Can Your Leadership Pass the Prima Donna Test?

Photo by Katelyn Greer on Unsplash

I’m not a regular fan of the FIFA World Cup, but when the news of football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo getting benched by Team Portugal coach Fernando Santos hit LinkedIn a couple weeks ago as a case study in courageous leadership, it caught my attention. I don’t know which was more remarkable — Santos having the guts to bench Ronaldo, or Team Portugal going on to win 6–1 against Switzerland without Ronaldo. In either case, it seemed like an opportunity not to be missed for my PM Friday blog. After all, when would I ever have another opportunity to say, “If Santos can confront Ronaldo at the FIFA World Cup, we can certainly confront the prima donna on our team!”

How This Story Came to Be

Actually, a story on this topic has been on my backlog since the day I started my PM Friday blog in retirement several months ago. (Fun fact: my “hook” was originally going to feature Jamie Tartt and Ted Lasso, another courageous-coach-confronts-arrogant-franchise-player story, but from the fictitious world of the TV series Ted Lasso.) However, I kept deferring writing it because it is a tough topic to write about. Meanwhile, this topic kept popping up in my coaching sessions with my mentees and in conversations with past colleagues. It even came up in a session where I was coaching a PM coach, who was contemplating how best to coach her client, who was struggling working for a prima donna boss.

Having managed product teams large and small over my 30-year PM career, I have had to deal with a few prima donnas myself, so I had real world experience to share, but my real world experience also told me this topic is very sensitive because in the tech world, prima donnas typically do not exist without upper management being involved, knowingly or unwittingly, as their enablers. Before coaching someone to poke a bear, I figured I had better do some homework to sanity check my own thoughts before dispensing them as coaching advice.

Well, I am glad I did that because I found some really helpful insights and advice in the book, Multipliers — How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, by Liz Wiseman. Although the book is mostly about developing positive “multiplier” leadership traits, it also warns about “diminishers” and their toxic behavior.

“DIMINISHERS: These leaders are absorbed in their own intelligence, stifle others, and deplete the organization of crucial intelligence and capability.” — Liz Wiseman

The interesting thing is, we could replace the word “diminisher” in the quote above with the word “prima donna”, and the quote would be just as valid.

The author’s further characterization of diminishers also describes really well the prima donnas I worked with. I found the author’s approach of juxtaposing the diminisher traits against the multiplier traits to be especially enlightening; therefore, I created the following table to summarize those characterizations.

Summary of Multiplier vs Diminisher from “Multiplier”, by Liz Wiseman

If you have worked with prima donnas before, and you found yourself nodding in agreement as you read through the diminisher traits above, you are not alone. The author conducted extensive research for the book, and these descriptions are based on common patterns compiled from her research.

The Challenge for Leaders

Now that we have a pretty good description of the prima donna via their diminisher traits, it should be obvious they need to be dealt with as quickly as possible. As the saying goes, “One bad apple can spoil the whole barrel.”

The question is, does leadership have what it takes to deal with a prima donna on their team?

From my experience managing prima donnas directly and observing my peers in leadership manage their prima donnas with varying success, I think the challenges can be summarized as follows:

1. Identifying the prima donnas early and acting quickly
2. Deciding whether to coach them or to let them go
3. If we decide to coach them, how to coach
4. If coaching fails, letting them go

We will now go into each of these challenges in a bit more detail.

Identifying Prima Donnas and Acting Quickly

So how do we spot a prima donna in a product team? This seems like a superfluous question. By definition, don’t prima donnas strut around with such swagger that they are impossible to miss?

This may be true in the entertainment industry or in professional sports, but in product teams prima donnas are much harder to spot based on their outward appearance alone.

Yet if you talk to team members who have to put up with their toxic behavior, you would often hear them say something like this, “The damage they are doing to our team is so obvious, I don’t see how upper management doesn’t see it.”

So what keeps management from recognizing a prima donna, when the prima donna is so easily recognizable by the rest of the team? This is a very interesting question, and one worth exploring deeper because it has implications downstream when we get to challenges #2, #3, and #4 above.

I believe the answer lies in how prima donnas come to be, so let’s take a small detour and explore that for a bit.

The Making of a Prima Donna in Tech

Before I start, there is something I want to state upfront. I have no intention to vilify prima donnas in this story. Quite the opposite. The prima donnas I worked with in the tech world were all extremely talented and hardworking (it is analogous to how nobody would question Cristiano Ronaldo’s talent and work ethics), and most of them had no ill intent. Of course, every case is different, but in my 30 years in the business, I have seen one particular pattern play out over and over again, where the prima donna themself was a victim of circumstances and deserving of our compassion and support. It is my hope that, by raising awareness to this pattern, next time it occurs we can recognize it earlier and disrupt the pattern, thereby saving a high performer from becoming a prima donna, and better yet, helping them develop to their full potential as an effective leader.

