Handling Good Ol' Charlie
Many experts think there might be something about your organization that provokes prima donna behavior. The psychological roots of prima donna behavior can be deep and complicated. Pierre Mornell, a Mill Valley, Calif., corporate psychiatrist, says, "Underneath every big ego is a weak ego. They're very, very fragile." Even so, Mornell says, the ability to alter the drives and needs of such wounded bullies is way beyond the skills of most managers--or most people, for that matter. Short of a major life crisis like illness or a death in the family, he says, people who are overbearing jerks today will likely be overbearing jerks tomorrow.
Other management experts, though, say there are some organizational causes of prima donna problems in growing businesses that you can do something about.
Swelled heads often come to the surface in a business that's making the transition from being a scrappy start-up to a more settled managerial culture. Often the hard-charging big producers who thrive early on turn out to be aggravating morale problems down the road. Unfortunately, says William Cockrum, professor of entrepreneurial finance at the John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, "there's no way to know at the beginning who's going to be able to make the transition and who isn't." Lawrence Steinmetz, president of High Yield Management Inc., a Boulder, Colo., consulting firm, calls those who don't make the transition examples of the "good ol' Charlie syndrome. This is the guy who's been around since day one, and he built or dang-near built the company himself. Now he feels he deserves special consideration."
What can you do about him?
Treat him like everybody else. Under no circumstances, management experts say, should you grant your prima donna a dispensation from the rules everybody else has to follow--no matter how indispensable you think he or she is. Steinmetz says, "The cemetery is full of indispensable people, and once you start thinking that way about someone, you create all kinds of problems: morale problems and potential legal problems."
Steinmetz adds that if you've made the mistake of letting your prima donna get away with something you wouldn't tolerate from anyone else, the only solution is to tell him or her in no uncertain terms that the free ride is over. Steinmetz says most employees will choose to toe the line rather than quit. Those that leave, he says, are doing you a favor.
Figure out what you're doing wrong. Prima donna behavior can also be a result not of bad attitudes or big cultural shifts in a company but of specific instances of bad management. Alfie Kohn, a Massachusetts consultant and the author of Punished by Rewards and other books, goes so far as to say, "In the overwhelming majority of cases, problems attributed to attitudes of subordinates are really problems of management. Some people may be dismissed as hard to handle or prima donnas when they're just more vocal about participating in decisions, and rightly so." For example, Kohn says, if you have a rule to which you need to make exceptions in order to accommodate your stars, it's probably a bad rule, and one you shouldn't have at all--for anyone.
Make sure the problem isn't in the eye of the beholder. Finally, sometimes managers see problems where there are none. Cockrum of UCLA says that what may seem like prima donna behavior sometimes stems from "the single-biggest mistake managers make": expecting their subordinates to think and act like them. Entrepreneurs without a lot of management experience sometimes see differences in style or opinion as problems of attitude.
Cockrum says the simple yet very difficult secret to avoiding that mistake is for CEOs to manage people as individuals, not as mere carbon copies of whoever the boss thinks he or she is. Cockrum concedes that it's not easy to identify the motivational needs of different people. But, he adds, "that's what management is."
Peter Carbonara is a writer based in Boston.
Resources: From our CEOs and experts you may have gotten more ideas about how to handle your prima donnas than you can use. But if you want to read more, here are some suggestions: Tough-Minded Management: A Guide for Managers Who Are Too Nice for Their Own Good, by Gareth S. Gardiner (Fawcett/Ballentine, 800-733-3000, 1993, $10); Dinosaur Brains: Dealing with All Those Impossible People at Work, by Albert J. Bernstein and Sydney Craft Rozen (Ballentine Books, 800-733-3000, 1996, $11); and Dealing with People You Can't Stand: How to Bring Out the Best in People at Their Worst, by Rick Kirschner and Rick Brinkman (McGraw-Hill, 800-722-4726, 1994, $12.95). Kirschner and Brinkman also have an audiotape and a video, both called How to Deal with Difficult People, which are available through RnR Productions (800-556-9996).
And finally, The A-to-Z Book of Managing People, by Victoria Kaplan and Robert Kunreuther (Berkley Books, 800-631-8571, 1996, $14), has some good and brief advice in the "K" section under Know-It-Alls. The book also has a useful bibliography of further readings.
CLAPPER COMMUNICATIONS, Marie Clapper, 2400 Devon, Suite 375, Des Plaines, IL 60018-4618;
WILLIAM COCKRUM, John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management, University of California at Los Angeles, 110 Westwood Plaza, Room C305, P.O. Box 951481, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1481; 310-206-6334
ESI COMMUNICATIONS, Michael Reichert, 5959 Baker Rd., Minnetonka, MN 55345; 612-930-4400
HIGH YIELD MANAGEMENT, Lawrence Steinmetz, 3333 Iris Ave., Boulder, CO 80301; 303-442-8115
HORIZON FOODS, Michael Rosenberg, 111 Express St., Plainview, NY 11803; 516-937-1550
INDUSTRIAL PUBLISHING, Richard Sturm, 2895 Chad Dr., Eugene, OR 97408; 541-342-1201
ALFIE KOHN, 242 School St., Belmont, MA 02178; 617-489-6300
MAIER MARKETING SYNERGY, Matthew Maier, 181 Cheshire Ln., Suite 100, Minneapolis, MN 55441; 612-449-4386
MCKINNEY LUMBER, Joe McKinney, P.O. Box 3689, Muscle Shoals, AL 35662; 205-383-7995
MCMULLEN ARGUS PUBLISHING, William Porter, 774 S. Placentia Ave., Placentia, CA 92670; 714-572-2255
PIERRE MORNELL, 1 Park Ave., Mill Valley, CA 94941; 415-383-1155
DAVID PITASSI, Drypers, 801 S.E. Assembly Ave., Vancouver, WA 98661; 360-693-6688
