Loose Cannons

There are lots of ways to destroy your professional life, but few are more terrifying than loose cannons.

In the old days of sail, cannons were mostly below deck and were securely chained in place, with enough slack to account for recoil. From time to time a weak link in a chain would snap after repeated firing, and in the pitching and heaving of heavy seas, the cannon would break free of its chains.

Once free, the cannon would begin to roll drunkenly wherever the pitching seas sent it, several tons of wanton destruction roaring like a speeding bulldozer, crashing through bulkheads, crushing sailors, and for real excitement, smashing into the powder magazine. Nothing approached the terror of a loose cannon.

All of us in the professions have had our loose cannons, colleagues or assistants unchained from reality or morality, careening about at the whims of some fantasy or addiction or grudge, with no thought for the ship or anyone aboard.

Cannons broke loose of their chains, generally, because of defective chains or links, or because of improper securement. And of course these defects never made themselves apparent until the tempest arrived, particularly a tempest during battle. This is not usually true for our professional loose cannons.

Unlike the uniform rows of cannons in the galleon, loose cannons in our professional firms are usually easy to identify before the storm or the battle tests us. More often than not they are prima donnas more concerned with their own welfare than that of the ship, constantly whining instead of shining.

Loose cannons usually speak in terms of “me” or “I”, not “us” or “we”. They obsess about their position on the org chart, or the size of their slice of the pie. What they never think about is how to make the pie bigger.

Loose cannons are, often as not, high performers in one sense or another. They may be the big biller, or the biggest client magnet. Sometimes they’re quite popular, and everyone wants to be with them or just like them. But the reality remains that when the ship goes into battle or the seas run high, the loose cannon breaks free of its chains and wreaks havoc. For most sailors, it’s “One hand for myself, one hand for the ship”. For the loose cannon, it’s “Both hands for me.”

Many firms spend inordinate amounts of time, energy and money accommodating the loose cannons, trying to make it comfortable for them, tweaking policies and making exceptions, tacking this way and that to avoid upsetting a fragile ego. And all of that is a mistake.

Loose cannons are incorrigible and unreformable. You cannot work around them, you cannot build a powerhouse professional firm with them in your midst. There is only one hard truth: they have to go.

Loose cannons are just one of the main reasons some professional firms go on year after year in a stilted and stunted version of what they really could be. Sometimes it takes an outside consultant or advisor to come in and state the obvious, and to help the real professionals find the courage to do what they need to do.

Do we need to talk?