Member Article

Dealing with a Suarez in your team

What do you do if you have a Suarez in your team? Someone who gets results but doesn’t play by your rules and whose actions impact on the wider team around them?

Luis Suarez is a great football player. He scores goals and consistently performs on the pitch. There are few players like him and his ability speaks for itself. But he is also well known for his bad behaviour and that poses an issue for management.

As a business leader, this is a situation you may face in your own organisation.

It’s biting

In April 2013, Luis Suarez’s appetite for bad behaviour came to the fore once again when the Liverpool striker took a bite of Branislav Ivanovic’s arm in a Premier League football fixture.

Over the last four years, Suarez has been at the heart of a number of contentious incidents and misdemeanours ranging from dressing room bust-ups, to racial abuse, deceitful hand balls, stamping and biting players.

Each time he immediately apologises and is subsequently punished, but only to go on and offend again.

Team player

As a football player, Suarez is part of a close-knit team and as such, what damage and impact is his behaviour having - not only for Liverpool Football Club, but on his team mates? And is management’s handling of the issue tough enough?

Of course, it’s not as simple as that (or is it?). Remember he’s one of the very best players wherever he goes. He scores goals (the second most in the league in 2013) in a world where goals and success is everything, and there’s a significant lack of people as brilliant as him.

This is a situation that is clearly reflected in the business world.

So as a leader, there are three key questions to ask:

• What do you do if one of your ‘A’ players or senior people behaves badly?
• What if they consistently fail to live by your company values?
• What is the impact of this if you don’t deal with it powerfully? And what is the impact if you do?

Possible scenarios in your business…

We’re hoping that you don’t have biting or stamping in your business, but you may have an ‘A’ player or a senior leader who is guilty of one of the following:

• Being extremely negative, leading others astray, causing division
• Erratic and temperamental behaviour towards others
• Not living the company values
• Drunk and irresponsible out-of-hours behaviour
• Fiddling the figures or breaking rules
• Being sexist, racist or homophobic

All too often we see leaders turning a blind eye to the behaviour of their key performers. They let them get away with it because their results are so valuable. Leaders are sometimes afraid to be tough, even when it’s the right thing.

Consistency

So first things first, you need consistency. Don’t treat people differently. Have the same rules for all, regardless of seniority or competence. If anything, be tougher on the more senior and the more competent - after all, their influence is greater.

Clear expectations

Whatever the crime, it helps if you have clear expectations in the first place, so make sure you define very clearly what is and what isn’t acceptable behaviour. Even define what the punishment will be for unacceptable behaviour before it happens.

There are clear parallels here with parenting children - very simply put you need to define boundaries, then reprimand when these boundaries are crossed, and do so in the way that you said you would. If you don’t follow through a child learns that you’re not serious and that they can get away with things. They learn that they can be naughty. They also learn not to respect your word.

There are of course different levels of severity of behaviour. Some misdemeanours (for example biting!) will require immediate dismissal. And if you’ve been clear upfront, then everybody knows the ramifications. Once they’re breached, the next step is already defined.

Living your values

It’s also important that you deal with all bad behaviour. What do you do if someone is simply but obviously contravening the corporate values? We see this extremely often - a senior leader who doesn’t live the values.

The values are teamwork and respect, yet a key leader is selfish, negative, demanding, and doesn’t really care about others.

If you have values, you have to live them and you have to enforce them. If you don’t, they are not worth the paper they are written on. Even worse, people lose all respect for the initiative and for the creators of the initiative.

Let’s be very clear, values should not be a fluffy HR initiative anyway. You should define a set of values to be the key aspects of the culture that you want to develop, in order to most effectively over-achieve your business goals.

Values-driven culture

There is plenty of evidence to show that a culture with entropy (limiting values such as politics, blame, gossip, manipulation, short-term focus) will negatively impact on long-term results. There is also plenty of evidence to show that a culture based on values such as teamwork, shared vision, shared values, honesty, openness and learning, as well as performance, results and excellence, will dramatically improve performance.

And if you don’t reprimand bad behaviour, you’re allowing values such as favouritism, gossip, lack of accountability and lack of trust to creep into your culture. When this happens once, it will happen again and again. The power of your culture and values evaporates and without realising it one step at a time you are significantly and negatively impacting on the long-term success of the business.

Red card your Suarez

So in summary, if you find yourself with a Suarez in your team then you must deal with it powerfully. Suarez may be an exceptional player, but as his manager said “no one person is bigger than the organisation”.

Make sure that you challenge, praise or reprimand powerfully. Set clear boundaries and clear rewards or consequences that are always followed through. In the end, if you have live and breathe strong values and a strong culture, then you’ll develop a strong team and score lots of goals.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Martin Palethorpe .