Popularity and results are different things, as Gekko knew

Gordon Gekko, the corporate raider played by Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, is the source of this line; the original post softened his “guy” to “person.” Coming from a character who is best remembered for defending greed, it is a slightly uncomfortable piece of management advice. It is also, in its narrow sense, true.

In most teams, popularity and effectiveness are only loosely related. The colleague everyone enjoys at lunch may deliver little. The one who insists on tests before release, pushes back on bad deadlines and tells the founder that a plan is weak is often less liked and more valuable. Hiring by charm, or promoting by who is easiest to work with, filters out exactly the people who make a company honest about its problems.

The advice is useful when making decisions about people. In interviews, likeability is easy to observe and results are hard, so interviewers overweight the first. Reference checks that ask specific questions about what someone actually delivered correct for that. In performance reviews, it helps to separate the question of how people feel about a colleague from the question of what the colleague has produced.

The speaker is the warning. Gekko ends the film under arrest for insider trading, and his effectiveness depends on ignoring rules and using people. Unpopularity that comes from high standards is different from unpopularity that comes from contempt, and teams can tell the difference quickly. A difficult high performer who makes others leave, hides information or treats colleagues as tools often costs more than they deliver, because the damage is spread across everyone else’s work.

So the line is half of a test. Do not reward popularity for its own sake, and do not mistake it for contribution. Then look at how the results were achieved, because a person who gets the job done by wrecking the team has not got it done.