Ever known the super-smart guy (typically, they’re always guys) who was just an absolute a**hole and couldn’t work well with others?  A recent GigaOM post, The Five Myths That Can Kill A Startup, refers to Reed Hastings’ term “brilliant jerks” to describe these people.  According to authors Michael Fisher and Marty Abbott:

Intelligence is important, but only insofar as it helps with performance and execution. As Malcolm Gladwell points out in “Outliers,” while some minimum level of intelligence might be necessary for superior performance, in many jobs it’s not in and of itself enough to ensure it. You need people willing and able to work as part of a team, and sometimes superior individual contributors can negatively affect team performance by creating affective or role-based conflict (for more on those, see Myth #3 below). As Reed Hastings puts it, you should eliminate all brilliant jerks from your team.

Which of course led me to Reed Hastings’ presentation on SlideShare that Om references.  I love it, and consider it a must-read for managers and entrepreneurs.  I like this statement in particular:

The real company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.

You ever work at a place and wonder how clueless management could possibly be?  (Scott Adams made a fortune off of this omnipresent phenomenon).  Look around: what are your company’s values?  They’re demonstrated by who gets rewarded, who doesn’t get rewarded, who gets hired, fired, reprimanded, how certain people are treated relative to others, relative pay, etc. etc.  The company’s support or non-support of certain people send an absolutely clear message about what’s important.  Printed mission statements and values declarations can’t hide it.

Now, having looked closely at that, do you still feel like your personal values are aligned with your company’s actual values?

If not, what do you do?