“I have one employee that is a huge producer, but he doesn’t play well with the rest of the team. I don’t want to lose him, but how do I keep him from infecting the rest of my team?”

We see these types of workers often. On paper, they’re amazing producers. But they seem to rub everyone else the wrong way. What can you do?

• You can build walls around him.

• You can give him special treatment.

• You can try to adapt to their personality.

That’s what a lot of people do, but that also creates lots of other problems. It can cause your other top performers to get jealous, feel unappreciated, and eventually leave.

When we look at the value that employees bring to the table, performance is only one metric we use. When someone is producing but doesn’t get along with the team, we don’t consider them top performers. We consider them “terrorists.”

What is a Terrorist?

Terrorists are employees that essentially hold the rest of the team hostage in order to meet their demands. They do productive work, but they are otherwise toxic, and their personality is grating to other people at the company that may also do good work – so much so, that it can hurt their value and their productivity, as well as everyone’s satisfaction.

Terrorists often seem like productive employees. But what we’ve found is that when terrorists are fired, productivity, satisfaction, and longevity go up all around the office, and ultimately you get far more productivity from the rest of the team along with a much happier work environment.

A Story of Terrorists at a Law Firm

We had a new client. They fired an employee that was controlling, jealous, and didn’t treat the rest of the team with respect. We identified that person as a terrorist, and they were immediately fired.

Now, usually when you fire this person, the team thanks you. But the client did not feel the atmosphere of his office change. His employees seemed just as down as they were before.

We told him that maybe he hadn’t found all his terrorists.

A few weeks later, he came to us about another employee. After chatting, we identified her as another terrorist. He was hesitant to let her go, but upon our urging, he did.

This time, when he fired her, the office breathed a sigh of relief, thanked him, and asked him what took so long. Everyone was thrilled. Not only was the office more satisfied and a happier place to work, but the productivity of the other employees went up as well because they were no longer worrying about interacting with that person, avoiding confrontations, and talking about her in the bathroom with other employees.

Nobody works hard when they don’t feel appreciated.

Now the client had a team of performers and none of the stress and drama.

How Do I Know if I Have a Terrorist?

Of course, it can be hard to identify “terrorists” in the workplace, especially if you do not have core values in place and ways to measure your team beyond just performance. If you enter your email into the form here, we can send you resources that go over the cost of terrorists in the workplace, and also how to integrate core values:

What we like to do is use something called Jim Collins’ theory of employees. You can read about it here. But in summary, you’re looking for answers to two questions for every single employee you have:

• Are they on the right bus?

• Are they sitting in the right seat?

Now, how do you determine if they’re on the right bus?

You first have to discover your core values, which is a process you can learn more about using the form above. But once you’ve discovered those values, you think about each employee and try to give an honest assessment of their score on a scale from 0 to 5, with 5 being “perfect fit.” Do not think about productivity, for now, only the way their personality, character, and ethic matches your core values.

Once you have that number, you have to figure out if they’re in the “right seat.” This refers to their ability to perform the job. You can do this subjectively, but it helps to have data and resources like their job description, the $$ they bring in, their annual reviews, etc. Again, rate them on a scale of 0 to 5.

Now we’re going to plot them on the following graph:

If they’re in the top right quadrant, they’re a STAR. You should do whatever you can to retain them, and they should be considered a core part of your business.

If they’re in the bottom left quadrant, they’re the exact opposite of a STAR. What’s STAR backwards? RATS. Call an exterminator and get rid of those employees, ASAP, as they should not be a part of your business anymore.

Now, here’s where things may go against your instinct. If they’re in the top left quadrant, we call those “Puppies.” Those are the ones that match your core values but are not performing as well as you’d like.

Lots of people think that poor performance is always a sign that they need to be removed. But people can learn skills. They can’t learn personality (core values) but they can learn to be more productive.

Puppies can be trained.

That’s why we like to keep the puppies and nurture them. Remember, some people’s performance has also been affected by the terrorists, so while you may find that they’re puppies that need training, you may also find that they’re actually also skilled, and just haven’t felt like they had their needs met.

Finally, you have those in the bottom right. Those are your terrorists. They perform, which make you feel like you need to keep them, but they’re also demanding, challenging emotionally, and do not play well with others:

• You make exceptions for them.

• They run off your stars.

• They demand all the attention.

They affect the performance of the rest of your team. We do not negotiate with terrorists. It is time to let them go.

If you want more information on the cost of having a terrorist or to have access to resources like the above graph, click the box below to access your resources.