Here are some strategies from business experts and entrepreneurs for managing the prima donnas at your company.
Sane strategies for managing the primadonna in your life
Michael Reichert, an owner, cofounder, and vice-president of ESI Communications Inc., a 12-year-old, $21-million Minneapolis-based provider of phones and Internet services, has the kind of personnel problem a lot of managers might love to have. He's got a young salesman who's driven, dauntless, and phenomenally productive; by all relevant measures, a star.
The trouble is, the guy knows it. And he's been driving his coworkers at the roughly 100-employee company nuts with temper tantrums, rude behavior, and other displays of his gargantuan self-esteem. Things have gotten bad enough that several staffers have come to the boss to complain. Reichert says, "They say, 'He's so demanding'; 'He's such a jerk'; 'He's condescending." Meanwhile, the salesman has developed a complaint of his own: many of his colleagues, fed up with him, have started to tune him out.
Almost every business has at least one person like this. Arguably, start-ups and growing companies actually need them: the supremely self-assured stars, the people with all the answers, the prima donnas. They make some of the most productive, imaginative, and effective employees. But their huge thirst for acclaim and autonomy, while driving them to excel, can also spark needless intramural tensions, depressing morale and killing productivity. They are the kinds of people you don't want to fire, even if you would occasionally like to strangle them. How do you drag your superstar back down to earth?
The problem of the office prima donna can take lots of different forms, ranging from the raging egomaniac to more subtle passive-aggressive types to people best described as "quirky." The one thing all prima donnas possess to varying degrees is a tendency to put themselves ahead of the team. The worst among them disrupt meetings, won't report to superiors, bully subordinates, and generally make life miserable for anyone who has to work with them. Not surprisingly, there is no one-size-fits-all method for managing them effectively. Joe McKinney, president of McKinney Lumber Inc., in Muscle Shoals, Ala., who has dealt with his share of egomaniacs, cracks, "Let's talk about world peace or something we can solve."
Still, according to a random sampling of executives at growing companies, there are some ways to identify and deal with prima donnas.
Avoid hiring them. If you've already got a "legend in his own mind" stalking the halls of your company, this may sound a bit like shutting the barn door after the horse is gone. But experienced managers who have learned the hard way say the best method for handling oversized egos is simply avoiding them in the first place. Marie Clapper, president and publisher of Clapper Communications Co., in Des Plaines, Ill., says that spending 20 years at the helm of a 50-employee specialty publishing business has taught her to weed out people who won't fit into the company's determinedly open, team-spirited culture. One giveaway she's discovered is identifying recruits who are uncomfortable with the company's "no locked doors" policy. Anybody who feels strongly about having the only key to his or her office, she says, isn't likely to fit in.
Likewise David Pitassi, founder of Drypers Corp., a Houston-based manufacturer of off-brand disposable diapers, says a question he's found useful in identifying prima donnas during interviews is to ask for examples of their having succeeded as a member of a team. Pitassi says he worries if the recruit can't think of a good answer or responds instead with a strong individual achievement. According to Pitassi, enthusiasm and a cooperative attitude are higher qualifications than mere talent any day of the week. "I'll take a team of average players working together over a team of superstars going in different directions," he says.
Put your cards on the table. Managers agree that one key to handling prima donnas is confronting them early and candidly and in as unthreatening a way as possible. Often the real problem behind their behavior turns out to be something other than merely a swelled head.
For instance, Richard Sturm, CEO of Industrial Publishing Inc., a Eugene, Oreg., printing business now in the process of launching a national operation, says he had trouble getting a longtime manager to change some of the procedures that had worked in the past but weren't part of the new national strategy. Sturm says that after he'd carefully explained to the executive what he wanted her to do, she would agree and then go back to her old practices. Finally, he forced a confrontation. Sturm found out that instead of thinking she was too smart to take orders from him, the manager believed that in his rush to do things his way, he was neglecting her ideas. "She felt that I wasn't listening to her," Sturm says, "and I probably wasn't." Sturm says once that was out in the open, he became optimistic that he and the manager would be able to work together rather than at cross-purposes. "If you had asked me six months ago, I would have said this person was going to be terminated," he says.
Michael Rosenberg, president of Horizon Foods Inc., a Long Island, N.Y., frozen-foods distributor, also says that opening up lines of communication is crucial. He says a healthy sense of one's importance is vital to star performers, particularly among the national staff of salespeople he oversees. "Would you rather deal with someone who has confidence or someone with 'I'm a loser' written all over his forehead?" he asks. But he concedes that an excessive winning attitude can easily become a problem. "I just got off the phone with a guy who's going to open a new territory for us in Texas, who's going to be great for us, but his strength is his weakness." Meaning? "He's a tough guy. He doesn't take any shit from anybody." A good quality when a salesperson is wrangling with competitors; bad when he or she is dealing with customers and colleagues.
Rosenberg says a key first step in getting through to such people is demonstrating that you and they are on the same side. The process is sometimes best initiated outside the office. "I like to try to make friends with these people," he says. "I take them fishing. I have them over to my house, and I have my house set up for that purpose. I have my kids play with their kids. I have my wife spend time with their wives." Once a rapport is established, Rosenberg says, he tries to lay prima donna behavior out as a problem to be solved jointly rather than a personality flaw the employee must fix on his or her own. To that end, when problems come up, he literally swaps chairs with the employee and asks him or her to pretend to be the boss for a minute. "If you were in my shoes, how would you handle this?" he asks.
