The Hidden Costs of Rockstars
Rockstars are employees that have an almost superhuman drive and passion to learn and produce. They strive to be masters of their craft, whether that’s sales or software development, obsessing over the smallest details. They usually see a noticeable gap between themselves and other team members. To use a sports analogy, Rockstars are the Michael Jordans, the Peyton Mannings, or the Cristiano Ronaldos of your business.
Businesses need productivity to survive, and Rockstars usually excel at being productive, at least in the short term. While this productivity can make it easy to ignore the faults of a Rockstar, there are also costs to maintaining Rockstars that we shouldn’t lose sight of.
This is by no means an exhaustive list; there are many costs associated with bringing Rockstars onto your various teams. These are a few of the things that we’ve experienced first-hand.
Team cohesion
Who wouldn’t want all of their employees to be Rockstars? A basketball team stacked with nothing but Michael Jordans may sound unbeatable, but in reality every team needs roleplayers. Even Michael Jordan needed teammates to rebound and pass the ball. A team full of Rockstars tends to bog down as everyone tries to prove they’re the smartest in the room and avoid menial tasks.
Rockstar employees don’t usually have issues within a vacuum. If they’re working solo, they can move as quickly as they want without the need to communicate or reach consensus. Unfortunately, the reality for most businesses is that Rockstars work on teams.
Their natural inclination towards moving quickly, combined with a lack of empathy, makes it easy for Rockstars to alienate their teammates and ignore their input. Rather than getting the benefit of your team’s varied experience, complex tasks are often solved by the Rockstar, leaving other team members to do grunt work. And this arrangement may work for a short period of time. Eventually, though, the complexity of the work will grow too large for even the biggest Rockstar. By the time everyone realizes that this approach isn’t sustainable, the team isn’t usually interested in being a team anymore.
This isn’t to say that Rockstars absolutely can’t function within a team, but it’s not their natural habitat. Helping them navigate team dynamics while maintaining their drive and passion can be a challenge. In the past, we’ve done a poor job of overcoming this challenge because we didn’t fully understand the impacts of a Rockstar on team cohesion.
There’s a quote that is sometimes attributed to an African proverb: if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. Rockstars definitely fit the first part of that quote, but often struggle with the second. If you want your business to go far, you’re going to need properly functioning teams.
Toll on other team members
Rockstars have their own gravity. When they’re on a team, they tend to dominate focus, conversations, and decisions. This strong personality can take a toll on other members of the team. Some will shrink back and let the Rockstar make all the decisions, while others may publicly challenge everything the Rockstar says. Either outcome is bad for the team and the individual members.
Increased team productivity in the short term may mask how devastating this problem can truly be. Eventually, though, you’ll have to deal with the fact that no one wants to work with the Rockstar. To make matters worse, you’re missing out on great ideas and experience from other team members.
The effect is exacerbated when you don’t have regular meetings with the other team members individually; your entire team may be frustrated and burning out, but without regular 1on1 discussions, you may never know. This is where we found ourselves several years ago. We didn’t take action soon enough and lost good team members because of it.
Deviation from your mission or core technologies
Rockstars are often driven to learn the newest technologies and methodologies in their area, and because they also tend to be the “most productive,” Rockstars are usually given the space to implement these. Unfortunately, your business might not be the right fit for the newest fad. Other team members may resent being forced to learn a new tech stack without their input.
This can be very disruptive to your team, but it can be even more disruptive to your business, taking it in a different direction. For example, in most software start-ups, early engineers have a lot of influence over what kind of technology the business implements, which in turn affects where it goes.
We’ve experienced this in our own business, and it’s painful to have to pull back weeks or months of work because it doesn’t fit the vision. Obviously, this can have a very negative impact on the Rockstar and the business. Our two biggest mistakes in this area were driven by being afraid of losing our Rockstars: not being clear enough about our vision and not correcting deviations when we first spotted them.
If there are Rockstars on your team who want to experiment or implement a new process, make sure that they understand your vision and how their process fits into it.
Concentration of knowledge
As a knock on effect of the previous hidden cost, much of the knowledge of your organisation’s processes can become concentrated with the Rockstar. After all, they’re the ones who really wanted to implement those processes, and they didn’t really give anyone else on the team a say. In the worst case, they’re the only ones who really understand how it works. Obviously businesses need to spread knowledge to as many team members as possible.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see where this knowledge is concentrating and how. In real time it can be difficult to spot where this is happening. In our situation, this concentration of knowledge almost always followed Rockstars implementing processes and technologies that weren’t fully understood by anyone else on the team. This wasn’t the fault of the Rockstar; it’s something that we should have caught.
How do you handle Rockstars in your business? Do you seek them out? Avoid hiring them? We’d love to hear some of your experiences.