The pattern goes something like this:

1. A high performing individual contributor earns the recognition of management through a series of successes.
2. The high performer, through their track record of recent successes and their uncanny ability to sell their ideas and methods to management, proposes to management to grow their team and their charter.
3. Management, buying into the high performer’s promises and eager to tap into their streak of successes, confuses their individual talent with actual leadership ability and appoints the high performer to a position of power.
4. Through this promotion, the rising star enters a honeymoon period with management. To the rest of the team, it becomes apparent the new leader has the full backing of management and is empowered to do things their way, and the team is expected to fall in line.
5. The rising star’s newly found power further boosts their ego, and they feel emboldened to call all the shots.
6. This could go one of two ways. In the happy case, the rising star is in fact a great leader (e.g. a multiplier), and they are able to do great things from their position of power, with strong support from upper management. (In Chinese, we call this “like giving a tiger wings”.)
7. However, if the rising star does not in fact possess the leadership skills required by their expanded role, then they will continue to lean on their individual contributor skills to try and fill the skills gap. For example, they may lack the communication skills, empowerment skills, and/or coaching skills to delegate properly, so they compensate by micromanaging or doing things themselves. They may lack the humility, critical thinking skills and facilitation skills to lead a problem solving session and tease out the best ideas from the team, so they behave like a know-it-all and dictate all the decisions. They haven’t learned to develop new leaders by giving away their own power, so they continue to take all the credit and horde power. Let’s stop here for a moment — does this sound familiar? If we look back at the table above containing the diminisher characteristics, the rising star is now beginning to exhibit many of those toxic behaviors!
8. Unfortunately, these approaches are not only ineffective as band-aids, to the rest of the team they actually make the rising star seem like a narcissistic, empire-building, know-it-all, micro-managing tyrant.
9. This is extremely demoralizing for the team, and team escalates to upper management.
10. The rising star defends themself by pointing out to management how incompetent the team is and how frustrating it is to have to micromanage everything in order to ensure a great outcome, discrediting the team and earning sympathy points for themselve.
11. Upper management is still in its honeymoon period with this rising star, so it gives the rising star the benefit of the doubt and protects them from the “incompetent” team.
12. Meanwhile, tension between the rising star and their team grows. The rising star’s ego will not allow the rising star to back down, so the rising star digs in deeper and becomes an even bigger tyrant.
13. The team has no choice but to further escalate to management.
14. At some point, management wakes up from their honeymoon period to find that the rising star’s projects are all struggling to scale up due to the lack of competent leadership, team morale is in the dumps, and some critical team members are leaving in frustration.
15. By this point, the rising star has burned all their bridges, and their relationship with the team is beyond repair. Management has no choice but to let this rising star go in disgrace.

In Multipliers, the author does a great job in help us identify the diminishers, as well as how to coach them and work with them. I love all the insights and advice, but I feel we can do even better. By examining the “origin story” behind prima donnas and breaking it down step-by-step, my hope is we can intervene much sooner and avoid a prima donna from developing in the first place.

As I said earlier in this story, in the tech world, prima donnas typically do not exist without upper management being involved, knowingly or unwittingly, as enablers. I hope the above steps 1–15 explains why this is the case.

Now let’s go back to our earlier question, “Why can the team spot a prima donna so much quicker than management?” The answer should be clear now. As the prima donna’s enabler, management can be the last to see the prima donna’s toxic behavior.

Once we are aware of our role in this sequence of unfortunate events, I hope we can avoid making some of these mistakes.

Coach or Let Go?

In Multipliers, Wiseman shares my optimism that many diminishers are “accidental diminishers” in the sense that even though they are high performers and think they can do things better than everyone else, they are not ego maniacs by nature. They just never learned to trust, empower, challenge, and delegate to others, and so they keep relying on their own talent as a crutch. As frustrated as the team is that has to put up with such a leader, the leader is equally frustrated they cannot entrust the team with anything important. In other words, everyone is a victim.

Although my suggestion is to try and intervene early and avoid a diminisher from developing in the first place, reality is we won’t always be successful and we will have some diminishers in our organization. The good news about accidental diminishers is that they might be coachable. They just didn’t know better. In this situation, as with any other employee performance issue, the key boils down to whether they want to be coached or not.

“Entrenched diminishers”, on the other hand, are ego-centric by nature, set in their ways, and have no interest in changing. They are uncoachable, and should be let go as soon as possible.

