Ep191: What Great Teams Do Great Issues #8 - dealing with a 'superstar'

Corey Fernandez looks at #8 in our What Great Teams Do Great issues series - how a team handles the 'superstar' who takes all the credit

Transcript

This is part of our What Great Teams Do Great issue series. I'm Corey Fernandez with Humanergy. All these issues use our What Great Teams Do Great model. This is available  at humannergy.com or in the book of the same name. Each issue is presented with suggested actions to get a team back on the path to greatness. So here's the issue, the team has a self proclaimed superstar who takes credit for everyone's work, constantly elevates themselves and is driving others nuts with their constant self promotion. So what do you do? It's really important here to give direct, honest and caring, one to one feedback to this person about their behavior and be specific about some of the examples and things that people are experiencing. I'm reading a book right now, and it's called the ideal team player by Patrick Lencioni, and it's told in kind of a story format, and it actually elevates this experience where a team is explicit that they don't want any jackasses on their team. That's how the book describes it. No jackasses, right? That's kind of a expectation of Team behavior. And surprisingly, right, or, I should say, not surprisingly, to some extent, oftentimes, if we're being a jackass, we might not realize it. And so to be specific about some of the behaviors that are happening, and for somebody to show the care and honesty and directness that are necessary to deliver that feedback and help people understand the specifics. Is really, really important. It's important to engage the person, help them understand why the behavior is happening, have the dialog be curious in those moments, help draw out some of the things that might be helpful to them to lean on going forward, so that behavior doesn't continue to show up and really annoy the team. One thing that can be really productive is the team starts to engage in kind of mini 360 sessions. And what we mean by this is that you might highlight that person, or even other people on the team from time to time to kind of get feedback from each member on the team. It's kind of that 360 kind of point of view from everybody that's a part of the team makeup, and they give feedback on specific behaviors and what each person should stop doing, start doing or keep doing, so that they understand some of the things that are really helpful and important and healthy for the team going forward, along with some of those things that are holding the team back, because it's a pattern that that person might be continuing to demonstrate or express within the team. These 360s are great, while it might be really important to do it with the person in mind here with the issue, it's also a really productive, proactive way to do things on a regular basis, so people get the healthy feedback and the timely feedback that we all need to be productive within a team setting. We hope you find these extremely helpful as you continue to dig into Humanergy, our podcasts, our YouTube channel and so on. Thank you so much for tuning in more to come. Stay tuned. You.