Thread by @evanlapointe

If there's one thing you learn today, it should be this:

the scale of...
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Psychological Agreeableness

This comes from the Big 5 model of personality. Here's the skinny...
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Put simply, agreeableness is the extent to which a person wants to compete or cooperate.

Competitive people want to create sides, win, and prevail over others.

Cooperative people want to erase sides, come together, and help others win.

But it gets a lot more interesting...

On the high end of agreeableness, you will encounter people who care so much about others that they can struggle to understand their own wants and needs. They have a hard time negotiating for themselves, sacrifice their wellbeing, and struggle with decisiveness.

These people can really benefit from the support of their friends, reminding them that they deserve to have their own thoughts and stances, that they deserve to be treated fairly, and that they can't make people happy all of the time!

Wonderful people, but hard to live this way!

On the other side of the spectrum, you have the extreme of ASPD (antisocial personality disorder) and NPD (narcissistic personality disorder). Together, these constitute 9.9% of the population!

This is important to internalize. On the flipside of agreeable people are PREDATORS.

9.9% is a lot. That means you know these people. You work with them. They are in your family. Maybe one was a parent.

People low in agreeableness care about themselves, not you. They will do things that are good for them, whether or not those things are good for anyone else.

We make a lot of excuses for these people, and they are very good at making excuses for themselves, too.

But STOP.

They are not having a bad day. They are not under a lot of pressure. They are not adjusting to their role. They are not learning. You do NOT have a plan for them.

One of the largest studies on NPD recovery concluded that it takes 24 months of weekly 1-hour psych sessions for a narcissist to have their first meaningful breakthrough.

That's 2 years.

That leader who you think is going to get better with your HR team's help? Not happening.

If trained psychology professionals take 2 years to help a narcissist become self-aware and take their first steps to improvement, your HR team isn't going to do jack shit with their 360 reviews and check-ins once a quarter.

Now we shouldn't go around slapping the narcissist label on anyone we don't like, but we do need to know that it's a lot more common for someone to have these legitimate psychological disorders than we think.

21% of Fortune 500 CEOs are clinical psychopaths.

Top jobs for clinical psychopaths? You might be surprised they aren't all in prison...

1. Executives
2. Lawyers
3. Media (TV)
4. Salesperson
5. Surgeon
6. Chef
...

People on the low-end of the agreeableness spectrum can be spectacularly successful, and that's because they don't mind stretching the truth, telling people what they want to hear, and manipulating people to win. Agreeable people do not manipulate people.

Manipulation works.

The trouble with their success is that as they gain power, they turn on the people who helped them. They do generate great results for businesses, but those results are just them playing the game to win, and as they win, they will kill off their competition, often their own team.

So yes, they create results. Sometimes great results. Especially in sales and in operations where they will slash costs and headcount and ask people to "do more with less."

"Do more with less" is quite literally one of the more psychopathic phrases you will ever hear.

The point of this thread is simple. WAKE UP. There are predators in your business & they are destroying you.

You will not rehabilitate them.

They are not loyal to you.

Their results are not worth it.

There are MUCH BETTER people out there you could replace them with tomorrow.

There are amazing human beings out there. They want to collaborate and cooperate.

Fill your companies with these people. Their short-term performance will be worse, but their long-term performance is substantially better.

Why? They breed trust over time, rather than erode it.

They breed trust with each other, meaning they can work smoothly rather than politically.

They breed trust with your customers, retaining and growing your business relationships.

They breed trust with the market, meaning it becomes easier to sell and create new relationships.

Each of these has a slower start than a disagreeable person's dramatic action will cause, but as the disagreeable person creates politics, distrust, and churn, their production softens and eventually crashes.

Agreeable people start slower but accelerate exponentially.

Disagreeable people don't need to be homeless and hungry. They should have great jobs...

At your competition.

Go have them screw that company up rather than yours. It'll accelerate your acquisition of their customers and best people. Everyone wins.

I do hope that psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists, and other disagreeable people work to become better.

But I'm also not naive and you shouldn't be, either.

The medical community has spent decades studying and attempting to create treatments for these issues...

And in their own words, they have failed. There is no known effective treatment for psychopathy or sociopathy. Narcissism can be helped, but over years and progress is arduous.

Every clinical psychologist offers a single piece of advice, instead: AVOID THEM.

And that's exactly what you should do in your business. Avoid and remove people who do not enhance your environment. Results or not, they are creating pain, suffering, and future failure inside of your business.

I hope that's clear enough. And I do hope for a cure. But don't be naive or misinformed.

Be cooperative and share this broadly. Everyone needs to know this.

And if you see any flaws, please point them out. We want to get this right. That's the goal.