Can you spot toxic behavior in your workplace?
Do these examples sound familiar? Many organizations struggle to coach, discipline, or even let go of employees who display toxic behavior. Why? Because they tend to also be high performers. They get stuff done. Leaders and business owners have a tough time making a case for correcting employees on their attitude or behavior when they contribute so much to the organization. What if the employee receives the negative feedback and decides to leave? It would be a tremendous loss for the organization—right?
In this two-part article we discuss the elements of successful employee performance, the impact that toxic behavior has on organizations, and how you can take steps to address and prevent toxic behavior in your business.
Before we can discuss toxic workplace behaviors, let’s look at effective workplace performance. Alan Fine, founder and President of InsideOut Development, started his career as a sought-after tennis and golf coach. Fine observed that some of his athletes still struggled to perform even after mastering the fundamentals of the sport. He outlined three elements he found essential to athletic performance—Faith, Focus, and Fire. He soon determined those elements had application in the workplace as well.
Faith is the person’s belief in their own abilities. An employee’s confidence is the culmination of their training, experience, and their past success. If they believe they can do something, or learn to do something, they can.
Focus is what an employee pays attention to on a daily basis. Are they focused on their work? Are they distracted by other things going on around them or at home? Is there something interfering with their ability to focus?
Fire is the desire, excitement, and engagement that employees bring to work. When employees understand what is expected of them, they are well trained, shown appreciation, and the environment is conducive to focus they are more likely to have Fire around their daily work.
Alan Fine explains that employees need all three elements to perform at an optimal level. When even one element is missing the employee’s performance breaks down.
A notable example of lack of the elements is Tiger Woods. When Tiger’s personal life fell apart—so did his golf game. With his attention diverted elsewhere he lacked focus on the golf course. Lack of Focus led to inconsistency which led to a lack of Faith (confidence) which further damaged his ability to play the game. During that time, no one would have said, “Tiger just needs to go to the driving range more often.” Tiger had already mastered the fundamentals. Something else was detracting from his performance—it was his Focus and his Faith.
The same phenomenon can be witnessed in employees. Employee’s degrees, certifications, and experience get them the job. However, it is often lack of Focus, Faith, or Fire that leads to an employee losing a job. For Tiger Woods, it was his personal life that impacted his professional life. For some employees, the detractors come from within the company—from their own coworkers. Employees behaving badly can be found in any workplace. Whether you deal with the behavior, and how quickly you deal with it, will determine how much it impacts your employee’s Faith, Focus, and Fire.
Toxic behavior from even one employee in your workplace can disrupt the Focus of other employees. This disruption leads to lower productivity and can make your job more difficult as you may have to do more coaching just to keep employees performing at a baseline level.
Let’s return to one of the examples from the opening paragraph. In the case of the employee who’s great with customers but a horrible colleague, this employee’s bullying disrupts the Focus of any employee who experiences the behavior. Rather than focusing on the job or doing their best for the customer, the employees are now thinking about the hurtful words that were said, or are trying their best to avoid being the next target.
For some of your employees, the angry, hurtful, or disrespectful words will start to undermine their confidence (Faith) in themselves. The employee in this example provides top notch customer service. If your employees continually see the bully employee rewarded for performance despite the destructive behavior the Fire will quickly be extinguished in your other employees. They will eventually lose their desire and excitement for the work and lose their confidence in you as a leader.
Company leaders who don’t correct toxic behavior are eventually left with a staff filled with a mix of toxic employees—and employees who are just biding their time till they can find something better. As a business owner, for the sake and success of your business, you should address toxic behaviors quickly to maintain a high performing environment and staff.
Now that you understand a bit about performance, let’s shift our focus to defining toxic behavior. Some behaviors are easy to see, while others are more subtle and do damage over time. Everfi, a company that educates employees on the topics of harassment and discrimination, defines a toxic workplace as a workplace “characterized by productivity-hindering interpersonal conflicts that tend to be characterized by distrust, bullying, resentment, unethical behaviors, manipulation, mean-spiritedness, or even harassment or discrimination.” In the US, we place a lot of emphasis on educating leaders and employees about harassment and discrimination because these behaviors are illegal. We clearly outline the behaviors we don’t want to see. Often that is where the education on our expectations for behavior ends.
Behaviors and attitudes of your employees create your culture. They can lead to a positive culture or a toxic culture. I describe toxic behavior on a continuum. On the lower end of the continuum, you may see employees who dominate meetings, know-it-all attitudes, and chronic negativity. These behaviors can do damage over time, but most people would just find them annoying and may even attribute them to an employee’s personality. Near the middle of the continuum, you find behaviors like taking credit for other’s work, blaming others for mistakes, and gossiping. These behaviors are intentional and will quickly erode trust and teamwork. On the high end of the continuum are intentional, malicious, and destructive (and even illegal) behaviors like bullying, harassment, and discrimination.
Sometimes it is hard for leaders to see toxic behaviors. For example, you may not know that someone is taking credit for someone else’s work or gossiping to colleagues. In other instances, it is easy to overlook behaviors because the employee is producing results. Essentially, they ARE doing what you are paying them to do. Does “how” they behave towards others really matter? Yes, it does.
According to research done by Cornerstone OnDemand, your good employees are 54% more likely to quit if they work with just one toxic employee. As good employees leave, your cost to hire new employees increases. If employees continue to churn out of your organization you pay more to advertise, hire, and train employees into positions that were originally filled with good employees. Your reputation as an employer can also be tarnished. When employees leave, they can (and will) share their experience with others making it increasingly hard for you to recruit good candidates.
This is Part 1 in a two-part series. Read Part 2 here!
Author Bio:
Dawn Johnson is an author, speaker, and the founder of On the Rise Development, LLC. As an advocate for thriving workplaces, Dawn has dedicated more than a decade to helping leaders and employees grow in their careers.
She earned her B.A. in Psychology along with a Master of Business Administration and a Master of Arts in Management, all from The College of St. Scholastica.
Dawn was recently certified in the Reina Team Trust and Leadership Trust Scales which are used to assess trust levels of individual leaders and within teams.
She is eagerly anticipating the publication of her first book. Outwit the Workplace Bully: 8 Steps You Need to Know to Reclaim Your Career, Confidence, and Sanity will be available on Amazon in January of 2022.
To learn more about Dawn and On the Rise Development, visit www.ontherisedevelopment.com
Read Dawn’s article on TRUST in the workplace here.
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