Various photos of Mark Rouse, Director, Marketing Services at IQ Partners Inc.Tibor Kolley/The Globe and Mail
No matter what field you're in, you may have employees in your organization who bring in a lot of business but they are management nightmares, horrible to deal with, and – echoing a report card from a Grade 5 teacher in 1971 – they "don't play well with others."
At all.
Everyone recognizes they are financial stars, making lots of money for their firms, but they're so blinded by ego and their own sense of self-importance, you constantly have to hire new support staff because the ones you assign them always quit. They are "rain men" (or "rain women") as much as rain makers – double-edged swords of Damocles and poisonous savants within the company.
The issue comes down to whether you and your management team should drink the Kool-Aid once a month and keep these people around because they're valuable to the bottom line, or fire them and pay the severances because they're too difficult to manage?
The same may be true with partners in legal and accounting firms. Some partners may bring a lot of clients – and therefore a lot of money – but they cost almost as much as they bring in due to the additional management time they burn up, the regular hand holding they need, the partnership disunity they create, the resignations and new hires they cause, and often, their incessant demands to be paid more than everyone else on the "team."
If you ask them to leave, can you deal with the lost revenue from their billings? And can you deal with the fact that they'll probably be competing with you at the firm across the street?
In the franchise environment, the issue is a little less cut and dried, and a lot harder to deal with because franchisees aren't employees or partners. You can't just fire them and pay some severance. You can't "vote them off the island" like you might with a partner at a legal or accounting firm. You have to terminate the franchise contract, and for that, you need poisonous franchisees to seriously default under their agreements, giving you the contractual right to terminate them.
Otherwise you're stuck with them.
The vast majority of franchise disputes I'm involved with these days, which is quite a few, are for one reason: the franchisor selected the wrong franchisee in the first place.
The franchisor or its sales agents were arguably more concerned with making the "sale," or selling "the location," or making a performance quota than treating the prospective franchisee like a potential spouse, which in some ways is an apt metaphor. The franchisors broke the cardinal rule: No jerks.
Other organizations do that with their prospective employees and partners too.
With that in mind, I want to commend a book that every person in business should read, and if you can't read the whole thing, then at least read the title.
Its called The No Asshole Rule : Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't, by Robert Sutton.
The book began as an article in the Harvard Business Review, and it has achieved cult status in the business-book sector, in part for its eye-catching title, which was intended to shock.
The premise is that work environments are filled with a few too many "playground bullies:" jerks, creeps, tyrants, tormentors, despots, backstabbers, egomaniacs. These are people who, for whatever reason, deliberately make their colleagues feel bad about themselves and their work, who pick on those who are less powerful, who poison the work environment, decrease productivity, induce other good employees to quit and are, after one does a cost-benefit analysis, detrimental to your businesses, regardless of their individual contribution to the bottom line.
Mr. Sutton argues they shouldn't be tolerated. Better yet, he says to spot them early so you don't hire them in the first place or make them your partners or your franchisees.
The chapter titles and subtitles are almost as interesting as the title of the book:
- What Workplace Assholes Do And Why You Know So Many
- The Damage Done: Why Every Workplace Needs The Rule
My favourite?
- What Is Your Organization’s Total Cost Of Assholes (TCA)?
Mr. Sutton develops a matrix called "What's your TCA?" It includes factors such as the time spent by direct managers, HR professionals, senior executives, and outside employment counsel; the cost of recruiting and training new support staff; overtime costs associated with difficult employees; and anger management and counselling.
He looks at the cost of one mid-level manager's antics within an organization, and he concludes the costs to deal with this person amounted to more than $160,000.
I showed my copy of the book to the former CEO of my law firm, who immediately bought two additional copies – one for the HR director's credenza and one for his own. Every new hire was told about the book, shown the cover, and offered a copy, with the message being "we don't tolerate this here … can I be any clearer?"
And we don't, which is encouraging for a law firm.
Is the book just for the credenzas of managers and CEOs so they can show off the cover, or is it actually used in the real world? Mr. Sutton, who also pens an excellent blog, says it is.
Similar "no jerk rules" exist at companies such as JetBlue, Men's Warehouse, and Google, all of which regularly get kudos for being great working environments where positive self-esteem is encouraged – the result being more motivated, productive, and satisfied work forces.
Anyone in charge of hiring employees – whether they be senior, mid-level or clerical – should read the book and, at the very least, display it in the office where prospective employees are interviewed. Same for your prospective partners or franchisees.
Encourage them to read the book, and to make the point loud and clear that your organization won't tolerate these managerial nightmares.
Tony Wilson is a franchise and intellectual property lawyer at Boughton in Vancouver, and he is an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University. His newest book, Manage Your Online Reputation, was published in November.
Tony Wilson