If you have ever been around a “star” employee, you know one thing for sure: They are almost always a royal pain in the ass.

 Almost every workforce has at least one such person, sometimes more. They almost always get special pay, privileges and kid-glove treatment from management, no matter what they do. Sometimes, star employees become star employees because they are very, very good at something, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes they are simply people brought in from somewhere else where they were rising stars, but who fail to make the leap to superstar status when they land in the new job.

The problem with star employees is that even when they truly are stars and are very, very good at what they do, having them around breeds a fair amount of discontent. That’s generally because the same qualities that drive someone to become a star are the qualities that make them hard for other people to work with: a gigantic ego, chronic selfishness, a sense of entitlement and an overwhelming disregard for anyone working around them.

My experience has been that star employees invariably wear out their welcome, but that most organizations don’t know how to get rid of them or what to say when they finally do depart. And that’s why the departure this week of superstar sports columnist Jay Mariotti from the Chicago Sun-Times is such an interesting object lesson.

Mariotti is not only a big-deal columnist at Chicago’s second-largest newspaper, but he is also known for his many appearances on ESPN’s Around the Horn and other shows. Mariotti has also been a lightning rod for criticism that gets a lot of people talking. As media columnist Phil Rosenthal at the rival Chicago Tribune put it, “In fact, he might have been more discussed than actually read. But he nonetheless became so much a part of the Sun-Times brand that the cash-strapped paper always felt compelled to re-sign him.”

In other words, the paper might have needed him more than he needed the paper (never good), prompting it to pay him big bucks even as it was slashing every other part of its operation.

Well, this week Mariotti returned from Beijing, where he had been covering the Olympics, and promptly quit. It gets better: He did it first on television and only told his newspaper bosses after they had heard about it elsewhere. And then he took a few shots at the paper’s lack of a strong Internet presence on his way out the door.

At most places I have worked, the top executives would have reacted in one of two ways—and sometimes both. 1) They would be publicly sad and dismayed to be losing such a critical part of the franchise. 2) They would be secretly dancing on their desks, glad to be rid of such a huge drain on resources. Either way, they would normally say the right things in public and wish the departing star all the best in his future endeavors.

Well, that’s where this story takes a sharp right-hand turn. Mariotti’s departure became an occasion for Sun-Times executives to mock him and crow about how happy they were that he was heading out the door.

They even pulled another Sun-Times superstar into the fray—the ailing Roger Ebert—and had him take some very public shots at Mariotti for the “ugly way” he left the newspaper. And the Sun-Times used Mariotti’s leaving as a way to market to readers (or former readers) who didn’t like him.

Here’s a question to ask yourself: What does it say about an organization that pays someone a superstar salary for 17 years, then trashes his (and by extension, its own) reputation when he decides to leave? This is a curious way to treat the office superstar, but it’s par for the course given the terrible and shortsighted management going on at America’s newspapers these days.

Verbal abuse has no place in any workplace, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen—and it happens a lot.

I’ve never understood how anyone with a half a brain could think that boorish, abusive language and behavior would motivate people or get them to work harder, but unfortunately, it is all too common in today’s workplace. Some companies have even institutionalized it as a workforce strategy, an approach that makes me wonder how an organization like that stays in business.

Verbal abuse, however, isn’t limited to the private sector. There was a great example from the California State Senate last week, and it involved a soon-to-be-gone legislator by the name of Carole Migden, a Democrat from San Francisco. Migden has the distinction of being the first sitting California legislator to be voted out of the state Legislature in 12 years.

That’s something that is really hard to do in California’s grossly gerrymandered legislative districts—and her term is winding down. She’ll be gone in November.

Migden has had a number of problems, “including a $350,000 fine from state political ethics regulators and probation for reckless driving,” according to the Los Angeles Times. She’s probably a little testy, given all her troubles. So how does she deal with it? By some reports, she verbally abuses her legislative staff.

In fact, last week Migden was so abusive to the people working for her that the director of personnel for the California state Senate had to send her staff home for the rest of the week. You read that right—the state of California dealt with an abusive boss by sending her staff home.

According to a story in the Sacramento Bee, “Enedina Hidalgo, the director of personnel for the state Senate, was in the hallway when she heard Migden screaming at the staff, according to a witness to the event. The source said Hidalgo later entered the office while the senator was not present on Thursday, informing the staff of their rights. Soon after, Hidalgo returned to Migden’s office with Tony Beard Jr., the chief sergeant-at-arms of the state Senate. They told staff members to pack up their belongings and then helped them out of the building, the witness said.”

The newspaper also notes that, “It was the latest transgression for Migden, whose decade in the Capitol has been marked by controversy, volatile behavior and high staff turnover amid complaints that she is unreasonably demanding and verbally abusive.”

