Truth 22. The bad will do you good

You might not believe in divine retribution, but you have an employee who makes you wonder what you did in the past—or past life—to deserve this nightmare now. Whatever it was, it must have been pretty bad.

He gets the job done, and then some, so you can’t ding him on performance. Darn it. But he has zero respect for authority, not to mention lesser social conventions like, say, socks. His work schedule seems to be synchronized to a time zone on the other side of the planet. So you can just forget about him showing up to any regular meetings, which is just fine by you anyway.

He’s subversive, sarcastic, hard to motivate, and impossible to threaten. When your more gentle creative employees come up with a good idea, they politely propose it to the group asking, “... why not?” But when he comes up with an idea, he’s in your face, demanding to know, “Why the hell not?”

He clearly thinks you’re a doofus. And worse yet, he has the power to make you think that maybe he’s right. He’s a walking poke-in-the-eye, dastardly disguised—but just barely—as a human being. Ah... mavericks. You gotta love them.

No. Really. You have to love him. He could be the best thing that has happened to you. Mavericks are passionate, revolutionary, ingenious, independent, completely dependable. (You just have to figure out what they’re dependable for and then go with that.) They’re the ones who take nice little companies and transform them into roaring change-machines that write not only the new code but also the new vocabulary and rules.

He could be the best thing that has happened to you.

Great or beloved companies are started or spun on the ideas of mavericks. Apple, of course. Whole Foods. ING Direct. Patagonia. Pixar. FedEx. Industrial Light and Magic. Cirque du Soleil. Wikipedia. Craig’s List. If you have a maverick in your group, whisper a silent prayer of thanks, and then hang on tight.

Your main job is to keep mavericks on your team—and to keep your team from wringing their necks when you’re not looking:

• Give them a goat. In horseracing, high-strung horses used to be assigned pet goats to keep them placid in their stalls (hence the saboteur’s expression to get one’s goat). Everyone needs a friend, even mavericks. And mavericks especially could use a trusted counterpart to bounce ideas off of and to share insecurities and questions with. If you notice your maverick congenially pairing off with another coworker, find ways to keep them together. Don’t try to engineer the relationship according to preconceived ideas of what a good goat is. You’re not necessarily looking for someone who’s meek to complement the one who’s wild. Even if you’re looking at two mavericks who have found each other, great! Put them together. At least they’ll stop bugging everyone else. Maybe.

• Give them all the latitude they want, without special treatment. If your company offers some sort of flextime, give your mavericks all the elasticity they’ll run with. Just make sure they know you expect to actually see some productivity. If they do their best work at 1 a.m., there’s comfort in knowing that at least you’re getting good training for running a global team.

• Hear them out. Much of that in-your-face energy that they bring to meetings (or conversely, the what’s-the-point-of-even-trying energy) comes from a past of being discounted by people who dismissed their originality. Be the first manager who actually listens, even to the point of asking them questions that draw out additional ideas about implementation, distribution, marketing, and so on. Be the one they know they can trust with a half-baked, but brilliant, notion. And they’ll see you as one of their team members who might not be such a doofus after all.

Be the one they know they can trust with a half-baked, but brilliant, notion.

• Ask them if they have any friends. Believe it or not, they just might. And you can bet these people are just as smart and visionary as your staff mavericks. If you mix more brilliance in your group, you could end up with a well-balanced team of collaboration, breakthrough ideas, and the round-the-clock energy to make those ideas reality.

Who knows? Maybe those mavericks will make you their mascot.