Is Your Employee Toxic or Simply Misunderstood?
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Bad behavior can conceal something important that you owe it to yourself, your team and your business to reveal. Here’s how.
I’ve been working with the leadership team of a growing and successful firm that wants help handling two “toxic” employees they have identified. The problems are not so much with performance — one of the problem employees is a superstar — as “political” in the business sense, i.e., they have to do with power dynamics within the fast-growing organization.
There are two problems with the way companies respond to “toxicity” in fast-growing businesses. The first is that they fail to explore and understand the context and cause of the apparent toxicity; the second is they’re reluctant to deal with the problem — toxicity or whatever you want to call it — when the person involved is a high performer.
In many or most cases, and certainly in this one, the toxic employees do exhibit negativity and dismissive attitudes toward their leaders and colleagues. That’s plain to see. What’s less plain to see, and requires some digging, is why the employees might be behaving this way.
In the absence of candid and respectful fact-finding and dialogue, the leaders have responded by telling themselves a story about their urgent need to back-fill the positions as quickly as possible before letting anyone go. Of course, this causes a lot of angst because one of the people is a top performer. “We can’t afford to lose him now” or “I must line up his replacement before making waves” are two typical storylines.
The leaders wanted my advice, which I gave to them, although it wasn’t exactly what they expected. Rather than counsel them on executing a behind-the-scenes move, I recommended they take a page out of conscious leadership and actually address the problem with the employee directly and in a spirit of goodwill — and even love.
Try a little tenderness
My experience has taught me that the key to resolving this kind of issue is to short circuit the fight-or-flight response of our emotions. Rather than seeing the choices as either “squaring off” or doing an end-around, the firm’s leaders should consider doing the following:
Regardless of whether they are an ideal employee or a toxic one, you should always have integrity and share/own your thoughts/stories, feelings, and what you want. Conscious leadership speaks of taking 100% responsibility for your thoughts and feelings. This includes not only acknowledging them yourself but sharing them with others. You can learn more about practicing this kind of integrity here.
The second practice you can adapt to your own case is to get curious. In fact, great leaders often discover that it is far better to be curious than to be right. So, ask your founts of toxicity a few questions.
Are you happy here? Is this job fulfilling your dreams/aspirations?
How might I/we support you more fully?
What gaps do we have in your expectations?
Then get clear on what you want and what are your expectations for your team.
These are our business objectives.
Adherence to core values is one of our non-negotiables.
There! Now that these have been aired and are on the table, seek agreement and alignment. If none exists, then maybe take a little break and come back and talk about what might look like a win-win for both of you going forward.
Approach this conversation lightly, with a spirit of love and wanting what’s best for the other person and in keeping with win-for-all agreements.
Even if the result is a parting of ways, it beats stewing in your juices until the inevitable explosion/implosion that produces a lose-lose.
“Isn’t all this touchy-feely stuff just a bit idealistic,” you ask?
Not at all.
It’s called acting like the adult in the room. When you act in integrity like this, the results will usually be good. In our current example, the founder was no longer able to act as the sole decision maker. She began hiring people who were better than her in key areas of the company, such as sales and finance.
Hiring new leaders when her company had outgrown her current leadership team was a smart move.
The problems arise when the new leaders ask the team to do things they’ve never been asked to do before, things for which they’ve received no training whatsoever. When companies are small and go-go, the founder calls all the shots and the employees do what they are told and, generally, do it very well. Then, one day the new whiz-bang chief growth officer comes in and sits down in the top sales guy’s office and says, “I want you to draft a sales plan for natural retail.”
Suddenly, the former star player can’t even shoot a free throw. He’s never developed a plan before! So he will try to deflect the feeling of being out of control and start to gossip, undermine and become angry. Maybe he’ll shut down.
And while his behavior may appear to be motivated by spite or pettiness, it is far more likely to be concealing feelings such as shame or fear of being “found out” as inadequate. Rather than getting frustrated or combative with the employee, the new leader needs to get busy training him to do what he wants him to do. That’s the leader’s job.
And if the employee won’t do it, or can’t do it, after an earnest effort on the leader’s part to work with him, then let him go. The company will survive the temporary dip in sales and all will be amazed how fast the business snaps back into a more positive culture.
But don’t make combat counter-strikes the first course of action. Conscious leadership offers a number of tools for opening up the lines of honesty and candor, allowing employees to “reveal rather than conceal” whatever issues are causing the toxic attitude and behavior.
But it all begins with empathy and total responsibility on the leader’s part. In most instances, your problem employees really don’t want to make life harder for you. That’s not what’s going on. What’s really going on is that you haven’t answered an important question that every leader must answer at the end of the day: have I set up my team for failure or success?
Let me know how you’re holding yourself and your team responsible for being in integrity.
Sincerely,
Rob Craven, ScalePassion
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All credit to my ghostwriting partner, Dave Moore, who is instrumental in getting my thoughts out in a coherent manner & into these blogs. Thanks Dave!