7 Toxic Habits That Impact Your Team’s Productivity
Let’s look at some toxic habits that form, how they impact your team, and what you can do about changing them!
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As a leader, you must always look for opportunities to improve effectiveness and productivity. Adding new tools, and processes, delegating, hiring more, and many other options exist, but it is also paramount to evaluate ineffective and toxic behavior that could impact productivity negatively. This last bit is often overlooked.
This is often difficult to solve and requires making changes and having uncomfortable conversations. Due to this, it tends to be avoided by managers, however not taking action could lead to unhappiness, conflict, and potentially losing valuable people.
Let’s now look at some toxic habits that occur and ways to address them.
⚠️ Addressing a Culture of Finger-Pointing ⚠️
This is all too common at organizations, where an individual or a team will point to someone else as the cause of a problem. This blame manifests in various ways, such as:
- A critical defect or blocker is “not my problem”, so there is no need to look any further, take action, etc.
- An issue that occurs is potential with one team, but they feel it is not, so instead of investigating, they just “throw it over the fence” and ask another team to address it, or worse not say anything due to being too busy.
- Instead of owning a problem, or declaring shared responsibility in the root cause, another group is blamed for the problem.
Here are a few recommendations I have to address this:
- Establish a policy that discourages blame and focuses on learning from mistakes. Retrospectives are good for this. Emphasize that the goal is to improve processes rather than calling out who did what.
- Lead by example — as a leader, you have a tremendous amount of influence on the team by how you act, and ensuring you yourself are not blaming or contributing to the culture is important and sometimes overlooked. Inspire your team and set the culture through your actions and words.
- Cross-team building is also helpful here; the idea is by having teams build a better relationship, they will be less likely to blame and more willing to work cross-team.
- Give feedback to those who blame, trying to change the bad behavior going forward. It’s important to focus on what can change, i.e. “What are you going to do differently going forward”.
Now, sometimes this will happen regardless (potentially with elevated emotions), and in those cases it’s important to become adept at conflict resolution, ensuring that the end result is calming the team down and solving the problem. After that’s done, go back to some of the recommendations above and give feedback to avoid the problem happening again.
⚠️ Negativity ⚠️
Negative employees have a very widespread impact on a company, as their reactions, attitudes, and feelings affect those around them. One bad apple really does spoil the bunch, given enough time and opportunity to do so. This unhappy person may spread rumors or share negative perspectives on the company, or its employees. What’s worse, this negativity can create a vicious circle, where the negativity causes other employees to not want to collaborate and have feelings of disdain. This treatment, then, generates more negativity, which in turn causes more employees to engage in avoidance. This cycle impacts productivity and can turn others negative.
These feelings usually arise from current pay, position, disliking other coworkers, or their manager, feeling anxious, working long hours, and even just feeling unfulfilled or dissatisfied with your job.
My recommendation is to address this as fast as possible to ascertain the root of the negativity and have an open and honest conversation. As a manager, you should usually have a semblance of an idea, but use your 1:1’s pay close attention if you are not sure, and get to the bottom of it quickly.
What Happens When You Can’t Address It?
Let’s say you determine the root cause — your director wants a lot more money or a big promotion, or maybe they want to stop doing certain kinds of work, and focus on something else (that you can’t have them do).
In these sorts of cases, being honest about what you can and cannot do is very important. “I understand you want a salary increase of X. Continuing to do a great job here can help lead to that, but unfortunately I cannot give that total amount right now.” — this is better than trying to give them false hope where in the short term they’re mollified, but long term you’ve just lost trust with them.
⚠️ Favoritism & Targeted Praise ⚠️
When a manager favors one person and praises them, others become bitter. Why isn’t my hard work being recognized? She always gets exciting projects.
As a leader, you need to think about whether you engage in this behavior and are unknowingly playing favorites. This doesn’t simply span projects — let’s say for example you and one of your Directs enjoy the same coffee, and this person has been working hard lately, so you occasionally bring back a coffee for them. Or perhaps you get lunch with one of your directors. These are cases where it can create confusion or bitterness, and you must be fair across your entire team.
