So you know so much about man management ? What would you do with your best performer who skips meetings, shows up drunk for work and involves in other un-professional activities.
Yeah but with talented members of any team, I don't know if you can apply such strict discipline. Symonds is an elite member of an elite team and, as in the corporate world, people who are a bit out of the box do (and should) get treated differently. We're not talking about a ubiquitous personality here; he's an immensely talented
individual, with all the associated positive and negative connotations, in a team of of immensely talented individuals. The problem with having a group of immensely-talented individuals together is that you have to find a way to make them all work together and sometimes that means concessions on the whole 'everyone gets treated the same, all must be disciplined' thing. Otherwise you won't get the best out of them or the team. The person in question, however, has to make the extra effort and concessions worth it so, correspondingly, standards about their performance have to be higher. That's the downside of being the gun in any team; you have to be REALLY good to make the crap you give the team manager worth their time.
This is why I have a hard time believing this is all about discipline. Symonds is a difficult personality but concessions have been made because he's been performing. In Tests, luck aside, he's been getting better by the Test. Why bring him to heel now for the sake of a nothing ODI series against a team little better than ICC associate teams who, predictably, got annihilated in their opening game?
Insisting on everyone being exactly the same in a team rarely works long-term in my experience because, unconsciously, everyone knows it's a lie anyway. There's always heirarchies, cliques and egos. Insisting on rigid discipline and not allowing even a little for out-of-the ordinary personalities has a catch; usually the results of the team suffer. You have a team full of cookie-cutter yes-men with interchangeable personalities who know how to work within the confines of established doctrine but presented with a novel situation or series of events, struggle to adapt.
In other words, you have South Africa.
Running a team isn't as simple as creating a bunch of rules, telling everyone to stick with them and then kicking back as the results flow in. It's also about ensuring that blokes who require more care, if their pay-off is worth the trouble (key point), also contribute to the goals of the team. Symonds was in the wrong here and should have been sanctioned but belting him from the team completely sends a message to others; stick to the rules or be ostracised. Many, many organisational psychology studies will tell you that's a sure-fire way to ensure the team under-performs when things don't go as planned.