Migden denies that her staff was sent home, just as she has previously denied that her behavior is problematic. As the Sacramento Bee’s Capitol Alert blog noted, “Migden admitted during the primary that her curt demeanor sometimes rubbed associates the wrong way. But she was unapologetic. ‘I make no apologies that sometimes it’s a tough arena,’ she said at the time.”

Politics and government is a tough arena, but tough or not, verbal abuse has no place in any workplace, whether it be public, private or anything else. Fortunately, voters in San Francisco have already dealt with Migden’s behavior, but my experience is that people who are such out-and-out jerks rarely change their ways, even when confronted with their over-the-top behavior.

My guess is that Migden will land on her feet after she leaves office. She’ll get some plum political appointment to a state commission or board that pays a big salary for very little work. And, unfortunately, she’ll probably continue to verbally abuse those who work for her. Good people will be forced to deal with her bad behavior. Like any kind of abuse, the pattern will continue until the abuser is ultimately forced to own up to her actions.

Reputation is a funny thing.

Sometimes, you get adulations for a strong performance that you can’t seem to lose (think Jack Welch and what he did while CEO of General Electric, or someone like Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines). Other times, you see people who work and toil and do great things (like former Delta CEO Gerald Grinstein ) but never really get the credit they deserve for their steady hand and solid style.

If you have been in the workplace for any time at all, you probably have seen another type as well: the person who continually gets over-the-top plaudits and kudos for no apparent reason. These people usually have giant egos, are generally about style over substance and seem to get the benefit of the doubt at every turn.

They also don’t get much critical scrutiny from anyone, and they leave everybody wondering: How do they manage to keep their job?

Can’t think of anyone like this? Well, here’s a good example that comes to my mind— Oakland Athletics vice president and general manager Billy Beane.

Even if you don’t follow Major League Baseball, Beane’s case is instructive for any manager or executive anywhere, because Beane is one of these guys who is lionized at every turn for his skills as an evaluator and manager of talent without much factual evidence to back that up. He was glorified as an out-of-the-box thinker and organizational strategist in the book Moneyball, but to me, the book simply overhyped an interesting management premise that, at least in Beane’s case, hasn’t made all that much of an impact.

For example:

• Beane’s Oakland teams have never reached the World Series, never won a league championship. They’ve won some division titles, yes, but have never had any great success.

• He’s dismissive of the other managers who work for him and seems to place little value on what they do. For example, he fired manager Ken Macha the year Macha took his team to the American League Championship Series (so much for appreciating good work), and as columnist Ray Ratto in the San Francisco Chronicle points out, “Beane’s well-known view of managers [is] that you can find them working Wal-Mart aisles. His is part of the new view of the manager’s place and value … that the [field] manager works for the general manager and cannot be allowed to be a competing center of power. Beane is wrong on this, of course, otherwise there would be no such thing as a Bobby Cox, or a Tony La Russa, or a Joe Torre.”

• He will follow his Moneyball approach over the cliff, even if it means sacrificing a season as a result. This year, Oakland was competitive (within three games of a playoff spot) in the American League West race until early July, when Beane started dumping the team’s most talented and marketable players under the misguided premise that he was rebuilding for next year.

You probably know managers and executives like Billy Beane, and it raises the question: What does a guy like this have to do to get fired? Can any business executive anywhere afford to write off an entire season? No, they generally can’t, because real managers can’t afford a rebuilding year.

As one San Francisco-area blog, beyondchron.org, put it, “Beane’s lack of a championship would have had him removed from more winning-oriented teams long ago. But the Bay Area sports fan often puts style over winning. … The progressive Bay Area does not want to cheer for Goliath; we like a David who uses smarts, rather than superior resources, to prevail. And Beane’s approach fits this perfectly, even though too many fans forget that David actually slew Goliath, while the [New York Yankees], and now the well-funded [Los Angeles] Angels, consistently beat the A’s.”

Reputations get made and reputations get shattered, but sometimes in business and in life, reputations get lifted up for no discernible reason. It drives me crazy, but were it not for the example set by the Billy Beanes of the world, I’d have a whole lot less to write about. 

I’ve written before about the many challenges involved with getting Millennials (the generation born after 1980 and sometimes referred to as Generation Y) engaged and involved in the workplace. It’s not an easy task, especially since the baby boomer generation seems a lot less inclined to leave the workforce get out of the way for them.

Millennials also get a bad rap for being difficult, but as I’ve pointed out all the ones I deal with reflect what you would find in society as a whole—some are good, some average, some clueless. To my mind, that is no different from any other group in the workplace.

That’s why I was intrigued by an issue that Mary Kramer, the publisher of Crain’s Detroit Business (a sister publication of Workforce Management) blogged about this week: “Which comes first in the job hunt of a young college graduate? Find the dream job or the dream place to live?”

