I have a confession to make.  

I’ve led software development organizations for several decades. The bad news is that early on, I made some critical mistakes. The good news is that I quickly learned from those mistakes. But one of the things about mistakes that involve people is that it’s always hard to recover from them. The better strategy is to be really crisp in your people decision-making.

One of the mistakes I made early on was hiring “Brilliant Jerks” or people who had exceptional technical skills but lacked skills in other areas. Another way to put it is they were, how shall I say it, assholes. But I tolerated their asshole-ness because of how smart, how productive, and how loud they were.

Nobody wants to work with them and they brought the entire team/organization down. But at the same time, I tolerated them because they had incredible value in certain areas.

Big mistake!