A Day in the Life of Alex Sander

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1-What Do You as a Manager Need to Do to Channel Alex’s Talent and Ensure Success for Your Product Group and for Alex as an Individual?

To bring it straight to the point, Alex Sander is a pathological and notorious narcissist. Even though this might be an unsubstantiated assessment at first glance, taking into consideration what we have learned in Leadership & Change Management so far, we consistently come to the conclusion that Alex shares numerous characteristics, which are typical for a person with narcissistic tendencies. Alex is egoistic; he unconditionally strives for power and frantically yearns to prestige at all costs. Despite his pretended self-confidence Alex fundamentally lacks in self-esteem, making it impossible for him to adequately deal with confrontation. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that Alex tends to have a chronic self-overvaluation of his own competencies in relation to his coworkers’ abilities. Alex desperately aims to be perceived, admired and respected. Moreover, he would not even deter from enforcing his superiority complex with (psychological) might and main, thereby consciously disempowering, duping and humiliating people surrounding him. Alex does not really show serious interest in his fellow men at work. Furthermore, he instrumentally uses his feigned empathy towards direct reports/subordinates only in order to reach his goals. Alex exploits subordinates/direct reports to be provided with admiration. In case of criticism, disobedience or poor performance he inconsiderately ceases relations to his counterparts.

A promising method to reveal narcissists in an organization is to evaluate the feedbacks of subordinates towards their direct supervisors: The 360° Performance Review, which has been newly introduced after Landon’s acquisition, is therefore a helpful tool not only to get a general overview of your executives’ overall performance but also to spot persons with presumably narcissistic tendencies: Person E complains about Alex’s extremely high expectations towards team members to uninterruptedly sacrifice at work, whereas Person F does not even dare to concretize his negative feedback towards Alex, which is actually a demonstrable statement by itself. Furthermore, Person G points out that Alex is notoriously incapable to recognize and praise performance of others. All these reviews from direct reports doubtlessly underline our initial assumption to detect Alex as a narcissistic leader who is selfish, inconsiderate and excessively pushy and commanding.

“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance”; if an executive exaggeratedly/perversely interprets Oscar Wilde’s words, this will not only have direct consequences for him-/herself but also for the organization he/she is working in. According to that, Sam Glass would be more than well-advised to empathically draw Alex’s attention to his unacceptable (narcissistic) behaviour while taking into account that Alex doubtlessly possesses a high performance potential, which might turn out to be continuously beneficial and promising for Landon Care Products in the future. How to do that?