Toxic bosses are costing your business money

Are 'brilliant jerks' ruining your workplace? How to spot one and call it out

April 16, 2024 3:00 PM

An angry boss yells at four employees who are seated around a wooden table inside a glass conference room.

More likely than not, you've had a coworker who was perceived as brilliant at their job but incredibly difficult to interact with. Is it time for corporate America to question whether these employees are worth keeping around?

Kimberly Williams, vice president of people, culture and compliance at Walker Advertising, has a name for this type of office fixture: The "brilliant jerk," noting that they typically have leadership roles of some kind and tend to be credited for bringing substantial profits to the company. She believes employers are long overdue to rethink their value to the team, since they often cause more damage than employers think.

"A 'brilliant jerk' is usually a highly valued employee whose behaviors are permitted, even if those same behaviors wouldn't be allowed for other folks," says Williams. "Especially in large organizations, that [behavior] can ripple through teams and have a chilling effect on innovation and loyalty. There are real dollars being lost."

But how do you spot this personality, and can anything really be done? To find out, Williams devised a formula alongside experts from HR software company Rippling on how to identify just how much brilliant jerks are costing their company, which involves conducting performance reviews and doing some hard math to calculate their cost.

As an advisory council member and spokesperson for End Workplace Abuse, an organization that advocates for the end of psychological harm in the workplace, Williams is committed to ensuring employees have a safe work environment in which to thrive. She shares her guidelines for employers below:

Run well-rounded performance reviews

First things first: Employers need to root out which employees are brilliant jerks. Williams advises companies to run 360-degree performance reviews, where employees are reviewed not only by their superiors, but also by their peers and subordinates.

Read more:

How to create connections with colleagues — without dinner and drinks

"What we typically see with brilliant jerks is that their boss recognizes the value of that person independent of how they may be contributing to culture," she says. "This will tend to factor into more favorable reviews."

Williams acknowledges that if employees are generally distrustful of their company, they still may not leave honest reviews of a toxic superior. Companies must stress that these reviews are anonymous and that anonymity will be protected.

Spot the red flags

If an employee is ranked highly by their supervisor but poorly by peers and those who work directly under them, then they likely are a brilliant jerk, says Williams. Once employers have identified which employees have these discrepancies, they can take a look at the performances of employees that often fall into the brilliant jerk's purview. If these employees seem to be struggling with meeting certain standards or communicating or connecting with colleagues, this should ring alarm bells, too.

Do the math

After employers gather just how many employees interact and take orders from the brilliant jerk in question, they can then calculate how much money they're losing. Williams notes that realistically, employees cannot be 100% engaged at the workplace at all times, and a great-performing employee is likely productive about 90% of the time. When employees are subject to workplace abuse or experience interactions where they feel psychologically unsafe, employers can assume their productivity drops by at least 30% or more, explains Williams. Depending on the employees' performance reviews, employers can subtract down from 90%.

Read more:

Young employees want to feel pride in their work — or they'll quit

From there, employers can take the total sum of these employees' compensation and compare it to the percentage of productivity they're likely getting from these employees. If an employee makes $100,000 a year, but their productivity is down by 40%, then employers are paying $40,000 more than what they're getting in labor. Add up the losses among all the employees under the brilliant jerk, and the cost grows quickly.

"Hurt feelings may seem invisible," says Williams. "But an employee may be costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in addition to whatever other brilliant ideas other people had that they didn't have the space to bring forward."