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Team Building: Team Jerks
By harveyrobbins | September 1, 2007
Nowhere is is written that you have to get along with everyone. There are people in the world who should not, who must not, be on any team — ever. These are people who lack interpersonal skills. They are not necessarily bad people, although some (the dark angels I’ll talk about in the next newsletter) are truly bad.
On any given day, we can all be jerks – rude people unaware of how we come across. But the true team jerk goes beyond occasional jerkness to full-blown jerkhood. Someone who, let’s say, is interpersonally challenged. A team jerk is often its most talented member. He or she (yes, there are she jerks too) may have made some very important contributions to the enterprise. Their specialty is ideas – new technologies, new products, new processes, new applications, new combinations of existing things, new marketing ideas. Extraordinarily bright and creative, they are often high-achieving dynamos when motivated, giving off ideas the way regular folk emit carbon dioxide.
Take Bert (please!). He’s a primadonna about his talent. He won’t play by the rules other team members follow. He demands that other people attend to him, while he ignores them. Interpersonal skills have taken a vacation. Communication with him has eroded to the point where the team simply ignores him – while hoping he includes them the next time a great idea comes to him. When team members do try to include him in things, he bushes them off.
A good archetype for Bert is the software programmer who is a genius with the latest blogging program or writes code in his sleep, but has horrendous interpersonal skills. You hate to lose his talent, but you could sure do without his arrogance, his eccentricities, and his contempt. (Wouldn’t hurt if he bathed a bit more often, either).
What can you do with a guy like Bert?
First, acknowledge that his personality is not his fault. None uf us asks to be born with the precise set of talents and peculiarities we get. The jerk is often blessed with great creativity, but cursed with a crummy personality. There are two strong opposing forces at play in the creative person. One force arises from high internal standards, the other from the need for recognition from others.
Second, appreciate that what you see is probably not all there is. People who seem arrogant often have profound insecurities. These people may simply be unable to adequately communicate what is going on inside them and, thus, often experience more stress than other team members. Their lack of interpersonal skills is almost intentional in order to hide their true self.
Third, see if the team itself is helping to create the problem. Maybe team members have unconsciously “outed” the jerk because he is cut from such a different bolt of cloth than they are. Or maybe the team rules and policies are too narrow to accommodate a personality with extra, um, verve.
Having made these adaptations, however, you still have the problem of Bert being Bert. You can change the whole world to suit some people, and they will continue to be jerks. In such cases, you have to make a choice…between competence and sanity.
The best solution may be to put some distance between him and the team. Set him apart from the core team as a valued resource team member. Make him a unit unto himself – a team of one – with a dotted-line relationship to the team or the team leader, as a reference source, sounding board, or technology guru. Set him up as a one-man skunkworks. Give him an office in a separate building, or on a separate continent, even. Buy him some bunny slippers and make a telecommuter out of him.
But be careful about sending your genius off to the jungle by himself. The idea of separation may sound good to both him and to the team, but it may backfire. It’s very likely that Bert needs human contact to keep him from going completely insane, or from becoming depressed, or buying a gun. The team he derides and ignores may be his lifeline to normality.
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