Why I will never hire “the smart jerk”
One of the MOST important things I’ve had to learn as an entrepreneur is how to build a fantastic team. Dream team is what makes the dream come to life. But how do we do that? When you’re young and just starting out on your journey, you tend to look for your team in friends or family. Bad idea. But this is a separate post.
This blog will be something I learnt about 4 years ago and then relearnt when it was echoed by two of the smartest, most successful businessmen I’ve met. It’s a pretty simple rule that I now swear by: don’t work with the smart jerk. Ever. Strong, disgusting language, but this category of people do worse kinds of harm to the team and the organization than the words I’ve used.
Image used as accurate depiction of what it’s like having one of these on the team.
When you’re in an organization, no matter the scale, most people want to do well either because they want to get promoted, or they’re passionate about the project, or they like to win, or… you get the point. But when you add the need to be perceived as smart all the time to a competitive, reasonably smart person, you get a disastrous result. This blend of characteristics means that these people begin using unnecessary cynicism as social currency to prove to those around them that they are somehow “smarter”; that they know something that everyone else doesn’t know.
In some cases having a cynic on your team is good - necessary even. You don’t want to be naïve and jump into projects without understanding and building preventions for everything that could go wrong. But this is not realism vs idealism. This is when someone is ALWAYS being negative about EVERYTHING.
Launching a new juice flavor? They will sit in board meetings and make a comment like “yeah we know this crap that we sell isn’t gonna be anyone’s go-to drink for the summer”. Thinking of expanding your product/service to a new territory? This person will be dismissive saying “yeah. like that’ll work”. Your team leaders trying to address a problem and trying to fix it? This person will ALWAYS have an issue with the proposed solution. But they will rarely have the solution themselves.
Why are people like this a problem?
Organizational culture is a strong factor in determining how well a team/business performs. Workers are 10.4 times more likely to quit due to toxic work culture than due to compensation issues. That number is HUGE. After a point, people don’t care about the money, or the prestige, or any of the glamorous stuff. People care about what their work makes them feel. A huge part of that is determined by organizational culture. So it’s clearly important, but what does this have to do with the smart jerk?
Organizational culture is built by people. (Wow! Who knew?!) But most people forget this. I first realized this when in college, which was basically like being thrown into a startup with no idea what would happen to you or where you’d go, there was one person who made everything seem like it will all be okay. This person in the administration had the absolute worst kind of job. He was stuck between the US, China, and lots of different stakeholders. One of whom were very angry and frustrated students (read: my friends and I). But this person and the rest of the team listened so well to our problems, that it felt like 60% of them had disappeared by the time we were done talking. They built a culture of listening well and adapting policy fast. Which in turn made us resilient and better equipped to deal with the uncertainties and emotional roller coaster of being the inaugural class of a university.
On the flip side, some of the people were overly pessimistic. No matter what their peers, professors, admin, the world, the universe, did, these folks would always complain. Do you know what this did? It created a trickle down effect. As newer classes entered the university, they got exposed to this negativity. Owing to COVID, no one had been on campus in 2 years. But somehow, about 200 students turned into passionate haters of an institute they had never set foot in. Why did the opposite never happen? Because their introduction to the institute was blanket complaining, cynicism, and channeling all their frustration and hate towards a select few who were easy to blame. Why did none of these people get equally vocal about much worse things that another institute was doing to them? Why did they look at me like I had lost my mind when I would say “no I actually don’t hate that institute. I quite like it. It made me who I am today”?
This detailed example was just from my university. I have seen the same pattern repeat in organizations I have started or joined. If you let “the smart a****le” build this culture of toxicity (separate from constructive criticism which is critical to your success), you really will have no choice but to either leave the organization, or kill it, or get rid of said person(s).
Bonus learning if you made it this far:
You have to understand that these people are not inherently bad or evil. This is just their way of asserting intellect or dominance. But you can resist this by not participating. The good people, the genuinely smart intellectual people who care about the cause and organization, will recognize this and will be willing to teach you wonderful amazing things that will be invaluable and will transform you forever.
When I think of what kind of people I want to work with or don’t want to work with, I really only have one thing I’m certain about. I’ll never hire the smart a*****e because they will eat away a culture and good people that I would have spent sleepless nights and a lot of my energy to build. And what’s a greater tragedy than that? To lose something that is honest and great to someone’s rigid attitude and stubbornness?