I recently came across a thought-provoking article from Inc.com which drew on the wisdom of the late Steve Jobs. A dozen years after his death, Jobs remains a mercurial figure whose words carry a lot of weight. We’re still fascinated by how someone as troubled as Jobs managed to create things so inspirational to the masses. Or at least I am.
The core of the article was actually about companies getting their compensation strategies wrong by distributing pay-driving performance assessments on a bell curve, which ignores the reality that 80 percent of an organization’s output is driven by 20 percent of its people.
This is a good subject for another time, but not what caught my notice. To flesh out this topic, the article spliced in some of Jobs’ thoughts on dealing with the often disruptive personalities of innovators:
I found that the best people are the ones that really understand the content. (By "content," think what truly drives results in your business.)
And they're a pain in the butt to manage. But you put up with it because they're so great at the content.
And that's what makes great products. It's not process. It's content.
The distinction between process and content is key to understanding Jobs’ meaning here. He’s noticed something we have probably all experienced first hand: as an endeavour grows, this brings with it the need to organize more people and resources to stay in unison, which invokes rules, policies, and processes designed to predictably replicate success on a larger scale.
Pretty soon, everyone is focused on these processes, which can instigate a loss of focus on creation, customer obsession, and stakeholder management. Those who stay rightly focused on the content, Jobs tells us, will appear non-conformist for doing so, but are actually getting it exactly right.
The article goes on to make the point that quite often, your best people are not the ones which are easiest to manage, but those who are perennially restless, frustrated, misaligned.
I find there’s a lot of wisdom in this, but it also sidles up a little too adjacent to the current conventional wisdom, which tells us that if someone is difficult to deal with, we’re probably at fault for stifling their innovative spirit.
This is oversimplified. When a team member is consistently difficult to deal with, there could be a number of different motivations driving this, and not always the frustration innovators can feel. Understanding what sits behind difficult behaviour is key to extracting the best performance from these individuals and reducing needless organizational conflict.
In my experience there are five main types of difficult teammate. There are certainly more, along with myriad combinations of these and other categories. But if you can grapple with these five types, you’ll have a decent heuristic for decoding team conflict.
Let’s grant the conventional wisdom primacy as we lay out these categories.
The Innovator. Often, when someone is constantly bouncing off organizational boundaries and creating friction with others, it is for just the reasons Jobs gestured toward in his remark. Innovators are the “chaotic good” class in an organization, and the indispensable vanguard of any entrepreneurial endeavour.
As Jobs says, they are oriented on content … which is the creation of the good or service or improvement or feature which is going to delight customers and grow the enterprise. They recognize that progress does not come from process compliance, and that in fact if everyone complies, the organization will stand still. They are driven by an innate belief in disruption as a means of avoiding organizational entropy, decline, and death.
Innovators should be ferociously protected and retained. If their non-linearity results in backlash which forces them out of the team, you are one step closer to stagnation, which equates to strategic defeat. This can be a difficult tension in large organizations which start to crave a level of stability which isn’t in their interest.
The Contrarian. Often confused with innovators and sharing many of their character traits is the individual who simply resists authority for the sake of doing so. These individuals believe ideologically in a distribution of authority which allows for the necessary debate to drive the best decisions. They are wary of intellectual inequality … of those in authority assuming they are intelligent enough to operate the organization without the free exchange and mutual testing of ideas and opinions.
USAF Colonel John Boyd made a name for himself as defense theorist and strategist. But his most enduring contribution was his relentless push for service reforms. He sought to remove undue bureaucratic and commercial interest from the weapon system acquisition process and instead get leaders focused on what would make the service more lethal and combat ready.
His constant rejection of rules and policies he viewed as unnecessarily confining and cumbersome earned him career-limiting scorn from senior officers. But not before Boyd contributed the idea that sometimes, in a large organization, individuals have to choose between “being someone” and actually “doing something.” The idea of career sacrifice driven by deep and abiding love for the organization’s purpose has echoed across the decades, continuing to influence how USAF officers view their role in being disruptive and how to balance this with career viability.
Contrarians should be protected, and should be given access to senior decision makers. They perform a critical function in advising top-heavy organizations when their well-meaning attempts at creating unity of effort are beginning to smother impulses critical to the organization’s progress.
