1. There's a great book "5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life" by Bill Eddy. If you have a choice to continue reading this article or to start reading the book, I'd prefer the book. It was my fault not to read this book earlier.
2. I'm not a psychologist in any way; I can misuse psychological terms out of my ignorance, so you should not trust me on this matter. The facts I write about, though, happened in real life and people got hurt.
3. If I write about this misbehaviour, it doesn't mean I don't have it. I'm not the one to accuse, but I could warn.
4. What causes these types of behaviour is outside of the scope of this article, and I'd recommend guarding your own boundaries rather than digging into that, although it's a childhood trauma as a rule of thumb.
5. The issue is serious, and from my practice two things worked: giving firm feedback to a person to stop this behaviour or excluding this person from the team. Both recipes work if you have power; if you don't, you have to decide for yourself to tolerate or to run – I felt regret for those who decided to stay.

I don't say that these types don't bring value; they in fact can bring more value than others. It just doesn't justify, for me, destroying other people's lives. If you are in a superior position and you think about hiring such a person and giving him/her a team to manage, it means leaving your team with the abuser and giving this abuser the power, including the power to hide his/her actions.

Let's move on: each paragraph in the following text presents evidence. As a rule of thumb (and as a Chinese saying goes), one can be nothing, two should make you think, three is a system. When you have three, it takes some courage to admit whom you are dealing with and to plan your actions accordingly. So, don't panic (C).

A psycho

Colleagues suffer and complain to each other about this person. A behaviour is not a one-off thing; it's repeated, so several persons usually experience this. But this is really dumb, because others can see a pattern. By the way, please note that I mentioned "complained to each other", so they are afraid of this person and afraid to escalate the issue to actually resolve it. Returning to patterns, something else is more dangerous and more powerful: he/she chooses one victim and demonstrates dysfunctional behaviour with this person only, while all the others can believe in his/her good intent and know nothing of his/her humiliating actions. But there's a pattern: after the victim leaves, he/she chooses another victim, so you can notice the pattern over time.

Power is a drug to such a person, and he/she understands power as an ability to micro-manage and to manipulate people. These are completely different issues, and it's above my paygrade to elaborate on manipulation, but micro-management is simple: insisting on how you should do something, demanding immediate reactions, so you should leave everything and run (literally), repeating requests within a minute if action is not taken, using different channels to demand actions like calling and messages and knocking on the window – you can easily get a nervous tic from these actions alone. Micro-management is also confused with understanding the matter and asking profound questions, and that's actual competence. You feel safe communicating in these scenarios if you are competent and have nothing to hide.

Impression over being a good person, hypocrisy. Culturally, many of us are taught a lot more about producing an impression than about being a good person (there's also a significant difference between being nice and being kind), so many of us do that. It doesn't make us psychos (maybe a little bit, and you definitely do yourself a favor if you stop behaving like this). For me, the evidence is a difference between how good and how bad the person can be depending on how much power he/she has in a particular situation. And the rule for me is this: if this difference makes you vomit, it's bad. Another point is that a person can treat his/her team badly and proceed like nothing happened. That's another issue; psychos lack empathy, so they don't feel the damage done.

A careerist / narcissistic

For every task, he/she first thinks about how it's going to advance his/her career and loses interest if it doesn't. These people are obsessed with career, and it's even funny to observe that they start career-related discussions for every small task. It decreases efficiency as they require detailed explanation in relation to their career, and these discussions obviously cost time and money. But they lose vigilance, so it's easy to notice. Regretfully, too much attention to career can be normalized in some organizations, so it becomes difficult to define what is "too much".

They try to lick bosses’ asses, and they are kind of systematic about this: they remember small personal details about bosses and their family members, try to be useful, always emphasize subordination, and leverage all the human weaknesses they can. These techniques are described and even recommended to build a career, but it's not healthy. They distribute more effort to licking somebody's ass than to doing the job. It's a pity this behaviour is normalized, tolerated, and recommended. Again, the extent is the question here, so I use the "vomit rule" here as well. It's easy to notice when actual performance falls because of focus on non-work-related issues, but these people are clever and usually performance doesn't fall. It's easy to notice how careerists spend lots of time with their bosses, a lot more than is required for the job to be done.

They overwork a lot and overemphasize their hard work. First, speaking about yourself too much is a definition of narcissism. Second, working in a team and speaking about yourself is nonsense. Third, taking too much work and not planning it adequately is a planning disability and should not be encouraged, but greedy persons do encourage that. And fourth, a healthy KPI system in a healthy organization catches the results, not speaking about the process, so it's a bad system if it works the other way. A careerist doesn't use magic; he/she exploits the system when the system allows him/her to do it.

Politics is a big thing for these persons. I mean, it is sure a thing, but there's a job to be done as well (I assume). It's again about prioritising politics over everything else, getting involved in politics above his/her paygrade, a willingness to sacrifice everything human-related for the sake of some political advancement. Sure, that's the world we live in, but it's also the amount of politics we allow ourselves to have. I've seen large organizations where people were able to do big changes without politics or small organizations where politics prevail – guess which organization is more effective.

So politics is a lot about influence, and they see someone doing anything even related to their sphere as losing influence, it's a tragedy, so they don't let anyone in and defend "their" field furiously. The problem is that it's not a private field; it's about the organization. This battle for influence can be misunderstood as zeal in work. I see it like this: if a person is competent, he/she is normally friendly and willing to tell anyone about the work he/she is doing. When you see hostility and concealment of information, for me it's a hit.

These persons also are willing to extend their influence, and their own lack of competence plays no role here. If you allow it, you get incompetent people doing the job, and you may even not notice it until something critical fails. I won't elaborate here on careerists' skills to blame others; the point is that for some reason the organization as a system and the managers allow incompetent persons to take the job. The moment you stop matching competence and the area of responsibility, you are in trouble.

Conclusion

From my experience, top management can be filled with psychos, and if this issue is not addressed directly, it spreads, because almost no KPIs show the problem, sometimes even employee turnover rate, as employees can be held in place using fear. And I also can't suggest a direct cure other than knowing people and taking an insight into what's going on in teams.

Careerists are less problematic as they are easier to spot. But giving them what they want, justifying their behaviour makes them advance and enlarge their influence. People are not idiots; they totally get who is promoted and why, so moving careerists up erodes a company's values when they exist. The funniest thing I saw was when a company full of careerists and greedy people collapsed and they blamed each other. It happens, and you don't even need an economic crisis for this. It's just the self-destruction they carry in themselves.

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