⚠️ Micromanagement Madness ⚠️
Micromanaging often stems from a lack of trust, uncertainty, a desire for control, and/or a fear of the unknown. Micromanagers often undermine the autonomy of their team members by closely dictating every aspect of their work. This can lead to frustration and a lack of empowerment among team members. Attempting to oversee every detail, being overly prescriptive in how to approach problems, and coming in heavy-handed when orders were not followed are all tell-tale signs of this.
Combined with creating a “pressure cooker” of an environment (expecting results quickly, hourly check-ins, and getting intimidating and loud when these daily expectations are not met) and this ultimately creates a very toxic culture where the team feels like they have no room to thrive or innovate. It also erodes trust within a team; when employees feel their every move is being distrusted and monitored, it can create a negative atmosphere, leading to decreased morale and job satisfaction.
If you are a manager reading this or are just curious about micromanagement in general, I urge you to read my post on this subject as I felt it warranted a dedicated story.
Addressing micromanagement involves cultivating trust, empowering team members, and promoting a healthy balance between supervision and autonomy. Look to focus on providing clear expectations, open communication, and trusting the team to achieve objectives, allowing for a more collaborative and productive work environment. If you have a hard time trusting the team, look to see what training and opportunities you can give them to “prove you wrong” and develop them professionally to allow you to lessen up on the reins.
⚠️ Communication Breakdown ⚠️
Team members that are not listening, or not sharing important information that can help another team move forward is all too common and unfortunately leads to frustration. For example, a bug is completed by a developer, but they do not change the status and tell quality assurance it’s ready to test.
Being vague is also an example of where communication breaks down — when you as the manager are not clear in your direction, feedback, or ask, it can lead to errors and loss of effectiveness. Colleagues can also be vague by not sharing or agreeing on how. For example, one software developer says they will work on a JSON contract to appear like X, but the other developer who needs to use it expects Y. Now there is a misalignment, and valuable cycles can be lost trying to figure out what the error is.
Not meeting is another case where the team should be getting together into a focused working session or meeting to solve a problem. As an example, a crucial problem is ongoing, but everyone is exchanging opinions over email or chat software. Instead, someone should step up and start a call or meeting to collaborate and get it done!
⚠️ When Collaboration Becomes Counterproductive ⚠️
As mentioned above, many times a meeting can help mitigate communication problems, but there are times when too many meetings are also problematic, and productivity decreases. Time is valuable, and when an employee is frequently switching between work and meetings, they can grow frustrated, which may contribute to negativity and a toxic culture. Other times, the audience includes too many or not the right people, creating issues. Imagine being invited to a weekly meeting where 90% of the time the topic isn’t relevant to you. That happens all the time, and this contributes to aggravation.
One must be judicious in calculating whether a meeting is needed, and who should attend. In addition, look to reduce or consolidate existing meetings to streamline processes and give back time to your team.
There is something to be said to having a few hours to yourself to get work done — try to give your folks that opportunity as often as you can.
⚠️ Ignoring the Team’s Well-Being ⚠️
Another bad habit is to ignore your team’s overall mood and wellness. If you can sense intense frustration, boredom, disinterest, lack of sleep, etc. it’s time to take a deeper look. Could a spot bonus help? A mandatory day off? Something as simple as “Thank you for the hard work” could go a long way.
In addition, you’ll often get recommendations or feedback for ways to improve processes, systems, or even how your team is working. As an example, someone might say “I’m having a really hard time joining a status meeting 3x a week, especially when it rarely covers my areas”. If this is not isolated to one person, and you sense fatigue and frustration across the board, maybe the cadence can be reduced to 1x a week, or the meeting repurposed somehow.
Ignoring these warning signs can contribute to a toxic culture in the sense it demonstrates to your Directs that whatever they are going through, you’re fine leaving it as is, and you aren’t planning on making any changes. Sometimes the expectations of your Directs are not realistic or possible, but at least you had a conversation and tried.
Simply ignoring entirely is a different matter.
Wrapping Up
In conclusion, a team can start out fine but in time toxic habits can start to form, either by the team itself or from the leadership. These behaviors need to be carefully evaluated and changed from time to time to ensure a happy team, which will certainly lead to more productivity.
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