For the leader who knows one person is difficult and has decided the business can’t afford to lose them: a way to check that calculation.
Earlier in her career, Francesca O’Connor worked with someone everyone considered brilliant. “I used to dry-retch with nerves before giving them work,” she says. “Not my chicest professional era.”
She could have been working until 10pm and would hand something over knowing there was every chance it would come back covered in red pen, and that she would be there until midnight doing it again. “People were frightened of this person and there was crying in toilets,” she says. “None of it was particularly secret.”
Hers is not a rare shape of story, and the arithmetic behind it has been done. A 2015 Harvard Business School working paper, drawing on more than 50,000 workers across 11 firms, found that avoiding one worker whose conduct harms colleagues or the company saved an employer $12,489, more than twice the $5,303 that a performer in the top 1% added.
Francesca has since given the pattern a name. The Brilliance Bias, the subject of her TEDx talk and a TED Editor’s Pick, is in her definition “the tendency to overvalue individual brilliance while overlooking the damage someone does to the people around them.” She is the Co-Founder of HappyHQ, a culture and communications consultancy that works with leadership teams, managers and growing organisations on how they communicate, how they lead and how they handle the moments that test a team’s culture. The reader she most wants is specific: “the leader who is still protecting one.”
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The Calculation She Wants Leaders to Question
That leader, Francesca says, usually knows the person is difficult, “and everyone else certainly does.” But they’re looking at the revenue the person brings in, the clients they win, the quality of their work or the ideas they produce, and thinking: “yes, but we can’t afford to lose them.”
“That’s the calculation I want people to question,” she says. “Businesses are very good at counting visible individual contribution. The costs tend to be scattered all over the organisation: management time, HR conversations, people leaving, ideas that don’t get voiced, confidence disappearing, junior people not developing and colleagues becoming incredibly skilled at managing one person’s moods.”
Some of those scattered costs do get counted elsewhere. The CIPD’s Good Work Index for 2024, a survey of more than 5,000 UK workers, found that a third of employees who had experienced conflict at work said they were likely to leave their job within twelve months, twice the rate among those who had not.
She is careful about one thing. “Brilliant Arseholes are often genuinely brilliant, which is important,” she says. “Otherwise there isn’t much of a bias to explain.” She has worked with people who were creative, commercially successful, charismatic and confident, and was drawn to some of them herself. “You think their work is amazing, then you start thinking everything they say must be right too, and over time their confidence can become more persuasive than your own judgement.”
There is a commercial risk in it too. “If one supposedly indispensable person occupies so much space that five other talented people never develop their own judgement, the business hasn’t built capability,” she says. “It’s built dependency. What happens when the indispensable person eventually leaves?”
“We get very creative with language once somebody has been labelled brilliant,” she says. Her favourite test cuts through it: “would you tolerate exactly the same behaviour from someone who wasn’t your highest performer? If the answer is no, there’s probably some Brilliance Bias going on.”
More recently she has been writing about whether performance is being measured incorrectly in the first place. “Can you really call someone a high performer if they make everyone around them perform worse?” she asks. “I don’t think you can.”
The question has the best part of twenty years in agencies behind it.
What Twenty Years in PR Trained Her to Watch
“None of this was remotely the plan,” she has written. She worked in TV after university, studied journalism as a postgraduate and, “when that didn’t work out, fell into PR for about 20 years.” Her PR career took in Edelman, Ketchum, Brands2Life, Popcorn and Milk & Honey PR, and she worked her way up to Managing Director and Partner before setting up on her own.
Twenty years of agency life trained her to watch people and organisations closely, and more than anything it showed her what a business rewards. “Look at who gets promoted, who gets praised publicly, whose behaviour gets excused, who is allowed to interrupt, whose mistakes are treated as learning opportunities and whose mistakes become a reputational event,” she says. “That will tell you far more about a culture than asking me to read the values on the wall.”
