They won’t play by the rules, but they hold all the cards. HR and L&D professionals explore the tricky politics of managing high performers
In the Mad Men heyday of the advertising industry, horror stories of combustible creatives were commonplace. In one, a top copywriter got drunk, smashed up his office and had to be dragged away from the window, several floors up, in the process of trying to shove his weighty wooden desk out of it. It took two men to restrain him, and another two to save the desk. Or there’s the one where a raging argument between an art director and an account manager ended with a stabbing by ballpoint pen. Neither story ends with dismissal. They were the top talent, and they were brushed down, sobered up and put back to work the next day.
And therein lies the rub. Sometimes, every HR or L&D leader has to deal with people who are difficult, irrational or downright impossible, but who bring something else to the party, be they creative geniuses who just won’t play by the rules or high performers who deliver the numbers but can’t relate to anyone around them.
Michael Brooke, UK lead, learning and development at investment bank BNP Paribas, says top traders in financial services firms can be a particular challenge. “They’ve seen it all before, done it all before, it’s very hard to please them and they are quite a demanding audience,” says Brooke, a chartered psychologist.
“I was talking to a guy [here] the other day with a PhD in particle physics,” he says. “That is normal. They are super-technical mathematics, engineering, physics minds. Those folks often, but not exclusively, have that expertise at the expense of communication skills.”
Brooke gets around this by enticing them with L&D offerings that are a bit out of the ordinary. He regularly brings in speakers from external disciplines such as the military, medicine or performing arts who will tick employees’ intellectual boxes. And he goes to great lengths to avoid labelling learning opportunities as ‘soft’ – calling a course ‘Optimising your strengths’ or ‘Using all your resources’, he says, is a good way to appeal to those who’d run a mile from something which sounded too straightforward.
Rob Goffee, professor of organisational behaviour and co-author of the book Clever: Leading your Smartest, Most Creative People says that how you “corral this group of extremely smart and highly creative people… is one of the great organisational challenges of our time.”
The true office genius is infuriating and ridiculously productive in equal measure. “Clever people want and need lots of resources; they are expensive to support,” says Goffee. “They need labs, libraries, equipment, training grounds, support staff… Clever people perceive their own work to be so important that it must always be well-resourced. They are prone to obsession and it is from their obsessions that organisations can generate the most value. The final irony is that having won the resources they require, they will then ask you to leave them alone.”
The leave-them-alone approach may be best for creative types when they’re relied on to produce ideas, says Gary Luffman, an occupational psychologist with Think Change Consulting. “There are key structures that almost kick-start the ‘a-ha’ moment. An organisation can either get in the way of that process or help it flourish.
“It tends to mean that people need a bit of time to mentally wander, as it were, and through that quietening of the mind allow different parts of the brain to conspire to give you the answer. Leaving someone to it, for a day, an hour, just to gaze, go for a walk, play sport – all these things work for quietening the mind.”
Some organisations, most notably Google with its ‘20 per cent time’, have formalised processes for doing just that. But how do you know if a genius is productive when their output can be so intangible? It’s essential to ask them for a genuine artefact of their work, be it a written-down idea or a cohesive plan of action. And they need to be subtly steered in the right direction, says Goffee: “Clever people are often driven – but around their own goals, not those of an organisation.
“The leadership challenge therefore becomes not the traditional one of motivating staff, but of making sure your clever people are roughly aligned in their aims. Whatever you are in business to achieve, it is vital that it is clearly communicated to the ‘clevers’, but also that it is worthy of their talents.”
Learning to fail is equally important, he adds. Many high performers get more from their setbacks than their achievements, and a rigid scorecard approach which only rewards them for what they get right will ultimately prove counter-productive. The end result of which could be some rather mangled office furniture.