I think it was Mark Cuban who made the point that a mature, professional team can handle having one "Dennis Rodman". But it can only be one, and management has to be clear that they're making an explicit exception which isn't open to others. The rest of the team might find this a bit unfair, but usually they'll tolerate it as long as results are good and they're treated well in other ways.
"Of course not. There is only room for one Dennis Rodman on this team. In fact, you really can only have a very few Dennis Rodmans in society as a whole; otherwise, we would degenerate into anarchy."
Similarly, John Madden on Terrell Owens:
"If you hold the bus for everyone on the team, then you’ll be so late that you’ll miss the game, so you can’t do that. The bus must leave on time. However, sometimes you’ll have a player that’s so good that you hold the bus for him, but only him."
I just shake my head at the idea Rodman likely deserves a Nobel peace prize for the work done with North Korea. (and he likely does) Of all the people in the world to guess... he would not be the one I expected to do something significant outside of sports.
This, exactly. we try too hard to make one rule to fit everyone but not everyone fits every rule. It's ok to use judgment and say "this person gets this other treatment for these valid reason."
I had always assumed that these sorts of exceptions can become HR liabilities, especially when the person getting special treatment shares the same title as other peers.
