Team toxins - unlocking your teams potential and promoting workplace wellbeing

By Dr Gilur Rahman

The fundamental ingredients of a successful organisation are optimised systems along with happy, engaged employees. Over the years there has been considerable work on streamlining processes and developing individual skills and qualities. There is now recognition that without a focus on relationships in the workplace the previous good work is limited in its potential.  

Business psychologists have extrapolated work done within the family and couple counselling field to the workplace. At its most basic all relationships whether professional or personal rely upon cultivating certain characteristics and avoiding others. A world renowned psychotherapist Dr Gottman who along with his wife founded the Gottman institute in the US first identified through studying married couples four patterns of behaviour that can be destructive within relationships. He was able to reliably predict the future breakup of relationships amongst couples who exhibited these traits.  He named the four behaviours as 'The four horsemen of the apocalypse'. Below is a description of these four behaviour patterns.

1. Blaming/criticism- verbally criticising someone’s character rather than attacking their argument.
   
   
2. Defensiveness– reacting in a manner to protect yourself from criticism, exposure of your shortcomings, or other real or perceived threats to the ego.
   
   
3. Contempt- treating others meanly with disrespect, mocking them with sarcasm, ridicule, belittling, cynicism, name-calling, mimicking, and/or body language such as eye-rolling.
    
4. Stonewalling - shutting yourself off from the other person and withdrawing from the interaction rather than confronting the issues. A classic example is passive-aggressive behaviour

Business psychologists have coined the term 'The four team toxins' when the same concept is used within workplaces. The toxins can be thought of as sequential, where one can lead onto the next. These behaviours are common in all relationships, we can all identify situations when we have either been the culprit or been on the receiving end of one of these behaviours. It is when the behaviour becomes the norm within the relationship that trouble brews. It is important to identify when this maybe happening and luckily there are antidotes that can be employed to help tackle the behaviours preventing a slippery slope to an inevitable break down of the relationship.  

It is worth noting at this point that the underlying aim of these behaviours are often not malicious, but it is an unskilled way of trying to achieve a desired endpoint.  

The antidotes  

Now that we know about these toxic behaviours what can we do about them. Below is a guide on how to counteract each of these behaviours followed by some more generic strategies about how to help your teams manage these toxins.

Blaming/criticism   

Have you found others are reacting badly to your approach or have been told you are exhibiting this trait than it may be worth using a model to frame your arguments to move away from the person to the situation or context at hand. Using the Coin model can help you to do this.  

Coin model 

• Context: the circumstances, event or issue that you want to discuss.
• Observation: specific, factual descriptions of what has happened.
• Impact: how the event or issue that you're discussing affects others in your team
• Next steps: a clear agreement on the changes or improvements in behaviour or performance

Example: I would like to discuss the problems with the rota. Last week the rota was incomplete. I can see that you are responsible for the rota. As it was incomplete, we were very short staffed on Sunday. It would be good going forward to ensure the rota is up to date and any gaps and filled accordingly.

Defensiveness  

• If you are feeling defensive in an interaction at work think whether you may have misunderstood the situation or the other persons intent and ask for clarification.
  
  
• A good approach is to assume there is always 2% truth in what you are hearing. Acknowledging this common ground can help to break the deadlock and make an unpleasant interaction much more productive.
  
  
• If you are on the receiving end of a defensive response clarify what the other person understood about what you are saying as more often than not a misunderstanding leads to this hostile response. 

Contempt  

To address contemptuous behaviour, promote a culture of professionalism where sarcasm, cynicism and name calling would be unacceptable in any interactions. It is important to ensure this culture permeates through all parts of the organisation including management.  

Try to verbalise your feelings and use "I" statements to bring it back to how you are feeling rather than making it personal towards another person.  The COIN model can once again be employed here to provide a framework for the interactions which are likely to be difficult.  

Stonewalling

If you are stonewalling someone try to deconstruct your behaviour to see what maybe behind it. Is there a perceived fear from interacting with this person and try to contextualise the perceived impact of this action. Ensure meetings take place in neutral environments to help address any power balance issues. If you are the recipient, look at what you are doing to cause the other person to not feel safe or to disengage. Ask probing questions and be open in your approach to get feedback.

General strategies 

To avoid toxic work relationships there are some helpful strategies to put in place. Prevention is always better than cure.  

According to Dr. Gottman’s research, healthy relationships have a 5:1 ratio of positivity to negativity. Build positivity eg humour, affirming body language, eye contact. Ensure time is spent forming the team and engage in regular team building exercises to better understand each other.  

Meetings can be a place where these toxins surface. One strategy would be to use a Toxin bowel technique for team meetings. Here you would have coloured cards on the table to represent the toxins and a bowel in the middle. When anyone feels like a particular toxin is surfacing they can throw that card into the bowel. This is nice non-confrontational way of identifying early toxic behaviours and merely labelling it often helps curb it.

This was a whistle stop tour of team toxins. Download the attached slides to start the process within your organisation to identify and stamp out these toxins.