Toxic Team(members) and how to communicate.

And now for something we have alllll dealt with….toxic teams. In one way or another, I believe we have all had to deal with  toxicity spreading itself throughout a group of people working on a project. Where does this terrible cloud of negativity come from??

Well where going to begin straight from the book, very few teams start out toxic. It always devolves unless the team was horribly put together in the first place. The book mentions a “trigger behavior” to watch out for; someone behaves in a way that is inconsistent with what the team expected, a meeting ends up with raised voices, etc.

Here’s a loose example, On a toxic team, one person may try to get angry at anther’s methods, not seeing the entire picture. When your on a team, everyone has their own way of working, a toxic person may ignore whether a person is getting results or not and just assume that their style is completely wrong.*WARNING! LANGUAGE!!*

So what makes this an example? This player was badmouthing another toxic team member because he was playing a class the toxic player deemed a “bad class”. He instantly devalued the other team members work ethic and methods, despite the fact that he was winning with this class. According to this article, this person would be toxic team member number 3 “wine with cheese”. Just one example of how a workplace can go bad, it is fixable though!

So how do you fix a toxic environment? While researching a ran into an article with a LOAD of solutions. Lets take a look at one of them; Communication. “Making sure a horrible version of the game telephone is key” we need to keep words clear and precise, and make sure channels to communicate are always open. My core 401 group did this best, despite other problems we dealt with (there was a wine and cheese in our group) we still all did our parts right due to communication.

Effective communication that is non-toxic, will always help a group lose toxicity.