Baby you know that your toxic!

When reading the chapter on how to deal with a toxic team, I started to wonder if suits or geeks are more prone to becoming toxic when in teams. I first gathered that geeks don’t necessarily like to be in teams in the first place, so I thought maybe geeks would be the most prone, however I then took into account that suits can be more emotional and more prone to feeling insulted, so that was a strike for the suits. I then recalled the chapter and saw that this chapter doesn’t really focus on “Geeks” in a toxic team, more so on toxic teams in general. The video below is a team that isn’t toxic and works well together. I chose to use the Madagascar Penguins because they work like a well oiled machine.

However a team that works as well as the penguins takes time to create, and doesn’t occur over night, the book talks about two main essentials in dealing with a toxic team, firstly how teams become toxic, which is due to behavior, and not necessarily bad behavior, but someone in the groups overall behavior. It can be cockiness or the person is just hard to get along with. No matter what the behavior is, this is the first step in how teams begin to become toxic. The second of the two essentials is rethinking blame. This goes hand in hand with the first idea, in the sense that the causation of the toxicity behavior creates blame. Because the behavior is noticed by others in the group, meetings and getting projects accomplished will become much more difficult. What usually follows failure is blame because everyone wants to point fingers at someone other then themselves, when something doesn’t succeed. So the strategy of rethinking blame comes in handy because once you get to the blame game, your group is pretty much at rock bottom.    How do we stop a toxic team? It starts from the beginning with addressing the toxic person or toxic behavior. In the video below it shows a flock of birds all conjoining on one telephone wire and keep pecking at each other until the see a larger bird. The flock of birds begins to make fun of the larger bird by teasing it and making fun of it until it finally gets poked to far and falls off the wire, however the larger bird had dragged the wire down so when the bigger bird left, all the little birds were shot into the air. This video is a perfect example of a toxic team.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VyPPDpT2xU

So when examining toxic teams in a situation with myself, I had a friend who we will call Andy. Andy was dating a woman who we will call Sarah. Sarah was a dreadful lady who is extremely needy and tremendously immature. I noticed this early on in there dating life and one day I took him to Mcdonalds in hopes of talking to him about possibly ending his relationship with her, or maybe confronting her of her toxic behavior. Selfish Sarah, drove him away from his friends, potential jobs, and from interacting and having his own college experience. At Mcdonalds we talked for a few hours and he agreed that he would talk to her. Later that week he told me in confidence that he was planning on breaking up with silly selfish Sarah. However that’s not what occurred, she ended up forcing an early engagement on him, without the families approval. However she is not the only one at fault. Andy was also in the wrong for allowing the toxicity. So again we met at Mcdonalds and he again told me, he doesn’t want to continue this toxic relationship, so he told me again he was going to end it. However this time they decided to move the wedding up a year! Silly Selfish Satan(Sarah) would again triumph over the forces of good. We again went to Mcdonalds, I am the best man in his wedding at this time and the wedding is months away. I told him that this was the last time I would tell him my outside looking in opinion, however he ignored me and married her….. I haven’t spoken with him in months due to her controlling nature, however from what I am hearing is that things aren’t going so well.