No one wants to work with the proverbial jerk at work. These people are disruptive to performance and productivity and are now making their organizations targets for lawsuits. Note that performance failure typically is not the result of the absence of technical skill but incompetence in behavioural skill.
You may gain higher levels of organizational responsibility based on your technical skill and performance, but your overall success is clearly dependent on your social/behavioural relationship skills. The truth is that the so-called soft skills of behaviour are really the hard skills that create the measure of influence for performance success.
Time and again the fundamental problems related to the lack of engagement and work performance enhancement is related to how people consistently experience their leader’s and peers’ negative behaviour. Performance failure is almost always directly linked to the absence of consistent, positive behaviour, as individual behaviour is singularly the most important predictor to organizational performance.
As a result, everyone in the organization needs to be able to confront their own behaviour. Sadly, few people have the courage and willingness, or even the awareness, to do so on their own. Consequently, it is imperative for leadership at all levels within an organization to establish behaviour-accountability within their culture for optimum performance. With accountability you then align behaviour to organizational values to create and sustain highly effective relationships that powers engagement and drives organizational performance.
The Skill of Positive Presence equips you with the tools needed to not only ensure that you are personally displaying the most effective and performance-driving behaviours, but it also equips you to recognize and effectively deal with the disturbing, disruptive and toxic behaviours of the jerk at work.
Changing our behaviour is not something we like to do. We lack the willingness to change even when we have the knowledge and the capability to do so. We lack the willingness to change even when we know doing so serves our own best interest in the most critical personal, familial, and professional relationships. John Paul Getty may have said it best with these words, “The individual who wants to reach the top in business must appreciate the might and force of habit. He must be quick to break those habits that can break him – and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires.”
There is a fundamental truth about organizational performance. The majority of people you know, yourself included, have a legitimate need for highly effective, functional relationships – personal, familial, and professional. It is actually these relationships that make us human and without which we cannot survive. 
Enlightened leaders recognize the importance of self-awareness and effective collaborative relationships and they focus their efforts on building connections with the people they lead. The six behavioural attitudes of their strategic approach to quality Cognitive Behaviour Development deserve a closer look:
It is a known fact that when people are engaged positively with their leader they are more likely to be engaged in their work. Enlightened leaders succeed where other leaders fail because they perform at a higher level, are more productive, and achieve greater results using their 
Arising from the research being done in the neurosciences, the idea of individual behaviour, group and team behaviour, and overall organizational behaviour has taken on a new importance. Behaviour is the most tangible evidence of organizational culture that there is. It is also a key performance indicator for mind health. And it is the tangible result of human emotional energy flow. “An organization cannot become what its people are not. The performance of an organization is the result of the collective performance of its people.” This quote comes from organizational expert Tim Kight. 
Organizational performance can rise no higher than the collective performance of its people. With the arrival of the knowledge economy, organizations transitioned on a global scale from a mechanistic environment of linear control, to a systemic environment of complexity. As such, the role of leader has never been more important than it is in today’s world, and individual leader behaviour is the single most important predictor of organizational performance. 
To be human means you need relationships which in turn necessitate social ability. Winning social behaviours are well documented, and according to Stanford Social Innovation Review, social competencies can be learned and developed with practice, the same way a 20 year old develops fluent language skills through training and practice. Some of the most sought-after social skills in a leader are:
Being the leader people want to follow requires first that you can connect by following. Enlightened leaders can connect through following others and practicing the principle of followership. Followership is a leader’s willingness to listen to those for whom they are responsible. 
The principle of connection validates and puts into practice the concepts of self-awareness and collaboration. Self-awareness enables leaders to initiate connections with their employees, while trust and accountability – the imperatives of collaboration – allow leaders to sustain these connections.