Today’s guest post is by Mitchell Kusy and Elizabeth Holloway, authors of “Toxic Workplace!
Managing Toxic Personalities and Their Systems of Power.”
“The day this person left our company is considered an annual holiday!” This quote from our two-year research on toxic personalities echoes the impact these individuals have in organizations. They are profit saboteurs who undermine workplace well being and productivity. And during economic downturns, the “perfect storm” emerges in which their “shadow” side is exacerbated, infecting those around them with their toxicity.
Our national study of 400-plus leaders included in-depth interviews and an 82-item online survey. Profit/non-profit representation, as well as the gender of the toxic person, was approximately 50/50; a whopping 94% worked with a toxic person! They reported behaviors not necessarily meeting the threshold of bullying or harassment, but more subtle behaviors that eventually took their toll on others and the bottom line.
We discovered three types of toxic behaviors: shaming, passive hostility and team sabotage. Our leaders’ comments showed that these behaviors both decreased productivity and retention of team members. With costs of recruiting a replacement ranging from 1.5 to 2.5 times the person’s salary, it is clear that organizations can no longer afford to ignore toxic behaviors.
And it wasn’t just the financial bottom line that toxicity affected. More importantly, the health and well being of individuals and teams deteriorate in a toxic environment as this quote from our study indicates: “Working under my toxic leader … I never realized the toll this had taken on my health and well being until I found myself in a hospital bed at 40 having just had a heart attack.”
Our research led to the design of our Toxic Organizational Change System (TOCS) model, integrating three systems for action: the organization, team, and individual. Among the actions we found that can halt toxicity in its tracks are:
- Give feedback to “toxic buffers” who shield the team from the toxic person, and feedback to “toxic protectors” who enable the toxic person’s behavior.
- Stop giving feedback only to the toxic person; instead focus on understanding and intervening at the team and organizational system levels.
- Weave behaviorally specific values of respectful engagement into daily performance expectations, hold all accountable, and give targeted feedback when these values are demonstrated and violated. Consider giving equal weight to achievement of both performance goals and organizational values.
- Mentor organizational members on these behaviorally specific values.
- Use 360-degree team assessment systems, not just 360-degree leader feedback so teams understand their role in creating organizational communities of respectful engagement and the impact this has on workplace well-being and productivity.
- Use skip-level evaluations to assure robust adherence to the values by all in the organization; create realistic guidelines so the process is not abused.
- Make sure no one is exempt from organizational civility: No pit bulls. No prima donnas. No chameleons who kiss-up and kick-down. Not even organizational stars!
Image credit, NicolasMcComber, via iStock
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Great and timely post!
A sign of a weak team , and toxic behavior truely shows in hard times.
Sometimes companies need to detox to grow. i wrote about this in my blog titled Do you need to “Detox “your business before it can hit your goals? http://nosmokeandmirrors.wordpress.com/2009/05/31…
Sometimes we have to go through a detox, no matter how uncomfortable it is.
Mark Allen Roberts
How to clean up toxic employees? Lead with gratitude: "Complaining is a dead-end road; it feeds depression and hopelessness. The next time you complain, ask yourself, 'Is this conversation adding any value?' The fastest way out of being a complainer is gratitude that stems from acknowledging the roles that others have played in your life and career."
More on cleaning up toxic employees from Deloitte, KPMG (from Financial Times) and Harvard Business Review here: http://globoforce.blogspot.com/2009/05/cleaning-u…
Of course the best structural way to deal with toxicity in the workplace is deploy an properly structured organizational ombudsman function. In addition to providing or enhancing all the functions needed in Kusy and Holloway's TOCS Model, they have a significant positive ROI (as high as $22 returned for each dollar invested) and they create an empowerment and learning cycle as well, meaning employees are better positioned and prepared to self manage situations of toxicity in the future. Pretty simple.
[...] article on this very subject that Mitchell Kusy and Elizabeth Holloway wrote for this blog was last week’s most clicked [...]
This is a key topic. I would like to expand on the idea of toxic work environments and focus specifically on leadership. For example research indicates that a supervisor's level of self care and heartfelt attitude affects the work performance of associates. One study of about 50 supervisors assessed the level of "Type A" stress prone personality and a trait called negative affectivity. The researchers found that "Type A" supervisors had associates who were more likely to be unhealthy, report depression and show chronic irritability and ultimately performed less over time. So hard driving leadership qualities may result in short term achievements, but at the expense of associate health.