Suffering from RGGS or Really Good Guy Syndrome? When you hear “What he/she does can’t really be measured”, what they really mean is that they don’t really know what that person does or they aren’t comfortable holding them accountable for producing any quantifiable results. That doesn’t mean they don’t produce any quantifiable value, just that nobody really knows for sure. “Gee, I can’t really point to one thing, but they are a REALLY good guy!”. In my experience, that’s probably NAGT “Not A Good Thing” if you are into ‘ROI’.
The good news is that if what RGG’s do can’t really be measured, you know – in those traditional ways of ‘measuring’ things in business like ‘how does this make money for the company and how much does it make’, then if you lose them, you won’t ever really know what you might have lost, because you won’t be able to measure that either.
Sleep soundly knowing that the things you can measure (revenue, profits, ROI, etc), by pure Spock logic, can’t possibly be adversely affected by removing something that you can’t!
Is there a sure fire shortcut to finding out if you may be suffering from RGGS? Absolutely. Either give your suspected RGG a one month vacation for all that great stuff they do, whatever you call that, or simply don’t communicate with them for one month.
If you don’t notice anything being different after a month, or no customers or other employees raise any red flags, then chances are you are suffering from RGGS.
Curing RGGS is especially tough because it requires an embarrassing conversation with someone who may feel insulted and hurt that you expect the same things of them as anyone else in the organization.
After all, they did help you move that one time.