, treat them as fair­ly as you can be respect­ful as you can, and let’s move on, pick a day, know­ing what’s pick­ing the ele­phant, we will do we get peo­ple to pick a date, they’re gonna be it’s gonna be if there isn’t notable improve­ment, and we know we fol­low the process­es the best, we can then pick a date. Now the gears, once that’s done, you also got to make sure, gen­er­al­ly, when these peo­ple leave, there’s a lit­tle bit of hap­pi­ness in the com­pa­ny. And the key thing is, we also want to main­tain a respect­ful cul­ture and don’t let peo­ple cel­e­brate too much. Like try and keep it real­ly Pro. And at the same time, make sure you’re lis­ten­ing to all of them say­ing we should have dealt with this soon­er. Right, that’s feed­back for you the deci­sion mak­er that this prob­a­bly should have been dealt with a long time ago.

Brad Giles 21:26

What’s implic­it in that state­ment is, and they may not have the courage to ask this of the leader. Why did­n’t you deal with this soon­er? Because there’s the evi­dence that they’re ques­tion­ing your activ­i­ty and your action?

Kevin Lawrence 21:40

Cor­rect. And then the final step is, well, how do we pre­vent all of this in the first place, which will be our next pod­cast, and we will talk about the top grad­ing method­ol­o­gy that is designed to make sure you only put the right peo­ple into new roles, whether they’re exter­nal hires or inter­nal pro­mo­tions, hav­ing a very thor­ough process to min­i­mize these mis­takes, that are not good for the per­son and they’re not good for us. Nobody’s nobody actu­al­ly is not good for the team, either. Nobody’s win­ning with these peo­ple being in these roles.

Brad Giles 22:12

And that’s our episode 100. Very inter­est­ing one to look for­ward to a bit of a mile­stone for us. Yeah, but how do you con­sis­tent­ly hire peo­ple who live your val­ues, and are pro­duc­tive in their role at an accept­able lev­el? That’s what we’re going to be talk­ing about next week on the growth whis­pers. Okay, so thanks for list­ing a good chat about the bril­liant jerk, unfor­tu­nate­ly, a part of life, many lead­ers and teams. And yeah, so I guess in sum­ma­ry, we have cov­ered off what is a bril­liant jerk, they’re pro­duc­tive in the role or high­ly pro­duc­tive, they’re low on the val­ues and behav­iors. We’ve pro­vid­ed a few exam­ples there, and also been able to explain that you you must take action, no mat­ter what it is, you must kind of take action. Any oth­er fur­ther com­ments on all of that, Kevin to close this out?

Kevin Lawrence 23:09

It’s just they’re hard sit­u­a­tions to deal with. And our job is just to make sure that we real­ly give them the best chance they can of being suc­cess­ful with our com­pa­ny, or free­ing them up to go get a job in a com­pa­ny that they suit better.

Brad Giles 23:23

Yeah, indeed. Okay, so thank you for lis­ten­ing. This has been the Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast. My name is Brad Giles. And you could find me at evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com​.au And you can find Kevin at Lawrence and co​.com. And obvi­ous­ly we both pro­duce newslet­ters full of action­able inter­est­ing insights every week. You can also sub­scribe to those for more. Thanks for lis­ten­ing. We hope you have a great week and look for­ward to chat­ting to you again next week. Have a great one.