Difficult people constitute a large and diverse tribe of individuals ranging from those who shirk assignments and never take initiative on up to the far more aggressive characters who make life difficult for anyone within shouting distance, including their own supervisors.
This essay will address the importance of firing the jerks. My definition of “jerk” involves culpability. It includes anyone who demeans, demoralizes, and drags down individuals and teams.
If you’ve met the type – and you probably have – you know how the presence of one jerk can poison a workplace and cause people to dread going to work. And you also know that when the jerk leaves, people rejoice.
As a result of such brutal truths, you may wonder why jerks somehow hang onto their jobs. Well, here’s a big reason:
Many a jerk has great performance evaluations.
Let’s face it. Performance evaluations are one of the most common forms of fiction in the world and they reach a high level of inaccuracy (and duplicity) when it comes to jerks. The reason can be found in the following exchange:
Manager: “I have an excellent employee, but he (or she) has terrible people skills.”
Me: “Then I seriously doubt if that person is an excellent employee. If that individual regularly demoralizes, insults, or intimidates other people, then he or she is not an excellent employee.”
Why are the jerk’s supervisors reluctant to be candid? Timidity. Cowardice. Raw fear. Pretending that Hannibal Lecter is an excellent employee avoids a lot of unpleasantness for the supervisor. Not for other people, of course, but Hannibal’s supervisor doesn’t want to think that far.