Whether to actively champion and promote a contrarian to senior-most levels is a circumstantial question; getting it right can super-charge liberated thinking in an organization; but getting it wrong can create disorganization and chaos. This can make intellectual output irrelevant as the organization loses focus on its purpose in order to quarrel with itself endlessly.
The Unsettled are a group we don’t hear much about, but are crucial to understand. Sometimes, team members are difficult because they don’t like what they see, hear, and feel in the organization. This can be common with new joiners, who immerse into a team and resist being absorbed into a culture they see as unhealthy. If someone is giving you feedback about your organization, refusing to assimilate, and tending toward a negative or even cynical view for reasons not quite clear to you, resist the temptation to try hammering them into place. Resist also the temptation to get rid of them. Seek instead to understand what’s driving their resistance. These individuals are often canaries alerting us to organizational dysfunction we had not previously noticed.
Or, sometimes, we find that they’re just difficult.
Which brings us to the Genuinely Toxic. There is a slice of humanity which is just ridiculously negative. Which is to say not merely difficult to work with but unkind. Uncharitable. Curmudgeonly. Unable to see the positive in any situation. Hyper-critical. Corrosive to the mood and mentality of those around them. So miserly with recognition that they leave teammates feeling cold, isolated, and under-valued for what they contribute.
There is little reason to invest in or work on retaining these individuals. You can easily find someone who contributes just as much value without subtracting from team enjoyment and chemistry. Even for those who produce occasional brilliance, potential is limited. This is because as you ascend the ladder to the senior level in any organization, it becomes more and more necessary to create a market for your own influence before you can exert it. And at least in my experience, there is a limited market for the terminally miserable who send people home every day feeling more negative than when they started.
We do see toxic people climbing to very high places sometimes, and that in itself is interesting. Usually this is because someone has benefitted from luck and timing, survived as others have peeled away, or become the favourite of a well-placed ally or two (or in a darker theory nonetheless relevant in some organizations, has tacit or explicit collateral on the right people). When this happens, a lot of damage gets done before they inevitably destroy themselves. So if you’re the gatekeeper, be mindful and searching in your reflections. Letting a toxic person into a leadership role can destroy everything you’ve worked to build.
Finally, there is the Prima Donna. Some people are as effective as they are self-referential, and in fact seem to be capable of moving large groups of people toward massive objectives partially as a result of an unhealthy belief in themselves. This tends to make them insufferable to work with. They will critique others. They will critique resources and support even when these are generously provided. They will be perpetually annoyed by rules which inconvenience them, even when these are valid and necessary. They will want to do things differently purely to have put their own stamp on them or to call attention to their brilliance. And they will always, without fail, make success about themselves.
But the reason we see these individuals in our midst is because they are often exceptionally superior, despite their flaws, at gaining allegiance, alignment, and mutuality across large groups of people. This superpower is what affords their prickishness. They tend to be enormously charismatic, persuasive, and able to bend their persona around the demands of the moment. These individuals sometimes achieve world-changing results with their presence and confidence. This when they’re not busy alienating and stirring resentment in everyone around them, often exposing their charms as purely instrumental rather than genuine.
US Army General George S. Patton Jr. was famously impossible for his peers and superiors to deal with. So much so that he was repeatedly marginalized and excluded from key aspects of the Allied campaign to retake Europe in WWII. But he was undoubtedly the most effective operational commander of his generation, and arguably among the best the US military has ever produced. When the chips were down, he was called upon and delivered.
Steve Jobs, not so much an innovator himself as a shrewd and often authoritarian leader with a clear aesthetic vision, a sharp eye for cutting-edge technology, and a thorny personal manner, continues to provoke us with his ideas long after exiting the stage.
In this case, we hear a distant echo of an idea about innovators and their personalities; a thought more novel in his time, before his and others’ creations carried the world on a wave of successive tech revolutions which continue to change basically everything we understand about contemporary life.
But in the time since he said it, we’ve perhaps become a little too comfortable with the most simplistic version of it. And if there’s one thing we can say for certain, it’s that leading teams of fellow human beings in a dynamic activity will never be simple. Each of us is different from the next, so when one of us is more difficult to deal with, it’s worth truly thinking about why.
Tony Carr is American writer, military veteran, combat pilot, and senior leader in operations. He shares these thoughts, purely his own, from his home in the United Kingdom.