Okay Players, Brilliant Jerks, and Why Titles Matter
Three hard team-building truths: why okay players cost more than bad ones, why your top performer might be a task monkey, and why titles are org design.
TL;DR: I recently joined Aleksandra Lemańska on the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast to talk about talent, AI, and the hard decisions leaders avoid. We covered a lot of ground. Three ideas stood out as worth writing up: why "okay" players are more damaging than bad ones, why brilliant jerks aren't the rock stars they think they are, and why dismissing titles is one of the worst pieces of leadership advice you'll ever get.
I spent an hour on Aleksandra's podcast talking through team building in the AI era: who survives, who doesn't, and what leaders get wrong when the pressure is on. If you want the full conversation, it's episode #174 on the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast.
We touched on a talent framework I've been using to map teams: task executors at the bottom, problem solvers above them, system thinkers who fix root causes, and rock stars who spot problems before anyone else has named them. I've written about the underlying shift before, so I'll skip the setup here.
This post isn't about the framework. It's about three uncomfortable takeaways from the conversation that I keep coming back to when I talk to leaders who are quietly wondering if they have the right people in the right seats.
"Okay" players are worse than bad ones
Bad players are obvious, everyone sees it. You bench them, you part ways, you move on. There's no ambiguity and no lingering doubt.
Okay players are a different problem entirely. They were hired for a reason. Sometimes they deliver, sometimes they don't. They're not failing loudly enough to force a decision, but they're not elevating the team either. So you keep giving them another shot. Another quarter. Another project. Another "let's see how this goes."
That limbo is where the damage happens.
An okay player doesn't just contribute mediocre output. They erode trust across the team, and they quietly drag down talent density, which beats raw headcount every time. Rock stars start wondering why standards aren't enforced. System thinkers spend energy compensating instead of building. The train moves at the pace of the slowest wagon, except nobody can point to a single moment where things broke because there isn't one. It's a slow bleed.
I've learned to separate impact from potential. High potential with medium impact? That's on me as a leader. I haven't coached them, clarified expectations, or given them the right problems. Medium potential with medium impact? That's probably a hiring mistake, and the longer you wait, the worse it gets.
Here's a tactical filter I've started using in interviews. Score every interviewer on a 1 to 4 scale: 1 is strongly against hiring, 4 is strongly for. Use an even number on purpose. Odd scales cluster everyone at 3. With a 1 to 4 scale, you force a real decision between "maybe" and "yes."
I used to think the rule was simple: nobody gives a 2. A 2 is a disqualifier. What I've found since is that the real signal is the presence of high scores, not the absence of low ones. The absolute top players often get a mix: some 4s, some 2s, maybe even a 1 from someone who felt threatened, and that's fine. What should worry you is a candidate who gets nothing but 3s: no passion for, no passion against. That person will be an okay player, and okay players are the ones who quietly kill your team's momentum.
Bad players are obvious. Okay players create a trust debt that compounds every quarter you don't act.
Your brilliant jerk is probably a task monkey
Every leader I talk to has this person: incredible individual output, deep expertise in one narrow area, hits their KPIs. Also destroys morale, undermines decisions in Slack, and makes junior team members afraid to speak up.
The instinct is to tolerate them because they're "irreplaceable." Really they're just expensive, and most leaders never do the math.
Here's the reframe that changed how I think about it: a brilliant jerk who delivers great work but doesn't improve the system is not a rock star. They're an expert task monkey with an attitude problem. They execute at a high level on their slice of the problem, but they don't think systemically. This is exactly why you have to evaluate the process, not just the output: the output looks great right up until you notice it's the only thing they improve. They point at what's broken instead of fixing it. They demotivate the people around them instead of elevating them.
Think of the cocky striker in Ted Lasso. Talented, productive, and completely missing the point that his job is also to inspire the team around him. Or the former national-level handball player I coached who was the best individual talent on the roster and the reason we never performed at an elite level as a team. Once he left, our ceiling dropped on paper but our floor rose in practice. We pushed each other, trusted each other, and actually played like a team.
Some brilliant jerks transform when someone finally tells them the truth. They've never been given the feedback that their role extends beyond individual delivery. That can be magical. I've seen it happen. But you have to have the conversation first, and most leaders avoid it because they're scared the person will quit.
They might. That's a risk worth taking.
Culture fit gets a bad name, and often for good reason. "Would I have a beer with this person?" is a terrible hiring filter. It means you're hiring people who look and think like you, which is the same likability trap that leads teams to pick AI tools for charm over value. What culture fit should actually measure is EQ: how do you react to feedback? How do you respond when a junior challenges your technical call? How do you learn? Those are measurable. They matter more than whether you'd enjoy their company at happy hour.
Before you label someone a rock star, ask: do they improve the system, or just their own output? Individual brilliance that never lifts the people around it quietly taxes the whole team.
Titles matter more than you think
One of the worst pieces of leadership advice I've ever received: "Titles don't matter."
My co-founder genuinely believes this. He doesn't care about titles as long as the work gets done. I used to agree. Conway's Law cured me of that.
Your product mirrors your org. It doesn't matter how small your company is. The structure you build determines what you can ship. Titles signal scope, authority, and how work flows between teams, which is the opposite of the vanity everyone assumes they are. Ignore them and you wake up with two products that can't be integrated because you built two organizations that were never designed to merge.
I'm living this right now. I'm part of a CTO office focused on innovation: redefining the software development lifecycle, building new products, moving fast. Some of what we've built is now being sold. The engineering team that owns the core platform is looking at our output and saying, "This isn't how we work." They're right. We built a fast-moving innovation org alongside a slower-moving product org, and now the hard part isn't the technology. It's the organizational reconciliation.
That wasn't necessarily a mistake. Sometimes you need a skunkworks. But it was a choice, and it was a choice about org design and titles whether we admitted it or not. We created a team with a different mandate, different incentives, and different velocity expectations. Conway's Law says the products will reflect that split. It always does.
The soccer analogy helps here. The head coach isn't the expert on goalkeeping or striking. They're the person who sets up the team to win: right formation, right strategy, right specialists in the right roles. The CEO isn't the best engineer. They place a CTO for deep technical decisions and a VP of Engineering for people management and systems thinking. That only works when the structure is intentional and the titles communicate real differences in scope.
As a startup, it's tempting to hand out VP titles to everyone because it feels cheap and morale-boosting. It isn't cheap. It comes back to bite you when you need to create actual hierarchy, when you need to signal who owns what, and when you need two teams with different mandates to eventually ship as one.
The through line
All three takeaways connect to the same leadership failure mode: avoiding hard decisions because the short-term cost feels too high.
You keep the okay player because firing them means absorbing their work. You keep the brilliant jerk because their output is undeniable. You ignore titles because org design feels like bureaucracy.
In each case, the long-term cost is higher than the short-term pain. Your rock stars leave. Your team stops trusting your judgment. Your products fork into incompatible branches that take quarters to reconcile.
The AI era makes all of this more urgent, not less. On AI-native teams the choice is lead, follow, or get out of the way. When system thinkers on your team can use AI to eliminate the work that task monkeys were doing, keeping dead weight isn't a kindness. It's a signal to everyone else that standards don't matter. And in a world where velocity is existential, that's a message you can't afford to send.
If any of this resonated, listen to the full conversation on the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast. Aleksandra pushes hard on the uncomfortable questions, which is exactly what these topics need.
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