Superstar employees are the obsession of the corporate world. They’re highly sought after, given the most attention and the best opportunities, generously rewarded, and expressly reassured after setbacks. Data shows that this group has outsize influence: high-performers have been estimated to be four times as productive as average workers, and research has shown that they may generate 80% of a business’s profits and attract other star employees.
But according to a working paper from Harvard Business School, there’s another group that can have an even greater effect on organizations: toxic workers. These are people who make going to work downright painful. In the most extreme cases, they lie, or steal, or show other kinds of illegal or unethical behavior. They could be a bully, incompetent, or just clueless about how to get along with others at work.
The impact of toxic workers on the workplace is much bigger and more destructive than you may think. One bad apple, the saying goes, can ruin the bunch. So, too, with employees.
A single toxic worker is enough to wreak havoc and negatively impact an entire workplace. Toxic coworkers make work dreadful and unpleasant. Research shows a damaging response from those on the receiving end to toxicity at work: decreased work effort, decreased time at work, fall in work quality, dip in performance and reduced commitment to the organization.Not only these, toxic workers create unnecessary drama, harm the organizational culture, undermine the values of the company and damage trust within the team. That’s why having to deal with toxic coworkers is one of the main reasons people leave jobs, according to an analysis published in the MIT Sloan Management Review.
To help both employees and employers deal better with difficult co-workers, associate professor of psychology at New York University Tessa West has identified seven types of toxic people at work and suggested ways to handle them. You can read about this in her book
Jerks at Work: Toxic Co-Workers and What to Do About Them. In this episode, I’m going to talk about five of them.
Kiss up/kick downers
The first type of jerk West talks about are the Kiss up/kick downers. They have only one goal in mind: to climb to the top by any means. To get there, they consider everyone who works with them as their competitor but use their skills to get affection from their bosses. They obsessively compare themselves with others, especially those with the same job title, pedigree or even the same office size. They question your ability and position, and regularly try to dig out information about how much money you’re making, how many days you get off as a package and so on. Then they use this information about you to compete against you. They make you feel a little bit insecure about yourself. They often do this as a way of getting ahead. They will sabotage you behind the scenes to get where they want to go. And they're really smart about covering their tracks. But the problem here is that their bosses tend to like them because they have certain skill sets so simply complaining about these people to your bosses almost never works.
Credit stealers
The next group West talks about in her book is a credit stealer. Most people face credit stealers quite a few times during their careers. For example, you've said a really important point during a discussion or a meeting and then somehow by the end of that meeting someone else has been associated with that idea. Credit stealing is pretty common at work partly because it’s really difficult to know who to give credit to. Moreover, they are wolves in sheep’s clothes - the smart credit stickers tend to be our friends, our confidants and even our mentors. They can do and get away with it because people trust them and they sometimes give you credit publicly for work that you even didn’t do. They make it look like they are a team player and they are on your side. But they’ll betray your trust if your idea is good enough to steal and are secretly jealous of your success. So it’s hard to beat them with simple tactics because they are good at covering their tracks.
Bulldozers
The next ones are the bulldozers who are seasoned, powerful, well-connected employees who aren’t afraid to flex their muscles to get what they want. These are the ones who take over the meetings, dominate the entire screen on a zoom call while everyone else’s get minimized and it’s really hard for others to speak up. So if you find that your team is just hitting a wall, you can’t get buy-in from the management, it is often due to a bull-dozer who dislikes the agenda you are trying to push forward. So they’ll go behind the scenes to the boss’s boss or even higher in the rank to shut the things down. The bull dozers have no interest in compromising.
Freeriders
Free riders are experts at doing nothing but getting rewarded for it. The free riders tend to be very charismatic, likable and fun to be around. They delegate their work to others and they get away with it because they pick teams full of conscientious people who are quick to make up for any gap at their work. These conscientious people can even overcompensate and outperform teams that don’t have free riders. The free riders take advantage of strong teams that are collectively rewarding to really get away with doing nothing at work. And they do it with a smile so no one in the team wants to complain about that.
Dealing with toxic coworkers
Now after talking about the common types of toxic coworkers, let’s touch on how to deal with them. We often think that the first step should be to confront this person or complain to the boss but Tessa West argues that this approach only works sometimes. Instead, she suggests doing some homework first before going into a confrontation or complaining. So collect some data, form some allyships with people who aren’t your best friends but are well connected in your social networks to discover how widespread the problem is. This is important because when you confront this toxic coworker or complain to your boss, you need to know whether this toxic person’s behavior has affected others in the organization or is it really just an issue of just you.
Next, when you finally confront, there are a couple of tricks to follow, suggests West. The first rule of thumb is that instead of starting the conversation with the problem, talk about a strength that you want to see this toxic coworker doing more of. So open your conversation by talking about their behavior, which you like and you want them to do more. Then, when you come to criticize their toxic behavior, don’t talk about how you feel about the behavior or what the behavior says about them. Instead, be specific about their behavior. This makes them less threatened than if you made these broad generalizations. Besides these two rules, indicate that through the conversation what you want to achieve is alignment of goals between the two of you, not nitpick the other person’s behavior. This makes the conversation less personal and more about work.
But then when do we throw a towel - fire them if you’ve the power to do so or change your job if you can’t tolerate toxicity anymore. According to West, it depends on the exact nature of what they are doing and whether it's intentional or not. In her book, she writes that we often assume that everyone who’s a jerk is meaning to be a jerk. But that may not always be the case. Sometimes toxic behaviors like credit stealing or bulldozing can be unintentional. So first determine whether the toxic behavior is intentional or not. Then, think if they have been receptive to feedback. If they are not motivated to change, then you can’t get very far. In any situation though, the important thing is to gain muscle to deal with conflicts at work because there is no guarantee that you won’t encounter toxic people at your new job, is it?
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