“You can say ‘people are our greatest asset’ until you’re blue in the face, but if everyone knows one person’s revenue means the rules don’t apply to them, that is the culture message.”
Francesca O’Connor, Co-Founder, HappyHQ
Across several agencies she saw, in her words, “some exceptional leadership alongside some pretty terrible leadership, often when the stakes were high.” She has had both kinds of boss.
The Leader at Ketchum, and Her Own Turn
One of the best leaders Francesca worked for was at Ketchum. “She had incredibly high standards and she challenged me, sometimes hard, but she also deliberately built my credibility, gave me visibility and put me into situations where I had to trust my own judgement,” she says. “I became better around her.”
That distinction, she says, really matters to her. “High standards aren’t the problem. Challenge isn’t the problem. The question is what your brilliance creates in everybody else. Do people become more capable and confident around you, or do they become increasingly dependent on your judgement and frightened of getting things wrong?”
She has been on the other side of it too. “I’ve also had to be honest about the times I participated in the Brilliance Bias myself,” she says. As she became more senior, there were people whose talent she bought into enormously, “and there were times when I probably gave that more weight than I should have when assessing their impact on other people.”
“I don’t think I was unusual in that, which is partly the point,” she says. “The Brilliance Bias is easy to see retrospectively and much harder to spot when you’re responsible for a team, under commercial pressure and looking at somebody who delivers.”
Taking stock of both experiences, she says, changed how she thought about performance: what somebody personally delivered could only ever be part of the calculation, and how they enabled other people to perform had to count too.
Why HappyHQ Treats Culture and Communication as One Job
After the agencies Francesca founded her own consultancy, Litmus Communications, which merged with HappyHQ in 2025. She and Janine Jacobs are now co-founders and lead the business together, which she describes as “a culture and communications consultancy helping organisations build cultures that work in practice, and giving leaders and teams the skills to sustain them.”
“We don’t really see them as separate things,” she says of culture and communication. “A culture strategy won’t survive leaders who don’t model it, leadership development won’t stick if the organisation rewards the opposite behaviour, and communications eventually stop working if people don’t believe the messenger.”
It’s also where the Brilliance Bias can turn up in practice, looking at first like several separate problems. A business thinks one manager needs confidence coaching, another team needs feedback training and somebody else needs to become more assertive. “Sometimes those are exactly the right interventions,” she says, “but occasionally you look underneath all of that and realise everyone has simply developed different ways of working around the same powerful person.”
What Fixing It Looks Like
“First, stop diagnosing everybody around the problem,” Francesca says. HappyHQ starts by listening: speaking confidentially to people, looking at engagement or culture data, understanding the existing values and behaviours.
Then leaders need to get very concrete. “Name the behaviour rather than attacking the personality,” she says. “‘You’re intimidating’ gives somebody plenty to argue with. ‘Three people challenged that proposal and you interrupted each of them before they’d finished’ gives you something you can discuss.”
The person gets clear feedback, a genuine opportunity to respond and support to change if they’re willing. Leaders agree how they’ll know whether things are improving, ask the people who experience the behaviour, and come back to it. And, she says, “there also has to be jeopardy.”
“If everybody knows you’ve had the difficult conversation but also knows nothing will happen because this person brings in £2 million a year, you’ve arguably made things worse. You’ve demonstrated that the values have a price.”
Francesca, Co-Founder, HappyHQ
Then the real conversations get practised, in the room, with someone pushing back. “I have very little interest in someone leaving a HappyHQ session able to recite a feedback model but still terrified of talking to their colleague,” she says. “Real people don’t respond to difficult conversations like the obliging employee in a management textbook.”
How She Knows the Work Has Landed
“I care much more about behaviour changing than somebody giving us 10/10 at the end of a workshop,” Francesca says. HappyHQ worked with a leadership team at Kraft Heinz that was preparing for a period of operational change. The work focused on how they were going to lead together, communicate consistently, make decisions, take ownership and handle the conversations that would become harder once they left the room. One of the leaders described it afterwards as “the most impactful offsite I’ve had since joining.”
