Beware the Competent Jerk

🎧 Listen to this week’s edition · 6 min (New!)

Happy Thursday.

In my early twenties, I was put in charge of organising engineering trials for a Navy frigate coming out of deep maintenance. It was a big job for a young officer, so when I found out who had been assigned as the trial officer advising me, I was ecstatic.

He was one of the most experienced engineers in the fleet and had been involved with the project for years. I thought I’d hit the jackpot. Not only would he help make the trials successful, but I was also going to learn a hell of a lot from him.

How wrong I was.

He made my life an absolute misery. He withheld information, communicated poorly and seemed completely uninterested in sharing what he knew, let alone mentoring me. He was an expert at making everyone else around him “feel stupid.”

I had access to probably the most knowledgeable person I could have asked for. In hindsight, I wish I had someone else.

🧠 LEARN something.

Years later, I came across research that helped explain why this matters far beyond one grumpy Naval engineer.

In 2005, Tiziana Casciaro and Miguel Lobo did a study of more than 10,000 workplace relationships across five organisations. They plotted the results against two things that influence who we choose to work with: Competence and Likability. From that came four wonderfully blunt categories:

• Lovable Star (highly competent and likable)

• Lovable Fool (not so competent, but likable)

• Competent Jerk (competent, but hard to work with)

• Incompetent Jerk (not so competent, and hard to work with)

The obvious preference was the Lovable Star: highly competent and enjoyable to work with. Few people preferred working with the Incompetent Jerk. No surprises in either case.

But when people had to choose between someone highly competent but unpleasant and someone less competent but likeable, something interesting happened.

They generally preferred the Lovable Fool.

That sounds irrational. Surely when there’s work to be done, competence should win?

Except competence isn’t particularly useful if nobody wants to ask you for help. The researchers found that expertise held by competent jerks can go untapped simply because people don’t want to deal with them. Meanwhile, likeable people can become important connectors between people and groups precisely because others seek them out.

🤔 THINK about it.

We tend to think of competence as something an individual possesses. How good are they at their job? How much do they know? What can they produce?

But perhaps in organisations we need to think about competence differently.

Your value isn’t just determined by how much you know. It’s also determined by how much of what you know other people can actually access.

That’s where the Competent Jerk becomes expensive.

Their individual performance might look fantastic, while the cost they create around themselves remains almost invisible. People stop asking questions. Junior staff avoid seeking help. Half-formed ideas don’t get shared in their presence. Information doesn’t flow. People find workarounds instead of dealing with them.

And organisations sometimes tolerate all of this because, well, the Competent Jerks are bloody good at what they do. Perhaps they are. But individual competence and collective organisational contribution aren’t quite the same thing.

✅ DO IT to get results.

So what do you do with a competent jerk?

Don’t make the mistake of treating their competence as a licence for poor behaviour. Make the invisible cost visible. Pay attention to who avoids them, what information isn’t being shared, where people are creating workarounds and whether their expertise is actually making the people around them better.

Then have the conversation. Don’t ask them to be “nicer”. Be specific about the behaviour and its impact. Being brilliant at your job isn’t enough if everyone has to work around you to benefit from it.

The goal isn’t to turn a competent jerk into a lovable fool.

It’s to help them become a lovable star.

Until next Thursday.

Keep it real, and stay curious!

Kenny

CEO & Founder | The Bridge Leaders