The Hub of Gen Y Unconvention

In a workplace, in most cases, people choose their work partners according to two criteria. One is competence at the job (Does Joe know what he’s doing?). The other is likability (Is Joe enjoyable to work with?). Obviously, both things matter. Less obvious is how much they matter—and exactly how they matter. These two criteria—competence and likability—combine to produce four archetypes: the competent jerk, who knows a lot but is unpleasant to deal with; the lovable fool, who doesn’t know much but is a delight to have around; the lovable star, who’s both smart and likable; and the incompetent jerk, who…well, that’s self-explanatory. These archetypes are caricatures, of course: Organizations usually—well, much of the time—weed out both the hopelessly incompetent and the socially clueless. Still, people in an organization can be roughly classified using a simple matrix.

The research at Harvard Business School showed (not surprisingly) that, no matter what kind of organization we studied, everybody wanted to work with the lovable star, and nobody wanted to work with the incompetent jerk. Things got a lot more interesting, though, when people faced the choice between competent jerks and lovable fools. Logically, when managers are faced with this choice, they would often state picking competence over likeability when it comes to getting a job done. Despite what such people might say about their preferences, the reverse turned out to be true in practice in the organizations the study analyzed. Personal feelings played a more important role in forming work relationships—not friendships at work but job-oriented relationships—than is commonly acknowledged. They were even more important than evaluations of competence. In fact, feelings worked as a gating factor: The study found that if someone is strongly disliked, it’s almost irrelevant whether or not she is competent; people won’t want to work with her anyway. By contrast, if someone is liked, his colleagues will seek out every little bit of competence he has to offer. And this tendency didn’t exist only in extreme cases; it was true across the board.

In my opinion, most of the time, while the incompetent jerks are automatically filtered out of the recruitment process, and the lovable star being hired, the choice should not be restricted to just picking between a competent jerk and lovable fool. These two extremes should be avoided entirely as both these groups of people are destructive to a team to a different extent. That leaves a group of mild competent jerk or lovable fool to deal with when being in recruitment process. If they fill a certain need in a team for the short term, they should be okay as there would not be enough time for them to impose damage on the team, especially if they claim to do so for workplace productivity reasons and have supporting proofs. This post addresses on strategies of avoiding the competent jerks and lovable fools on the extreme negatives for the shortcomings, and dealing with people who are mildly classified in those categories.

The first line of defense would be avoiding the competent jerks over the lovable fool in the extreme cases, as they cause more problems on the team by making the rest of the team not getting along. The first sign can often be detected during the early stages of a job interview from the candidate’s behavior and attitude. When asking them to clarify their achievements in their work history, the competent jerks are usually someone who goes from job to job without accomplishing much is probably someone who had to leave the job before they were ready. This implies they were probably pushed out for not getting along with others. For lovable fools who just socialize in the office while having minimal accomplishments on a consistent basis, even their work history would not show them going from job to job like the competent jerks, the accomplishment content of their resumes would be again consistently empty, hence giving you a second line of defense to focus in avoiding them. You would want to avoid those candidates with minimal significant accomplishment contents, or those who cannot explain what they have accomplished (meaning that they likely lied about their accomplishments on their resumes), especially when your guts do not feel comfortable. Using this technique in addition to paying attention to their behaviors would further filter out those undesirable candidates.

There are arguments supporting why lovable fools are chosen over competent jerks when boiling down to choosing one of those two types of people to work with. For example, let’s take a competitive rowing crew team. Advocates of managers who behaviorally choose the lovable fools would argue that a faster boat results if you have slower rowers who get along with the rest of the people in the boat than the fastest rowers who are not likeable (implying jerks and unlikeable people probably make the workplace unproductive and discordant). Some competent jerk would defend their behavior by the notion that they are not paid to socialize, wasting time on company’s pay like the lovable fools. On a short term basis, mildly lovable fools or competent jerks do have their place on a team. Lovable fools can often help a team maintain a positive outlook through adversity, while competent jerks can influence team members to become more focused on important accomplishments away from socializing on company’s dime. On a long term basis, I would suggest staying far away from those types of new hires if possible to avoid dealing with the headaches later when they cause major problems or bottlenecks.

What are your opinions on lovable fools and competent jerks in the workplace? Please drop me a line at blog@sysil.com or in the comment box below!