She is proud of that, “while also being very clear that no offsite fixes a team forever.” Teams evolve, people join and leave, commercial pressures change. “Something everybody agrees in a room on a Tuesday can look quite different six months later when targets are being missed and everyone is knackered.”
So for longer pieces of work, what success should look like is agreed at the beginning. The signs she looks for are everyday ones. “Are managers coaching people rather than automatically solving their problems? Are difficult conversations happening earlier? Are people challenging each other in the meeting rather than saving the real conversation for the corridor afterwards?”
“I don’t think any credible culture consultant should walk into a business, run a workshop and announce that the culture has been fixed,” she says. “Humans are far too annoying for that.”
Not an Argument for Being Nice
There is one reading of her idea that Francesca wants to rule out. “I don’t want the Brilliance Bias to become an argument for everyone being nice to each other all the time,” she says. “That would be unbearable.”
“Good cultures need disagreement, candour, high standards and people prepared to tell each other when something isn’t good enough,” she says. “The question is what happens around you.”
“Do people get better because of your standards, or better at managing your moods? Do they become braver around you or quieter? Do you develop their judgement or teach them to defer to yours?”
Francesca, Co-Founder, HappyHQ
The version she has started using more and more is shorter still: “Does this person’s brilliance make everybody around them better?”
Where Francesca Is Now
Over the next twelve months Francesca would love people to start recognising The Brilliance Bias “as an idea in its own right,” and would be delighted if that led to more speaking and more culture and leadership work for HappyHQ, “because they’re increasingly connected.” The idea has already travelled beyond the talk: she has written about it for Stylist, and HR Magazine has run a piece on the real cost of the brilliant arsehole. “I want to keep developing The Brilliance Bias into a bigger body of work around what organisations reward, how we define high performance and what brilliant leadership should create around you, and take that conversation into a lot more rooms,” she says.
Outside work there is her family, including two young children, “who provide a daily masterclass in the difference between communicating something and anybody remotely taking it on board. Very humbling.”
To the leader still protecting one, she leaves it like this: “If your brilliance needs everybody else to become smaller for it to work, I’m not sure we should keep calling it brilliance.”
The Francesca O’Connor Playbook: For the Leader Still Protecting One
- Run the test first. Ask whether you would tolerate exactly the same behaviour from someone who wasn’t your highest performer.
- Stop diagnosing everybody around the problem. Check whether the coaching and training requests are different ways of working around the same person.
- Name the behaviour, not the personality. Give the specific example, set out what good looks like, and come back to it.
- Make sure there is jeopardy. If everyone knows nothing will happen, the conversation has shown that the values have a price.
- Practise the real conversation. Have it in the room, let someone push back, and try it again.
From the Diary of Francesca O’Connor
Francesca O’Connor is a London-based culture and communications consultant and the Co-Founder of HappyHQ.
| Role | Co-Founder, HappyHQ |
| Based in | London, United Kingdom |
| Previously | Founder and CEO, Litmus Communications, which merged with HappyHQ. Earlier agency career at Edelman, Ketchum, Brands2Life, Popcorn and Milk & Honey PR |
| Also | TEDx speaker: The Brilliance Bias, a TED Editor’s Pick |
“If someone’s brilliance consistently comes at the expense of everyone else’s, it isn’t brilliance.”
Editor’s Note
Executives Diary features Francesca O’Connor because she has put a name and a working definition to a pattern she has seen from both sides. What convinces the editors is that she includes herself in it: she describes being on the receiving end early in her career and, later, buying into the same kind of talent from a senior seat. Her answers come with a test a leader can run on the day they read it and a method for what to do next. She also says where the idea stops, which is well short of everyone being nice.
Executives Diary, Editorial
