I’ve devoted several weeks now to looking at the potentially destructive impact of a negative employee on company culture. But as one loyal reader pointed out, company culture is the overall environment, mainly credited to leadership, in which employees either embrace or run away from. A few quick searches on my part led me to numerous articles about why one company’s culture is preferred over the other and guess what? None of them referenced leadership, employee relations and interpersonal conflicts. No, instead the answers I found led me to ask, is company culture just about the benefits?

When I started Verge Pipe Media, an independent inbound marketing agency in 2010, I didn’t think about culture much. Now, don’t get me wrong: I knew what type of agency I didn’t want to have, and I had a core set of values that are still in place today. What I didn’t have was a mission statement or many perks. We simply couldn’t afford to do more than create a fun atmosphere, with a relaxed dress code (unless clients were present), plenty of beer in the fridge, liquor and wine at the bar, some snacks to power through the afternoon lulls, and team birthday and anniversary lunches. Within the first 18 months, we adopted an unlimited vacation policy, paid time off for part-time employees, monthly offsite team meetings, and encouraged our full-time employees to read by purchasing a business or non-fiction book of their choice quarterly. By year three, we added gifted (free) admission to community events where VPM was a sponsor.

It was also in those first few years we became a HubSpot Inbound Agency Partner. And that’s where I realized to compete with the big guys, our company culture had to reflect amazing benefits. Unfortunately, those remain(ed) out of reach. HubSpot has always been a content powerhouse, and even their culture video is first-class and reflects their brand voice very well.

For more on HubSpot’s culture code click here.

One of the first things you notice that is unique about HubSpot’s culture video is it shares the history of the company, although quickly, as well as some key members of the team. But then it does what most do – transitions into the tangible benefits like an on-site gym, vacation policy, unlimited eBooks, and more. There isn’t really any mention of how or what senior leaders do to support and foster an environment that weeds out toxic employees or leaders.

Tanya Hall‘s article in Inc.,  actually straddles the line between culture defined by the benefits and culture defined by the leadership example set by the C-suite. She has a handful of tips that rising executives would be wise to read and pay attention to. You can click on the image below to read the full article.

Finally, in my own experience, company culture is absolutely a delicate balance of both benefits and the environment. You certainly need the benefits package and other work-perks to attract top talent, but it has to be bolstered by a well trained and highly skilled leadership team that sets the tone and maintains an environment where top performers are rewarded, and negative employees aren’t.

I’m interested in your thoughts, either in a comment here on the blog or a social media post that may have led you here. And, as always, if we aren’t connected and you’d be open to a new LinkedIn connection, please just tap my nose in the image below (NOTE: you can actually tap anywhere on the image)!

NOTE: Featured image photo by The Lazy Artist Gallery from Pexels

In last week’s topic, I looked at what to do with a toxic employee from a position of leadership – and made reference to a couple of examples where isolating the negative employee was what kept the team together to mitigate the spread of their negative attitude.

On social media most of the comments were people who identified with having been in similar circumstances as a fellow employee or co-worker. Several gave specific examples of how one employee’s actions destroyed team morale. One other spoke (presumably) from a managerial perspective and cautioned that the offending employee should be counseled first as they may not know the reach of their destructive behavior. Overwhelmingly though, no one commented on whether they raised the issue to managers at the time.

Which leads to this week’s installment on how the team reacts, and if they speak up or not. Also this week, there’s another fantastic article from HBR.org by Francesca Gino, Why It’s So Hard to Speak Up Against a Toxic Culture. Admittedly, Gino’s article speaks to more egregious behavior such as sexual harassment which I purposefully have excluded from my discussions. However, Gino does raise interesting points on why we, as co-workers, don’t speak up or act when we are a part of a toxic culture, and despite the differences in examples, there are a lot of similarities in the reasoning.

For starters, the risk of speaking up, especially if no corrective action takes place or the offending employee isn’t isolated or removed. For example, I worked as part of a senior team at AOL where one of the members was arguably the most difficult person I’d ever worked with. She was crass, self-centered, often publicly dressed down employees, interrupted meetings – and crushed her numbers. It was a mystery to me why so many senior leaders who worked hard to cultivate positive relationships struggled or got by, and this leader was the “anti” in every best practice leadership sense of the term, and yet her team performed. They were miserable and didn’t mind saying so in the break room or after-work happy hours. Yet, they all needed their jobs and loved their bonuses which were their comments immediately after, “I can’t stand her.” I bit my tongue and accepted the rationale that our mutual boss couldn’t be that blind and that he must be tolerant of her behavior because of her team’s performance. I feared speaking up, and suspecting nothing would be done, would just lead to my own demise and make things worse for my team.

Another reason the team may sit on their feedback to the boss is what Gino referred to as, ‘the bystander effect.’ In other words, we all sit silently because we assume someone else will be the one to stick their neck out, or we just feel it isn’t any of our business to intervene.

What both examples indicate is a culture of compliance. If the boss (and their bosses) have not made it clear to report or otherwise bring forward toxic behavior, then the offending behavior is either assumed to be normal or that any contradictory commentary will be met with some form of reprisal. In all instances, leadership should make it known what the standards for acceptable behavior will be and that anyone, at any level, is empowered to speak up to help set things back on the proper course. In my time in the US Army, it was standard practice for anyone in a leadership position to have an open-door policy. In my time at AOL, I would routinely hold skip-level meetings and open forums with employees seeking to understand morale, and to make it clear what I believe constituted acceptable behavior for myself, my managers, and our employees.

If you have an example of either speaking up or staying silent you’d be willing to share, please drop it in the comments below or message me on social media. Speaking of – why don’t you connect with me on LinkedIn by tapping the button below!

Featured image: Photo by Kat Jayne from Pexels

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!