Brilliant Jerks

Product Information

This coaching process should not be hidden. The coach’s interview process helps stakeholders understand that the brilliant jerks are working on their leadership and not to perceive the brilliant jerk’s initial awkward changes in behavior to be suspicious or manipulative, but rather as an intense effort to improve their leadership. Stakeholders will appreciate their efforts and often contribute to the process of change. Finally, a holistic performance review encourages employees to bring their authentic selves to work. Knowing that you will be measured not only on your skills but also on your contributions to the company culture, or your willingness to support a colleague going through a hard time, makes for much more engaged employees. How do we assess the impact of high individual performance at the cost of others' performance? Impact on others performance can be due to resources grabbing, team morale, customer satisfaction, etc.

What is stopping the brilliant jerk from seeing that their toxic behavior is counterproductive? It’s their underlying fear, which triggers them into the fight mode when faced with a threat. It’s a threat to their insatiable need for status and recognition. The coach’s role is to provide insights that widen the brilliant jerk’s array of behavioral responses to any perceived threat. Step 3: Empathizing About Boss Awareness Anticipates the customer’s needs and takes potential customer impact into account in making decisions/tradeoffs When the term "Brilliant Jerk" becomes the metaphor for organizational productivity (therein lies the problem). To associate monetary bottom lines with brilliance, and provide room for its continuing growth - says a lot about the intrinsic culture of the/a company. We want to reward employees based on their full contribution to the team, not just their individual impact. Starting in childhood, they "unconsciously" develop a pattern of behaviors that "work" for them - that support natural biases in their personality. It becomes habitual very fast.

Having built his firm from the ground up, the mere suggestion from Jarrod (Sean Delaney), the company’s co-founder, that another executive should be brought on board to help share the burden, is dismissed. But his response that bringing in outsiders would mean he would “ lose control” fails to hold water when there’s talk elsewhere of a growing number of employees (that is, outsiders that have been brought in). And then he lets rip in a board meeting, yelling at the top of his lungs in a desperate attempt to elicit sympathy. It fails, because while few have done when he has done (which is what his point was – he’s better than everyone else), I wouldn’t want to be in a position to boast about being in “ an eight-way conference call across six time zones, firing three different people [at once]”. Creates opportunities for others to share their voice and makes sure teammates feel valued and included

People are jerks because it has paid off for them in the past, so the manager must stop their jerkiness from paying off now.Great entertainment thrills and inspires. It sparks laughter, tears, gasps and sighs, stirring our emotions and nourishing our spirit. Ever since humans learned to speak, storytelling has been essential to our happiness. A dream team is one in which all of your colleagues are extraordinary at what they do and highly effective working together. Our version of a great workplace is not great perks, although we have many. It’s about investing in a dream team of talented people who are excited to pursue ambitious shared goals. On our dream team we encourage collaboration, share information and discourage politics. There’s lots of love and there are demanding peers. It’s exhilarating and how we learn the most, do our best work, improve the fastest and have the most fun. Now the challenge for Mary and Cedric is to persuade by creating a vision and mission for people to enact the desired change. This takes integrating everything the leader has learned to craft an enticing vision that compels people to make the changes, but is ingrained in reality so as not to cause cynicism. One way to deal with a toxic co-worker is to intentionally seek out co-workers who make your life better. “One of the ways that jerks can operate is to make us feel isolated,” Pliner said. After considering these points, a number of people in every group change their “Fire Joe” vote and suggest alternative strategies. These range from isolating him in a new role away from everyone (the “Penalty Box” approach) or even promoting him. On rare occasions, someone suggests the team might be the issue and recommends team coaching.

relationship is on both parties. What is communicated to the stakeholders is that the brilliant jerk is undergoing a leadership development program. If absolutely everything has been done to help someone to correct their behaviour and hit performance targets – and I do mean everything – then managers should work with their HR/people department to start the performance management process. Brilliant jerks make a direct contribution to the immediate numbers and stretch others to do more while their negative impact is not understood nor objectively debated for they are often the darlings of the management. In my opinion, it boils down to the culture and leadership on how this issue is handled. I believe that humans are fundamentally good and if you’re with me, then I suggest you read Human Kind by Robert Bregman, which provides evidence to support that. Because of this, I don’t believe that anybody wants to come into work and be a brilliant jerk. I don’t for one minute think that they’re stood in front of a mirror – Gareth Cheeseman-style – saying, “You are the worst, you are the worst, today you’re going to make everyone’s life hell… Grrrrr!”, but clearly their behaviour shouldn’t be tolerated just because of the knowledge that they have. So what to do? Be better at setting expectations

2. Understand the drivers

Todd's comments prompt the questions: Have we failed to take appropriate notice of research and accumulated experiences that would help managers understand and act on the problem? Can the brilliance of the "jerk" be tapped with some degree of consistency? Is it worth it? What do you think? Secondly, think about what actions might help change the situation, like bringing up the behavior to a higher-up. This does come with a risk of retaliation, so it is very important to proceed cautiously.

Most of us are not in a position where we can make any big changes to the work environment. Still, there are still some strategies to survive and maybe even make things a little better. Freedom also doesn’t mean your managers are not involved in your work. Getting input from leaders, peers or direct reports improves decision making. It’s another example of how freedom can’t exist without responsibility.Dream team members take informed risks, which require courage and encouragement from leaders and peers. We have many successes and failures, which is how we learn and why everyone is evaluated on their whole record (versus simply mistakes or bets that didn’t pay off). If it’s a team situation, help the team reinforce core values and expected behaviors of all members and observe the situation closely. Just don’t rationalize maintaining or sustaining the individual in this environment at the cost of destroying it for everyone else, along with your credibility as a manager. Brilliant Jerks briskly tells three parallel stories: founder Tyler (Shubham Saraf, star of last year's National Theatre hit The Father and the Assassin) latches on to being able to get a taxi on your phone when his friend conceives the idea in Paris only for the company to grow so fast it careers out of his control; company coder Sean (Sean Delaney, from Killing Eve, pictured above) falls in love with a male co-worker Craig while their female colleague Amy gets marginalised by the “brogrammer” culture; and Mia (Kiran Sonia Sawar), a Scottish driver reliant on working for the company to keep herself above the poverty line, recognises during one of her rides the teenage son she gave up for adoption.