Destroy the real expert

As a Leader you must always be in charge and surround yourself with those who will support your game.

If you’re willing to play a long game you can rise even higher on the talent and success of those who are so absorbed in their achievements that by the time they realise you are stealing and taking credit for their work it will be too late for them to do anything about it.

First you need to find the ideal person for creating and leading a truly challenging and significant project. This person must be excellent at their job but must also have the talent and contacts to find the best people to develop the project. The project could be anything from a massive training initiative, a major organisational culture change, developing and marketing a new product, or even creating an entire 3-year university degree.

You will need to give the person time to ensure the project is highly successful, very visible and generally held in high respect. Once it is well established and still growing you need to make your move.

Compliance is always a good way to get these people. Experts who achieve great things often view much compliance activity as a pure waste of resources and time (which you and I know is often true) so they will have been putting minimal effort into just the amount of compliance needed so that they can continue to focus on their passion.

There will be policies and procedures that they won’t have been following to the letter. You can start demanding that they spend time updating their localised procedures to fall in line with the organisational policy.

Naturally, you quietly create new policies and ensure they are available to all. But it’s important that you mask the availability by using an intranet that is labyrinthine and consequently confusing. Any attempt to find your new or updated policies will be abandoned in frustration at the time wasted and the inability to find the required policies (especially as the policy titles are a poor reflection of their content). Of course, not much time will be wasted by people looking for the policies because you won’t have told them that they’re there. Doesn’t matter, because you’re still in a position to say, for example, “Well, you should have known about the policy, it has been available on the intranet for the last 18 months”. They can’t argue with that last statement. Checkmate!

If you do this enough, they will often leave voluntarily. But if they don’t you have used their non-compliance to create grounds for giving them a wonderful opportunity to diverse their workplace experience … somewhere else.