Enterprise

Dealing with outliers’ unique behaviour

outlier

In business, just like in most families and social organisations, we often have outliers. These are people who are significantly different from others in the group in the way they think, behave or conduct themselves.

Outlier is an amoral phenomenon. It has nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of someone. It simply means the person is different from others.

Outliers are contrarians. They behave contrary to popular opinion or norm and are sometimes called funny characters who care less.

Thus outliers could be star performers or underachievers compared to others in a similar situation.

In psychology “Outliers can represent a nuisance, error, or legitimate data. They can also be an inspiration for inquiry”.

The ultimate challenge of a manager is how to manage outliers who insist on being different or who are not able to think and behave like the rest of the team yet the organisation has its rules and regulations.

For instance, how do you handle a salesperson who indulges on weekends and miss Monday sales meetings? Who does not submit work plans and ignores the common sales strategy manual yet he tops in performance?

Sometimes outliers are problematic and have the potential to destroy the social fibre if not handled with utmost care.

Managing such people without breaking or letting their behaviour negatively influence other members of the team is a true test of leadership.

Where outliers perform excellently with their magical ways, they become a source of inspiration to others. Efforts should be made to contain them and curb their negative behaviour and emulate the better part of them.

However, outliers could also be destroyers. Their deviant behaviour could drain the team’s energy and sap the overall productivity.

Their actions or inactions could lead to loss of customers and revenue to the business. Depending on their position, they can easily make the work environment toxic and unhealthy to other employees.

If not controlled, performing outliers can easily change the culture by inspiring others to behave like them.

As a manager, you need to explain to others that the person is different and is able to perform well in spite of his funny character, and not because of the character.

I recall that in high school, a truant boy came up with a catalogue of extremely rich and successful people who had dropped out of school, been expelled from school or failed in their exams. The idea of course was to justify his poor performance and prove that despite of everything else his future was still bright.

But the teacher successful saved us from adopting his thought system by first acknowledging that it is true there are many such characters who are successful. He explained that they succeeded in spite of the limitations and not because of limitations.

The problem, he said is that many people focus on a few successful ones but ignore the fact that, for instance, the majority of school dropouts end up languishing in poverty. He did not need to provide a catalogue to prove it. We all could see it.

Mr Kiunga, author of ‘The Art of Entrepreneurship: Strategies to Succeed in a Competitive Market