A friend of mine called the other day to describe a candidate she had just finished interviewing. She was seeking advice on how to appropriately convey her feelings to others on her management team. The candidate appeared to be competent on paper, had prepared all the right questions and clearly rehearsed responses to any question posed. However, it was my friend’s impression that this person would be an absolute nightmare to work with, making it impossible for her to recommend the hire.

Human Resource Executive published an article yesterday describing SuccessFactors CEO Lars Dalgaard’s philosophy on the workplace. Lars had published an online description of the type of behavior he didn’t want in his firm, namely “no politics, no parochialism, no silos, no games, no cynicism, no arrogance, and no jerks.” Keep in mind that “no jerks” was originally posted as “no assholes”, but they modified the text over concerns that folks might be offended (clearly I don’t have that concern). According to the article, Lars, his HR Director and the entire firm take this philosophical approach very seriously, even to the point of encouraging employees to call our their peers if they exhibit asshole-like behavior.

This issue over jerks harkens back to a wonderful piece in the Harvard Business Review published in July of 2005. Entitled, “Fool vs. Jerk: Whom Would You Hire”, the article describes four different archetypes of colleagues:

1) The Competent Jerk - S/he knows a lot but is unpleasant to deal with;
2) The Loveable Fool - Doesn’t know much but is a delight to be around;
3) The Loveable Star - The uber-combination of likability and smarts; and
4) The Incompetent Jerk - Persumably the aforementioned a-hole that we’ve all had the pleasure of working with.

What I find most fascinating about this particular research is when people were asked to choose between the Competent Jerk and the Loveable Fool. One would think that people would choose competence every day of the week. Not so, according to the authors:

“We found that if someone is strongly disliked, it’s almost irrelevant whether or not she is competent; people won’t want to work with her anyway. By contrast, if someone is liked, his colleagues will seek out every little bit of competence he has to offer. And this tendency didn’t exist only in extreme cases; it was true across the board. Generally speaking, a little extra likability goes a longer way than a little extra competence in making someone desirable to work with. […]”

Who would you rather work with? Is likeability truly superior to competence? Does posing questions with no responses make me a likeable fool? *grin*

Let’s keep the conversation going.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 8:24 am and is filed under General Thoughts, Human Capital/Human Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.