This transcript records a short interview (hosted on Naked Insider) with Peter Natra about the nature, impact, and remediation of toxic employees. It defines toxic employees (self-aggrandizement, demeaning others, abrasive boundary enforcement), contrasts rudeness versus toxicity, describes organizational impacts (morale loss, trust erosion, attrition, cultural drift, potential organizational failure), and recommends leadership, documented behavioral boundaries, and policies as primary responses.
Chapters
Hello and welcome back to Naked Insider. And I have Peter Natra again and thank you for joining. So today's video, and I'll pose a question. What is the cost to the organization of a toxic employee?
The cost can be more than you can actually guesstimate at because it can be very, it can spread throughout the organization very rapidly and we're going to.
Find out very soon.
Yep.
But before we start talking, talking about the actual cost, what is, or define me, what toxic employee is all about?
Toxic employee is somebody who will grandiose themselves and also will make others feel inferior or make them feel less than and basically interfere with their capability with those individuals. Capability. So you could almost see it as self aggrandizement as well.
Very much so. I would say also, I mean from my side, I think they would be very sort of toxic from a perspective of culture. So they very much degrade the organizational culture.
Correct. And yes, they do degrade the organisational culture and they take it into a direction that it doesn't want to go, probably.
Okay, can you give me a sort of very simple example of what is a toxic employee?
So a toxic employee is one that enforces their boundaries or enforces their territory in a particularly acidic way or particularly abrasive way that forces others to comply to their boundaries and forces others to comply to their view of how that organization should be run and oftentimes to the detrimental performance of those people that they're affecting.
Okay, so what is the difference between someone who's rude compared to a toxic employee?
Sometimes people that come across as rude simply are calling a spade a spade. And quite frankly you probably need people like that in the organization. But somebody who is rude for the sake of expressing an emotion or getting rid of their frustration and imposing that on other people, that is, that is toxic.
Okay. And then if we take it to another level, which is then narcissism and self aggrandizement. Yes, correct.
Visions of self beyond one's own abilities.
Correct. Yes, correct. But in some ways they're very similar to what you can categorize as a toxic employee.
Absolutely.
Most the same. All right, so let's talk about impact. Yes. If you have a, a single toxic employer, what is the potential impact that they can actually cause?
So a toxic employee will have a visible effect inside of the whole organization. And there's a couple of things that can happen. If they are a charismatic type of person, then they will aggregate around themselves other people that become their choir.
Yes.
And oftentimes they are also in a position where they can use whatever it is that their purpose is in that organisation as leverage to have that tolerated by management level. And sometimes you even have toxic personalities in a management level which can be a problem as well.
Okay, okay, cool. So the cause and the impact to the organization as a result of that sort of behavior.
There's an analogy of one bad apple can ruin the whole crowd.
That's a good one.
What happens is that there is a creep in again values, I suppose, if you like, from the original purpose of the organisation and the original vision of the organisation that goes further and further adrift. And a lot of the organisation will come along with that if it's not kept in check, if the ship isn't steered back into the direction that it.
I think as soon as you have that sort of negative degradation in an organization, you're really creating, talking about the word trust, a low level trust, low level morale. And again, I think it's very similar to what we discussed before around bullying, which is now you're creating an environment where it's difficult to work with. You're creating more stress, you're creating more anxiety. People are unsure of themselves, they don't know whether they should be working there and so forth. And I think if you take to the extreme, depending on how people view and receive that sort of toxic negative outburst maybe coming towards them, that they.
Might decide, well, well, you'll have an attrition effect. So those people that don't resonate with that environment will tend to leave.
Correct.
And those people. And look, we're not in a petri dish yet.
Correct.
So your reput does go around. So what will happen is you'll tend to attract those kind of people that will then resonate within that environment that you may or may not want to have in the organization in the first place. And by attrition you'll find that you get this being the norm rather than being an outlier.
Yeah. Could the toxic person cause so much damage that they could fail the organization?
Absolutely. By just being focused on their own private little boundaries and losing sight of what it is that they're there for. They can, they can totally annihilate an organization.
Because you know, I've come across stories about toxic salesperson. But imagine if you have a toxic director or toxic CEO. It becomes a bit of a different story, doesn't it?
It does, it does and it needs to be addressed or it will have circumstances around it that people don't want.
Correct. So talking about addressing what strategies do organisations have to address it.
Most of the organisations need to go back to find what their founding principles are and then set up boundaries, set up directions, set up documentation, if you like. This is acceptable behavior and this is not acceptable behavior. And it really does need to be adhered to. Because the old saying is you get what you put up with. If you put up with rubbish, you get rubbish. So if you reset the boundaries, or if you set the boundaries and keep resetting them, very soon those people that are toxic will want not to be in that organisation and then you'll have a vacuum for those people that want to be in the organisation to come there and move along with the vision that you had in the first place.
So how important is then to have right leadership?
Absolutely important. That's the definition of leadership. Leadership is the leader of the ship. This is the direction we're steering in, this is the direction we're going. If that leadership allows adrift in any way, shape or form, then that becomes the new direction, that becomes a new navigational standard. You really do need to have strong.
Leadership because we know we've come across situations or stories whereby you've got a top salesperson and they might be generating 60 to 80% of the revenue, but management says, well.
Who'S managing who in that situation?
Correct?
Yes, you have. I'm the list. Make it like this. I'm the top salesman, so I can do anything I want.
Ha ha ha.
But literally what you're doing is you're saying you're no longer the, you're no longer the leader here. I get the lead because of this leverage I put over you. That's not on.
Alright, so if you had to summarize that in terms of what organizations could do right now, what's the number one thing or advice that you could recommend?
Recognise that if there is individual or individuals like that inside of an organization, recognise it. Then if you've not yet put together strategies or policies, we can certainly help you out with that and work with you to come up with a direction that will serve your needs much better than letting it drift.
Good, good. So Peter actually answered a few questions all at once. This is all good. So if you need some advice or help in terms of helping you mitigate bullying or the toxic personality, then reach us all our details down below. So that's basically it in regards to toxic employee. And by the way, if you've got a topic that you'd like us to talk about, please let us know. So reach out to us and tell us what, what area of human behavior you would like us to talk about. So the next video is going to.
