In this short, the speaker outlines several low‑performing, toxic behaviors that leaders must recognize and address. The key behaviors include chronic negative complaining without offering solutions, publicly undermining or “throwing leadership under the bus,” and fostering a “we‑they” mindset by disparaging others to elevate oneself. The speaker warns that such individuals often survive multiple leadership changes, creating a generational “department curse” that can persist unless the current leader intervenes. Practical identification tips are offered: the toxic person makes meetings feel like the leader is the problem, consistently shifts blame, and never contributes constructive ideas. The overall message is a call to leaders to confront these behaviors early, prevent them from outlasting the current leader, and break the cycle for future leadership.
Chapters
So, just a couple of reminders about low-performing behaviors. You know, if you have people on your team that the way that they point out problems is always in a negative light, they're never, you know, looking at kind of solutions, they're never looking at how to fix things, they're never looking at how to make things better, they're just kind of complaining all the time, they're just kind of always, you know, talking bad about either you or the department or the organization or the work you do, or senior leadership or whatever it is. And I just want to challenge you to realize that that's not a healthy behavior in any team, in any organization. That is absolutely a low-performing behavior that we as leaders have to address. A big part of that is how they talk about leadership in general. You know, if you've got somebody on your team that is constantly undercutting or throwing leadership under the bus, that's never helpful. It's never healthy. I mean, there's absolutely conversations that we can have, you know, even behind closed doors a lot of times. I'm totally open to criticism. I'm totally open to feedback, but it's never helpful for someone to be undermining leadership in an open public space. And so if that's happening, we want to make sure that we're addressing it. These people are masters of the we/they, and what that many times will look like is they are constantly talking about themselves in a positive light or maybe that's not really the right way to look at it. They're actually talking about others in a negative light to make themselves look good. So they might talk negatively about another team member, or they might talk negatively about another department or another organization or another piece of Monarch, and they're doing it to help themselves look good, but what they're actually doing is creating this we-they culture, and it is absolutely toxic. A lot of these individuals, unfortunately, think that they're going to outlast us as the leader. And some of that's because they have, they have outlasted their last 2 or 3 leaders. And no, maybe your predecessor didn't do the right thing about their performance. And so they're still there. Maybe you've inherited them as a challenge. And so you want to make sure that you kind of break that, I'll call it generational department curse, and make sure that your legacy is not one that you're going to leave that person's poor performance for the next leader. So, make sure that they don't outlast you. And then, a lot of times, if you want to know who this person is, it's the person that when you meet with them in any setting, you might be talking to them about their performance, you might be talking to them about how the team can get better, and you somehow leave those meetings always feeling like you're the problem.
