"A report from Harvard Business School found that when a company gets rid of a toxic worker, it's more than twice as valuable as hiring a superstar. Toxic workers cause 78% of coworkers to decrease their commitment to the company. So why can't managers just get rid of them? Here's my personal experience: It's a combination of fear and complacency."
"Mark was our highest performer; he'd delivered major client engagements and had superior technical knowledge. At first, he was so good that nobody cared about his rough edges. Then he started hoarding client relationships, making himself the only person who understood key accounts. By the time he was openly undermining leadership, I'd already normalized it. I'd heard myself say, "That's just Mark.""
"After I fired him, reactions from our team were split. His mentees, who'd only seen his brilliance, marched into HR to insist we'd fired our best performer. A second group of people came quietly, saying they'd been afraid to speak up for months. (One project manager told me he'd been updating his resume, because he just couldn't deal with Mark anymore.) That reaction haunts me, because their silence was my fault."
"I'd clearly built a system that measured what people produced ...but ignored how they treated each other. As a result, we were effectively rewarding bad behavior."
Three employees from the same team took stress-related sick leave within six months. A client meeting revealed a senior project manager snapping at internal staff and undermining their work in front of the client. When confronted, the manager showed no remorse and claimed the company’s customers depended on him. The manager was eventually fired, but team reactions were divided between those who focused on his performance and those who had been afraid to speak up. The firing exposed that the manager’s behavior had been normalized and that the company’s measurement system rewarded production while ignoring how people treated each other, effectively reinforcing bad behavior.
#workplace-toxicity #management-accountability #employee-well-being #performance-measurement #organizational-culture
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