Beyond Work is our line of resources for people and community leaders looking for something new and innovative outside, be it a new job, career change, or personal development outside of work.
I just read an article about authenticity and authentic leadership that is going to stick with me. The big takeaway:
“See, authentic leadership is all about self-awareness, positivity, solid ethics, measured transparency and personal development; far more nuanced than just being ‘real’.”
– The Difference Between Authenticity and Authentic Leadership by Morgan Browning, President and COO, Emergenetics International
To read the full article click here.
How do you know when to fire the prima donna? You know one when you see one. Before you can define exactly what a prima donna is, you can name one. In the flesh. And they have most likely made your work life hell at some point or another.
Prima Donna – noun: “a vain or undisciplined person who finds it difficult to work under direction or as a part of a team.”
Merriam-Webster
What do you do when faced with one? Or, how do you get leadership to realize there is one in your midst?
For a variety of positive reasons that have nothing to do with prima donnas, I love 360° assessment and feedback tools. If you need to spot and prove you’ve got one in your midst, a good 360° and a person’s response to their 360° feedback will help you nail one. (Any type of formal or informal feedback mechanism can work, but a 360° gives you quantifiable data.)
Here’s what you do and the signs you look for along the way:
1 Give a 360° assessment and/or encourage leadership/HR to administer them. Make sure it includes a self-assessment and a 360° (peers, subordinates, boss) view. If you need some ideas on good ones, email me. You can also read our case study for Total Employee Engagement with a client that used 360s successfully.
2. Look at the results of how the person rates himself or herself compared to the aggregate of the way others rate them.
Sign one: Prima donnas have an inflated view of themselves. In other words, a prima donna will rate themselves as higher than their raters on almost all if not all dimensions of the assessment.
3. Look at the results of the aggregate average of the way others rated them compared to the sample/norm average.
Sign two: Prima donnas have lower aggregate ratings from their peers than the sample average. In other words, prima donna’s raters rate them an average of 2.6, let’s say on a dimension and the sample norm is 3.5 (on a five point scale). You see this across most if not all dimensions of the assessment.
4. Have a feedback session with the potential prima donna to explain and discuss the results. Up until the feedback point, you really don’t know if you have a prima donna based on sign 1 and 2. You may just have someone who is incompetent either in skill or will. But you have real trouble when….
Sign three: A prima donna doesn’t own their results.
Sign four: A prima donna places blame on everyone except themselves for the less than stellar results. It could be another person, a group of people, the organization, or heck, they could blame it on the weather, but they take ZERO ownership.
The Coup de Gras: A Prima Donna (or maybe we’ve crossed over into clinical narcissism by this point) expresses a level of PRIDE in their results. You may hear something like “Well this shows why I’ve been successful.” Or “This is what I’ve had to do to be successful.”
Once you get to Sign Three, you know you don’t have any choice but to fire the person. Because when behavior isn’t owned, you can’t do anything about it. The person has declared they are uncoachable. Sign Four and the Coup De Gras are just icing on the cake.
The prima donna will continue to reek their toxic nature to the organization and continue to be proud about it because you did nothing about it, even with the quantitative feedback on it.
Furthermore, those who rated them will also be punished because you did nothing with their feedback. You may even be showing them that to be successful, the prima donna is in fact right. It does take behavior like theirs to be successful. That’s when you know you’ve lost the game – empowering toxic behavior.
Do you have prima donnas in your midst? What do you do to diagnosis and deal with the challenges they bring?
When you look for a new job , whether it’s out of necessity or because you’re ready for the next thing, it’s usually a stressful time. When stressed, many people fall back on what they’re used to. And if you’re used to exaggerating on social media, you may not realize the extent to which this language bleeds onto your application, which can make you unlikable—or worse.
Read more about this subject here:
Social Media Is Ruining Your Chances On Getting a Job, But Not In the Way You think!
Think about your family, organizations you volunteer with, the company you work for. How would you rate communication in each of these groups? Do the members of each of these groups communicate effectively with each other, or is something lacking?
We learn to communicate from a very early age, learning to listen and speak as an infant and later on learning to read and write. However, even though we learn to communicate very early in our lives, many people have difficulty communicating effectively.
As an HR professional, one of the complaints I hear most often from employees and leadership within organizations is that there is a lack of effective communication. This lack of communication in the workplace often leads to added stress and tension among employees, loss of productivity, a decrease in employee morale, and turnover.
So how can you improve communication within your organization?
For information on Communication Training, as well as other training topics we offer, click here.
We’re continuing our series of highlighting other authors and articles that speak to authenticity. This week, I’m sharing thoughts by Nicole Matos:
The best advice I can give you as a job candidate is to be genuine, honest, even vulnerable. In a world of hucksters and blowhards, believe it or not, authenticity sells. – Authenticity and the Job Interview by Nicole Matos
Here is a great read on Authenticity and the Job Interview.