You may have an incredible brand presence and project a healthy, vibrant and fun culture to the outside world, but did you know it only takes one toxic employee to turn your internal culture upside down?
For purposes of this discussion, I’m using “toxic employee” in the always negative, never has anything good to say or share, or is just outright closed off to other employees and a team approach. Obviously, toxic employees in the sense of committing egregious acts or hurtful behavior towards other employees aren’t being included in this conversation.
I’ll highlight two different times in my professional career where I’ve observed toxic employees and their impact on the team. I’ll also reference an interesting article I read on Harvard Business Review by Christine Porath titled, Isolate Toxic Employees to Reduce Their Negative Effects. Perhaps the most important point in Porath’s research is showing that bad behavior spreads further and wider than good behavior. In other words, one negative employee can far outspread their vibe over one positive employee.
Right out of the US Army, I was hired into a contact center with America Online in Jacksonville, Florida. This was where the rubber met the road as they say when it came to customer touchpoints. I had several components to my team including a sales retention (members who called to cancel their service), technical service (members who could not connect or otherwise use their AOL service), and a beta team who fielded calls from select members who were testing future versions of the AOL software. One member of this team had, at least on paper, more technical training and certifications than quite literally anyone in the 1,700 employee center.
If work started at 9 am, he was there at 8:59:57. He rarely spoke to anyone else on the team unless it was to complain about his schedule, his upcoming shift, or the tools he was forced to use while interacting with our members when they called. Over time, other employees stopped speaking up in team meetings or gatherings, because the learned behavior was if they said something good, or complimentary, our negative friend had an instant rebuttal. I began speaking to him privately about his behavior and his impact. I tried any number of approaches, all to no avail. My solution then was to keep him so busy on a special project, he rarely had interactions with the rest of the team. According to Porath’s article, that may have been the best, and only approach.
Years later, also at AOL, there was a person who worked on the same floor and was part of the larger team that fell under my Vice President. She was the epitome of the sour puss. She had a legendary eye roll, and her sighs could often be heard several cubicles over. We had an interesting professional relationship in that she was the program manager for a campaign, reported to another Director, but the senior managers who were responsible for the day to day execution of the campaign worked for me. It was the only such arrangement, that I knew of, in marketing. Once with my VP, he asked how things were going with the relationship and I told him honestly, it was awkward, and I was curious why her reporting relationship was set up the way it was.
He asked, “do you want to manage her?” I responded, “not particularly.”
“Well then,” he responded, “you’ll just have to trust that I have her placed in the best spot for all of us. Her ideas and strategic thoughts are what built and grew her program, so she’s an incredible asset. Too valuable to see her take her talents elsewhere, but her personality conflicts limit how far she’ll go and who she can work with here.”
Culture and work environments have such an enormous impact on the performance of individuals, teams, departments, divisions, and entire companies. You can have a top performer in sales, IT, program management, and other places that just don’t get along well with others. Whether or not you keep them fully included or in some degree of isolation may dictate how well your team performs.
In my own experiences, whether I knew it all those years ago or not, isolating my toxic employee was the best option to keep him employed and maintain the overall positive ‘personality’ I wanted my team to embrace.
What has been your experience with that one employee who seemingly never has a good thing to say about anything? Please comment below or Tweet me, @DonCrow – better yet, connect with me on LinkedIn by tapping the image below and leave a comment. I may include your thoughts in a future post!
