How highly skilled employees bring down businesses

I was recently contracted by a local company to conduct psychological evaluations of their employees, with a view to pairing similar personalities to project teams.

The underlying goal of the exercise was to make the company draw maximum benefits from their workers by placing them in teams that reaffirm and validate their own character and attitudes.

With almost similar values and communication styles, they could turn the fortunes of the company around.

Getting it wrong

It was not in vain that the company took this recourse.

Different leadership and personality styles, values, goals and aspirations, and conflicting communication styles conspired to ensure timelines for crucial projects were not met.

The company was losing revenue and non-performing employees were becoming a huge drain on their budget.

However, the company couldn’t sack the bickering lot: it had spent a fortune getting on board some of the best talent in town.

This is where the company got it wrong, as many others have — they thought profits would soar only through hiring competent minds.

Many firms tend to disregard a candidate’s likeability. This is a human relations quality that is an indispensable element in business growth and sustainability. It is key to the family model, which many for-profit organisations struggle to build.

Psychologists list three essential components in interpersonal relations that have a bearing on performance: cognitive responses (which represent what one thinks of a person); affective responses (what one feels of a person); and behavioural responses (what one does or intends to do as regards a person).

These three aspects greatly influence business enterprises with a sizeable number of employees. What employees think of their leadership and of each other will certainly influence their actions.

That is why competent individuals are not necessarily the best leaders, whether in a company setting or in social arenas. This becomes pronounced when they are not likeable.

A competent individual is someone who knows how to do his or her job, while a likeable fellow is one who is enjoyable to work with. When an individual is passionately disliked, his or her level of competence becomes irrelevant and importance to the company becomes moot.

Though their study was conducted in informal settings, the work of Tiziana Casciaro and Miguel Sousa Lobo in 2005 opened an exciting arena of research in the area of competence and likeability.

They developed four archetypes of working partners; competent jerk, loveable fool, loveable star and incompetent jerk.

Competent jerks know a lot but are unpleasant to deal with. They live in a make-believe world where they are the geniuses and everyone else a fool.

They are brusque, condescending and unwilling to share. Fellow employees and subordinates find it hard to brainstorm with them on new ideas. If they are in a leadership position, they are akin to a suicide bomber, able to bring down in a flash an edifice that has taken sweat and blood to build.

Loveable fools

Loveable fools lack the requisite competence but are a delight to be with. They are receptive to ideas and are willing to collaborate with others. Their only major weakness is that they do not have a mind of their own and are like another organisational suicide bomber.

The least said the better of the hopelessly incompetent and socially clueless incompetent jerks. Most organisations would get rid of them in record time.

Loveable stars are both competent and likeable — some would call them natural leaders. They are able to understand the essential linkages between co-ordination, collaboration and innovation. They respect the abilities of their peers and have an open ear for subordinates.

They are also able to balance between what psychologists call affect-based trust (the emotional bonds between individuals that make people have genuine care and concern for the welfare of others), and cognitive-based trust (knowledge and expectations concerning an individual’s competence and performance reliability).

Above all, they have in abundance political skill — the ability to read and understand people and situations around them, and to translate that knowledge into goal-directed influence over others. They are adept at forming friendships and building strong coalitions.

Studies are now showing that both competence and likeability expand businesses hugely — this is basically the corporate family model most businesses the world over are after.

The writer is a researcher on mental health.

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