“I know he’s an asshole, but he’s really smart!”

This was the answer given to a friend of mine a few years ago when he raised serious issues about the behaviour of a new senior manager hired at his company.  This manager’s abusive and critical behaviour had seriously impacted the morale and performance of his team, which (before his arrival) had been high-performing with a great culture.  In spite of the complaints, the senior staff still believed that this manager was a net benefit to the company.

They were, of course, dead wrong.  But too many senior business leaders still cling to the myth that every Great Leader or Great Artist or Great Thinker is difficult to get along with – that the poor behaviour is a part of the package, something to be expected if you want the best.  I imagine some toxic leaders excuse their own abusive behaviour by believing themselves to be that Great Leader.

The damage that toxic [1] employees can inflict on a company is well-researched.  This 2015 study from the Harvard Business School estimated that the benefit of hiring even the highest-performing (toxic) employee was far outweighed by the damage they do.  They showed that a company would be much better off hiring an average, non-toxic employee than they would hiring a top-1% performing toxic one.  And their damage estimates did not include the significant cost of turnover driven by the toxic employee.

But what happens to teams after a toxic team member leaves?  Is recovery automatic?  Is there more that needs to happen?  This had been less well-studied.

As a part of my research for this article, I surveyed or interviewed twenty-five people who worked with toxic co-workers or bosses to get some understanding of the legacy of toxic team members.  (My sample was neither large, random, nor representative – this was just to gather anecdotal insights, not numbers.)  The toxic behaviours that they reported included:

• Being verbally agressive or abusive

• Spreading malicious gossip, lying, gaslighting, or blame-shifting

• Making racist, sexist, homophobic, or similar comments or jokes

• Excluding specific people from knowledge sharing, ignoring their emails

• Micromanaging or other overly-controlling behaviours

When I asked my respondents what happened in their teams after the toxic person left, fully half of them couldn’t tell me because they had left the team first, primarily because of the toxic behaviour.   Even long after leaving a toxic employment situation, many of my respondents were still scarred by their experiences.

“If you’re in the midst of it, it’s very hard to talk about.  Like being in a bad relationship… Even after our toxic boss left – everyone still had PTSD.”

We know that the arrival of a toxic team member or manager negatively impacts both performance and morale, by destroying psychological safety and reducing employee engagement.  And this can happen very quickly.  Unfortunately, the recovery is not necessarily so fast. 

Most of my respondents reported that while team productivity rose almost immediately after the departure of the toxic employee, morale and engagement did not.  The destruction of team trust and the departure of key people had long-lasting effects.  This was especially true in cases where upper management had been informed of toxic behaviours early on, but took no visible action for a long time. 

“Getting rid of the toxic person was good, but there was no follow-up with employees. While the situation is somewhat better now without him, we are still left to deal with the emotional baggage of having no response from his managers for 5+ years before something happened. There is a lack of trust from employees. The team has always done its work and completed tasks with pride and stellar effort. That hasn't changed. Job satisfaction has changed, and morale.”

“The fallout is still being felt from being gaslighted for so long.”

“After our toxic boss left, everyone still had PTSD. We all wondered, what does the new manager mean when he says this or that?  What is he going to do?  How long will he stay?   Our whole sense of team camaraderie is gone.  There is cynicism, and lack of trust.  [The new guy] walking in and assuming everyone is going to be one big happy family is unrealistic”

“Two of us raised red flags about the new manager before she was brought in, but we were ignored.  It wasn’t until over a year later that she was fired, but only because her behaviour finally affected her boss.  By that time several of our best people had quit the team so they wouldn’t have to deal with her, and our in-team trust had been completely destroyed.  Even after she left, several more people quit over the next few months, because it was clear senior management didn’t care about our concerns.”

If you are a hiring manager, obviously you want to avoid hiring a toxic employee in the first place.  If you have hired a new manager, consider booking skip-level meetings with that manager’s employees during the probationary period to get the team’s feedback about how the new manager is working out.  Where is the manager doing well?  Where can the manager improve?  Listen to what their staff tell you, and pay attention to things they might just be hinting at.  Managers can often look very different from below than they do from above – a phenomenon sometimes dubbed “Kiss up, kick down”.

If you have fired an employee for their toxic behaviour, you need to understand that the problem may not be over.  Your other staff will be relieved, but it is very possible they will hold you responsible for inflicting that person on them.  The longer you waited to take action, the more likely this is.  Your team’s entire perception of the corporate culture may have changed – remember that “the culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behaviours the leader is willing to tolerate”. [2]  This can lead to reduced engagement, and further retention problems.  You need to repair your relationship with the team.

How do you do this?  By using the basic building blocks of Psychological Safety – honesty and vulnerability.  After the toxic employee is gone, you need to talk to their team about what you’ve learned, and how you are going to do better in the future (both in hiring a replacement, and ensuring that toxic behaviour will not be tolerated from anyone).  Give the team space to talk about the impact the toxic behaviour had on them.  If you were warned about the toxicity and ignored it earlier, apologize.  Thank the people who raised the issues.  You might want to partner with HR or a facilitator for this discussion, but don’t fob the full responsibility for it onto HR.  As a senior leader, you need to own your role in what happened.

The power of a team is not the sum of the individual talent of team members.  That sum can be greatly enhanced – or completely quashed – by the quality of the relationships that team has internally and externally.  As a leader you need to create an environment where those relationships can thrive.  When those relationships are damaged, it's not enough to pull out the knife – you need to stop the bleeding.

[1] I don’t normally like referring to human beings as “toxic”.  It’s used here as a shorthand meaning a ‘person who is engaging in behaviour damaging to others’.  This does not differentiate the source of the behaviour, which could be correctable.  There are situations where toxic behaviours can be eliminated by training or support rather than removal of a person, but that is outside the scope of this article.

[2] Quote from School Culture Rewired by Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker.

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