I remember this one time, a few years ago, when I coached the CEO of a mid-sized software company.By mid-sized I mean, the upper end of a small-business, that is to say their annual revenues were in the vicinity of US$30 million.
They had a handful of clients but each account was worth a few million dollars and everything rested on the star engineer of the company because they were in the business of supporting a legacy system. The star engineer, senior member of the technical staff, also happened to have a poor attitude. Whenever my coachee would talk about him, the sentence would almost always begin with, “He’s a genius, but…” There was always a but.