I agree very much with the author’s views on this, and I would just add one more thing. When I have had to decide whether to give a prima donna / diminisher a chance, even before I assess whether they are an accidental diminisher or an entrenched one, I first consider their tenure with the company. If they are a high performer within the company whose title has outgrown their ability to lead, I would invest the time to coach them and hopefully get them back on track. However, if they are a new hire, and we somehow missed their prima donna tendencies during the hiring process, I would suggest letting them go right away. The risk/reward of trying to coach a prima donna who is new to the organization is simply not worth it.

Coaching a Prima Donna

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, my suggestion is to avoid creating a prima donna in the first place. Even though our analysis of the prima donna’s journey involved 15 steps, the solution to disrupt this 15-step progression is far simpler and involves only two simple pieces of advice:

• Whenever we promote a rising star individual contributor into a leadership position, we need to critically evaluate their leadership skills and coach them through the transition.
• Regardless how enamored we are with a rising star, we have to stay clear-eyed about their performance as a leader and reinforce a team-first culture. We also have to stay tuned to feedback from the team because they are likely to spot any issue before we do.

Simple enough, right?

Now suppose we failed in the above, or maybe we inherited a prima donna from a former leader, what to do then?

The coaching is still focused on teamwork and leadership, but first we have to deal with the attitude issue. Whether it is our real world superstar Cristiano Ronaldo or the fictitious Jamie Tartt from Ted Lasso, it is not easy to confront a big ego, but it must be done for the sake of the team. A heart-to-heart talk about the problem, ideally in private, is required.

Letting Them Go

After all this discussion, you may wonder —if we are truly a team-first organization, in the best interest of the team wouldn’t it be more expedient to just let them go? My answer is no. The reasons I feel letting a prima donna go should be the last resort (unless they are a new hire, as discussed earlier) is two-fold. First, let’s face it, they are a prima donna for a reason, and their talent and knowledge would be sorely missed if we let them go. Team Portugal managed to beat Switzerland 6–1 despite Coach Fernando Santos taking the bold action to bench Cristiano Ronaldo for bad behavior. But product development is not football. Removing a star player from a product team would certainly hurt a team’s performance in the short term.

But that for me is still not the biggest reason. The biggest reason is the tremendous upside you gain when you can successfully coach a prima donna into becoming a team player and a true leader. This was portrayed in Ted Lasso, where the fictitious franchise player Jamie Tartt became even more potent on the pitch once he learned to be a team player. I have seen this play out several times in a product team setting, so it is definitely not something that only happens on “feel good” TV. And when it happens, the team retains a talent (which doesn’t grow on trees), and it becomes a defining moments in the prima-donna-turned-true-leader’s life and a gratifying moment for the manager.

But if the prima donna does not want to be coached or proves to be uncoachable, then they must be let go.

Closing Thoughts

In this story I shared some common traits of prima donnas I have encountered over my 30-year career, much of which was corroborated by insights from the book Multipliers in its description of diminishers. I hope this helps you identify prima donnas much more readily and confidently so you can take action.

In addition, I shared a common 15-step pattern I have observed regarding a prima donna’s journey in our product teams. It is my hope that these insights will arm you to prevent such a tragedy from happening in the first place.

I realize these patterns, both the characterization of a prima donna / diminisher and their typical journey, are incomplete and there are many other cases we did not discuss here. For example, I once managed a prima donna who was not a rising star but a setting sun, who was already winding down their illustrious career after thirty years but felt it was necessary to routinely bully younger team members from his position of seniority. He was still holding a VP title even though he was an individual contributor, but he was reporting to me even though I was only a director level manager, a good two levels lower than him in title. It was not easy to rein in this prima donna under such circumstances, but it had to be done, so I did it. I was unable to “convert” him into a much better team player, but he did stop his bullying for the remainder of his tenure.

Given how often I see my mentees and colleagues have to deal with prima donnas and diminishers, I am certain we all have unique stories to tell about a variety of other prima donna scenarios. Across all of these stories, the message to management is always the same — no single person is more valuable than the team, and toxic prima donna behavior cannot be tolerated, regardless of how talented or special they are. I hope the insights from this story arms you with the courage to confront them and the tools to help them in a compassionate way if they are open to be helped.

Lastly, if you are not the one managing a prima donna but have to work with one (or report to one), I highly recommend Chapter 8 in Multipliers: “Dealing with Diminishers”.

Bonus Material (for Ted Lasso fans)

If you are a Ted Lasso fan and you stuck with me through this long story, I have something to share with you. During my research for this story, I came across this YouTube video of Allen Iverson (an NBA star) talking about (and belittling) practice in a press conference. It was interesting to see how masterfully the content was repurposed in this clip from Ted Lasso, where Ted Lasso was lecturing Jamie Tartt about the importance of practice. Enjoy!