So how do we get people to do things in a group context? Well, the scientific evidence is pretty clear on this too. First of all, we don’t hire assholes. If we do accidentally hire an asshole, we identify and fire them as rapidly as possible. Finally, if by some stroke of very bad luck an asshole does stick around, then no matter how “brilliant” we might think they are, we certainly don’t promote them up the leadership chain.

What is an asshole though? In this context, it’s basically a narcissist, someone who consistently puts their own personal, short-sighted needs in front of the other humans around them and in front of the best interests of the organizations that they are a part of, which includes the employer that pays their salary or wage.

When I write about narcissists below, I’m referring to people with various shades of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) or similar clusters of change-resistant personality features. Some people exhibit features of NPD without being diagnosable, a state which is referred to as “sub-clinical;” those features are still usually very destructive to relationships. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) lists the following symptoms:

Grandiosity with expectations of superior treatment from other people Fixation on fantasies of power, success, intelligence, attractiveness, etc. Self-perception of being unique, superior, and associated with high-status people and institutions Need for continual admiration from others Sense of entitlement to special treatment and to obedience from others Exploitation of others to achieve personal gain Unwillingness to empathize with the feelings, wishes, and needs of other people Intense envy of others, and the belief that others are equally envious of them Pompous and arrogant demeanor

People with NPD usually exhibit at least some of these symptoms in a way that is out-of-whack with their real-life qualities or accomplishments. Of course, it’s important not to read this list and start diagnosing yourself or others, but it’s good to be aware of this list in order to recognize when these kinds of behaviors seem to be appearing. There are many other terms related to NPD that come from different psychological schools attempting to categorize the phenomenon, such as malignant narcissist, oblivious narcissist, and covert narcissist, all of which hopefully speak for themselves.

All personality disorders are essentially characterized as being ego-syntonic, which means that the person with the disorder consistently perceives their dysfunctional behaviors as normal and acceptable, even if they also attempt to hide them from selected others (such as those with immediate power over them). This characteristic of personality disorders, especially NPD, make them very resistant to treatment. NPD is particularly heavily armored against change because the idea of needing to change is in itself an affront to the narcissist. The narcissist believes that everyone else needs to change, but not them.

Narcissists are highly effective at self-sabotage in the long-run simply because they cannot understand that what’s best for the group is usually also what’s best for themselves. Doing what’s best for the company is obviously the most effective long-term path to career success for someone who can peer just a little bit past their own fear, jealousy, anger, righteousness, and greed. The only kind of employee you need to instruct to “do what’s right for the company” is either severely disempowered (probably by a narcissist) or is a narcissist themselves. By definition, the narcissist will never do what’s right for the company unless it happens to coincide with their own short-sighted and selfish desires. The solution in either case is to locate the narcissist and terminate their employment.

And it’s pretty easy to root-out narcissists in an organization. For the individual contributor, a thorough review by peers is sufficient. Since NPD is characterized by dysfunctional relationships, the working peers of a narcissist will usually be able to convey the experience of chronic demoralization, upset, and manipulation that they have experienced at the hands of the narcissist. They usually want to get away from the narcissist, and often do so by leaving the company. This can result in great cost to both the company and the victim. I believe that this is partly the explanation for the somewhat surprising discovery by Google that the most significant predictor for the effectiveness of an employee is the quality of their personal relationships outside of work. Larry Page, one of the two founders of Google, told this to a friend of mine.

Narcissistic leaders (including managers and supervisors) may be even easier to root out: all you have to do is ask the people they lead. The “lower” part of what is often considered to be a cumbersome 360-degree review process is usually enough. Since the role of a leader is primarily to lead, all you need to do is asses the effect they have on the people they lead, those directly “below” them in the organization. These are the people who are more likely to actually be getting work done, the people who are closer to the reality of the technology, the market, and the customers. They are one step closer to where the rubber meets the road. If you can get these people to talk about it, which can be challenging, the strongest indicator that they may reveal is fear. Those led by a narcissist are often terrified of the narcissist, of their manipulation and of their narcissistic rage. Later in this article, I will tell you about the hallmarks of effective leadership; with the narcissistic leader, those characteristics will be wholly absent.

It’s important to understand that narcissists are usually very skillful at managing up; they’re often really good at kissing ass. So those “above” them in the organization often perceive them as compliant and pleasant and their organizations as effective. Since it’s almost impossible to create organizations with control groups, the narcissistic leader’s own leader has no effective way of personally assessing how much performance is being left on the table due to those being led by the narcissist feeling terrified and demoralized.

