Deadly Sins of a Prima Donna

This year we hosted our annual Fall Grand Summit conference in the Bahamas. One of the topics we covered was how to grow leaders within your company. In any business, there are many paths for a new employee (a potential leader) to follow. Keeping them on the right path is always the challenge. Without a formal path towards Leadership, we risk allowing “Prima Donnas” to develop. Prima Donnas lurk in the background moving great potential leaders down the path of destruction. Do you have a Prima Donna in your company?

Here a Host of Signs of a Prima Donna:

1. Under communicate. They’re not interested in sharing too much information.
2. Me… Me…   Me…  It’s all about me!
3. I’ve earned the right to… (fill in the blank).  Prima Donnas have an entitlement attitude. “I have been here so long that I can do whatever I want to do,” or, “This place would never exist without me.”
4. Reprimand in public. Prima Donnas love an audience so he can show off his authority?
5. Short-tempered. “How dare you challenge my authority,” a Prima Donna might say.  They try to keep new leaders in their place – they are a threat to the Prima Donna.
6. Loves to put others down in front of new employees.
7. Brags to the customer about the value he brings to the company.
8. Knows the answer to a problem, but he was not asked and did not volunteer the answer when needed. Brags to others afterward about how he would have handled it.
9. Unwilling to teach or share.
10. Only wanting to work with certain people (Control factor).  This is especially true if they are friends or if the other person is easily influenced or manipulated.
11. Loves to see others fail-especially if they were a threat to him
12. Loves to tell all employees what is wrong with management and what is wrong with the way they run the company (who needs company culture or company values!)
13. Those company policies don’t apply to me! Prima Donna’s follow their own rules, often at our expense.

Do any of your employees match some or all of these descriptions? If so, the path towards improvement and growth may be more difficult than need be. Now is the time to have one-on-one conversations with these employees, and possibly invite them to leave.

What’s more, for the employees that aren’t Prima Donnas, are you doing everything you can to keep them on the right path?

All the best,
-Conal