She writes about a conference of C-level executives she recently attended that was sponsored by Deloitte and the Michigan Economic Development Corp. Michigan in general, and Detroit in particular, have a huge “brain drain” problem because the best and brightest young workers don’t want to stay there given the terrible job market (9.7 percent unemployment in Detroit) and lack of what they consider to be “cool” jobs (attractive careers in attractive industries).

One expert argued that Michigan (and a lot of other places in America, I would think) not only needs more knowledge-based companies with higher-paying jobs, but also needs to present a more attractive lifestyle to young talent so they aren’t lured off to places like Chicago, Portland, Boston or Minneapolis. Another expert countered with the notion that talent will go where the jobs are and Michigan’s biggest problem is its high cost of doing business. He felt the state needs lower taxes and other costs of doing business so companies will grow and attract young talent to the increase in jobs and opportunity.

Kramer’s take is that places like Michigan can have it both ways because these two notions of what attracts Millennials are not mutually exclusive. “But,” she added, “the real epiphany [is] this: My guess is that the more technically trained a young college graduate is, the more likely he or she will move to the job they really want. Liberal arts grads, meanwhile, without a specific niche or job training, will gravitate to seek the PLACE they want to live before they actually look for the job.”

As the father of three Millennials and as a part-time college professor who deals with a classroom full of them each semester, my view is a little skewed. What I keep hearing is that new grads and young workers just want solid jobs that pay decently. But that view may be skewed since I’m in Southern California and lifestyle isn’t the issue here that it may be in places like Michigan.

What do you think? Are Millennials overly focused on lifestyle instead of the job, or do you see something else going on? Either way, I’d love to get your view either with a comment here or an e-mail me at jhollon@workforce.com.

Years ago, I heard Pat Riley speak to a business group about motivation and management. This was in the 1980s when Riley was coaching the Los Angeles Lakers to multiple NBA championships, back when he had great teams with great players like Magic Johnson, James Worthy and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Riley was always a master motivator, and although I don’t remember a lot about his talk, what burned into my brain that day was his answer to a very simple question from the audience: How do you get star players making millions of dollars to perform at their best? In other words, how do you motivate those who can’t be motivated by money?

His answer was equally simple: You motivate superstars by appealing to their pride, to a greater sense of purpose. In Riley’s view, you must appeal to that part of them because “a champion needs a motivation above and beyond winning.”

I’ve been thinking about Pat Riley’s philosophy this month while watching the men’s and women’s U.S. Olympic basketball teams compete for gold in Beijing. From my perspective, the U.S. teams should never lose in Olympic basketball, and I don’t say that from an overblown sense of national pride, but rather, because the United States clearly has the best basketball talent in the world, bar none. Yes, the rest of the world has improved a great deal—largely by having so many of their athletes training and playing here in the States—but none can field teams with as much top-to-bottom talent as the United States.

But as most business executives know, having the best collection of talent doesn’t mean that you will produce the best collective team effort from that talent, as fans of the U.S. men’s basketball team know all too well.

The men’s team struggled to win a bronze medal in Athens in 2004, and it was embarrassing to watch so many great players perform so poorly together.

So, Team USA basketball took a different approach after the Athens debacle—work to put together a team with the same level of talent, but focus more on motivating the players to work together with a greater sense of purpose.

So far, it seems to be working. As a story in The New York Times pointed out: “For three summers now, [USA basketball executive director Jerry] Colangelo and [head coach Mike] Krzyzewski have demanded commitment, established rules. The sport’s most leveraged megamillionaires have enthusiastically acquiesced. Here, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James and the rest have played spectacularly but professionally. … But by and large, the histrionics of recent tournaments have disappeared. The fine line between fun and fatuous has not been crossed. ‘It’s not about intimidation,’ said Jason Kidd, who, at 35, was brought here as an example of a longtime star disinclined to gyrate and pose. ‘We’re not showboating. We’re not showing anybody up. It’s about playing the right way.’ ”

Yes, it seems to be working, with highly-paid NBA superstars like Bryant and James putting aside their egos for the greater good of the American team. 

“I think they’re unbeatable,” said German coach Dirk Bauermann after his team was routed by the U.S., 106-57. “I don’t even think it’s going to be close. I would be surprised if anyone can even give them a game.” The U.S. women’s team is doing equally well and has been rolling over opponents as it marches closer to a gold medal, although their upcoming game with Russia should feature a little drama.

This just goes to show you: In international basketball, in business and in life, just getting the best talent or paying workers a lot of money doesn’t always guarantee success. There’s a lot more to it than that, including blending the talents of your workforce together to make the whole much, much greater than just the sum of all the parts.

If you didn’t know that before, you certainly should get the message from watching the U.S. Olympic basketball teams.

It’s like the late, great Peter Drucker said a long time ago: “Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations. … [In short,] management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”