Simply assessing leaders primarily on the effect they have on the people they lead is very likely to produce a massive increase in their effectiveness as leaders, which will have an enormously leveraged effect on the effectiveness of the organization as a whole. Even if you’re not trying to root-out narcissists, the important and effective assessment of leadership will naturally do the job for you. For the non-narcissists, perhaps for those existing gingerly on the autistic spectrum, an effective feedback loop will likely lead to an increase in critical learnable personal characteristics such as social and emotional intelligence.

And it’s not even necessary to have a formal, cumbersome, and likely ineffective review process. At the company where I work, I regularly meet with people at all levels of seniority. From having hundreds of candid conversations with those who are led by others, I have a very clear picture of the relative strengths and opportunities-for-growth of many of the leaders across the company. If you want to read more about assholes, I recommend an awesome series of articles titled Your Company Culture Is Who You Hire, Fire, and Promote³.

Before I go on to talk about effective leadership, I want to point out that, for a “good-enough” leader, it takes an enormous amount of courage to be willing to even discover and acknowledge the level of dysfunction about which I’ve written above. It then takes even more courage to confront it. It can be really scary to confront narcissists, because most people can sense the rage hidden just under the surface. It also takes courage to transition people out of an organization. What’s more, if your company culture is conflict-avoidant, and therefore probably filled with conflict-avoidant leaders, then it’s susceptible to infiltration by narcissists, and eventually infestation with them. In these kinds of organizations, red flags will be ignored, minimized, and rationalized away.

One way that narcissists flourish is when a leader claims that “he’s a top-performer, so there’s nothing I can do”. It doesn’t matter how much of a rockstar, key player, or top contributor you think the narcissist is, you can be guaranteed that they have a net negative effect on the organization, and ignoring their behavior will not make it go away. For every unit of goodness that they apparently add, they will subtract at least two from those around them, and probably much more. In fact, this is one of the ways they get to shine: by puffing themselves up while tearing down their peers or reports.

Narcissistic leaders also take credit for the work of those they lead while at the same time dismissing their contributions. As each new discovery is made, it is immediately assimilated into the knowledge-base of the narcissist, as if it magically appeared in their brain overnight. There’s no need to recognize the effort of the folks who are actually doing the work because the narcissistic leader apparently already knew the results that were painstakingly obtained. Initially, this can be confusing to employees because the leader seemed to have asked for work do be done unnecessarily.

From the perspective of a narcissist, the purpose of those reporting to them is only to make them look better, to serve their narcissistic needs. This is one example of what I mean by short-sighted selfishness. The narcissist is usually so lacking in empathy and self-awareness, so consumed by the deep psychological processes driving the narcissism, that they don’t even realize that their behavior will undermine their ability to achieve their personal goals in the longer term. Talented people learn to hide their innovations or to reduce their creativity or productivity, or they simply leave the company. This is anti-leadership.

So you can also bet that one unit of goodness you think the narcissist is adding is in fact only a fraction of a unit. As the results of Google’s Project Aristotle⁴ show, “what makes a team effective at Google” is a set of characteristics that simply don’t mesh with narcissism: psychological safety, dependability, structure & clarity, meaning, and impact. The narcissistic employee might be reasonably effective working alone on a small project that doesn’t involve interacting with other people, and that might be an alternative to firing them, so long as you can keep them quarantined; good luck with that.

The long-term costs of the kind of draining and insidiously manipulative behavior that these narcissists act-out are almost incalculable in their scope and depth. As an organization, how do you even account for the bad karma of inflicting psychological torture on innocent people who simply want to come to work, do a great job, and feed their families? As a leadership consultant, the witnessing of this stuff has led to me feeling like I needed to literally vomit from disgust.

I myself know what it’s like to fire people: as a manager, I have let people go. In fact, whereas it was normal for firing to be done by people at the senior vice president level (my manager), I insisted on doing it myself. “It’s my decision, so I’ll do it” I said. And yet, as an empath, being the instrument of that much distress in someone else’s life wore me down.

As I’ve matured, I’ve come to believe that pretty much any employee, with the exception of a narcissist, can be made productive. The trick to avoid having to fire these people is to simply not hire them in the first place. This is why, even though I’m a senior engineer, when interviewing candidates I’m focussed wholly on assessing their personality. I’m able to do this relatively effectively because I have a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. I also have a lot of personal experience with narcissists.