Steamroller personalities get results but they can also cause major headaches. In his latest book, “Lead Inside the Box: How Smart Leaders Guide Their Teams to Exceptional Results,” Mike Figliuolo offers insights on eliminating the headaches without demoralizing these hard-charging team members.
Make sure you understand the costs your Steamroller is incurring. Reach out to key stakeholders for feedback about the Steamroller’s bad behavior. Ask them to provide specific examples of negative situations they’ve created. See if there were damaging effects on operations, personal relationships or other intangibles like morale and culture.
Make sure the Steamroller understands the impact of his behaviors and give him a clear understanding of the problem. If he is surprised by the feedback, the main issues could be empathy and communication skills.
Does he understand — and does he care about — how his actions impact others? If he doesn’t, get him training and coaching on these skills. Set clear goals and deadlines for him to apply these skills.
If the Steamroller isn’t surprised by the feedback but is focused on sharing his side of the story, you have a different challenge. Make it clear that these behaviors have negative consequences for others — including you — and that he has to start dealing with those negative consequences too. At a minimum, stop fixing the problems the steamroller creates. When you solve problems for a Steamroller, you’re enabling his bad behaviors because he doesn’t have to deal with the problems he causes. A Steamroller needs to exert the effort and feel the pain it requires to fix those problems.
Ensure you factor in the negative impacts a Steamroller has alongside the positive results you note in his performance reviews. If the source of his problems was a lack of awareness or skills in working relationships, develop a plan for building those capabilities and gain commitment to that plan.
Steamrollers can destroy your organization’s culture if you don’t get them to stop behaving badly. You may have glossed over these issues in the past — “that’s just how they are” — so be disciplined in the future about giving a balanced rating and meting out consequences. This feedback should make them aware that it’s not only important that they deliver results, but their rating is also a function of howthey get those results. By forcing Steamrollers to clean up the messes they create, they should learn to avoid causing problems in the first place.