High Performance, Bad Behaviour: Where Do You Draw the Line?

Episode 276

What do you do when someone is smashing every target… while making everyone around them quietly consider a career change?

This week, Ish and Sacha get into the awkward world of difficult high performers: the rock stars, sales guns and thoroughbreds who deliver brilliant results but don't always play nicely with others. When is "difficult" actually a valuable challenge? When is it genuinely destructive?
And at what point do you stop worrying about what if they leave? And start asking, what if they stay? 

They explore the important difference between someone who ruffles feathers because they're pushing standards and challenging mediocrity, and someone whose success comes with a trail of damage behind them. Because letting your thoroughbreds run is one thing. Letting them kick everyone else in the head on the way past is another.

There's also a brilliant confession from Sacha about being given responsibility for providing feedback at 18 or 19, despite having absolutely no idea how to give feedback,  resulting in roughly "one thing you did well and 95 things you were a bit shit at." Strangely, people weren't grateful.

Along the way, they get into courageous conversations, team standards, whether team charters actually change anything. 

Plus, the most important preparation for Ish and Sacha's upcoming overseas speaking gig: apparently, sorting out what they're wearing.

Key Learnings

1. Difficult isn't necessarily destructive

Look at the impact of the behaviour: are they raising the team's game, or raising themselves by pushing everyone else down?  Pasted text

2. Ask "What if they stay?"

Leaders can become so worried about losing a star performer that they'll tolerate behaviour they'd never accept from anyone else.

3. Results don't cancel out behaviour

If performance reviews only reward the numbers, you're effectively telling people that how they achieve those numbers doesn't matter. 

4. Sometimes people genuinely don't know they're difficult

Before deciding someone is simply an arsehole, consider whether anyone has actually told them how their behaviour lands.

5. Standards only matter when you use them

Team charters, values and behavioural agreements can be useful, but the document itself changes nothing. They become real the first time someone crosses the line, and another team member says, "We're not going to do that around here." That's when words on the wall become the way a team actually works.