A Toxic Paradox
Everyone is an adjustment. When you’re interacting with anyone, you leave the core you and become slightly them. This is not a betrayal of who you are, this is the middle ground we define between any two people. It’s a place of compromise so we can communicate.
There are those people with whom this is an easy, natural place to reach. It’s that friend that you haven’t seen or heard from in six months, and the 12 seconds it takes for both of you to get back into a familiar place where the six months vanish. It’s the easy now.
Then there are those people who are more work. They require a protocol of context setting, translation, and cautious check-ins. Hi, I said this, is this what you heard? Ok, good. This set of abilities, of communication skills, is more work and is a skill you refine over the years. It is a requirement of seasoned managers who are constantly thrown into meetings with strangers where they need to move quickly and efficiently past the “getting to know you” phase and into the “we’ve got work to do” portion of the meeting.
My guess is the majority of our relationships fall into the either the natural or slightly-more-work buckets. The majority of the folks you surround yourself with both inside and outside of work are manageable. Not all are natural, so they are work, but you can live with them and are willing to do the work to maintain the relationships.
Then, there are those you can’t handle. These are the folks who, for reasons you may never understand, behave in a way that you’ll never grasp, can’t define, nor will ever like.
These people are toxic.
Big Fat Toxic Assumptions
This article is going to end with someone getting fired and it makes two large, uncomfortable assumptions.
First, as I explain the serious issues with toxic co-workers, I need to remind you that when it comes to disconnects between two people that there are always two vastly different stories regarding perceived toxicity. If I were to say that Veronica had a toxic personality, you would do well to spend some time with Veronica and see what her perception was of me. While I might have done as much due diligence as possible to examine every possible personality angle regarding Veronica, there would still be essential data to be gathered directly from her.
A declaration of toxicity is a judgement. Sometimes defined by a group, sometimes spearheaded by an influential individual who simply cannot find a healthy way to relate to this person, but regardless, never trust a toxicity label without doing your own research.
Second, this article isn’t about fixing the problem; this article assumes you’re done. You’re done trying to bridge the gap between you and this toxic person. If you’re a manager, this is hopefully the end result of months of careful negotiating, delicate compromise, and hardcore communication.
There are entire parts of your organization dedicated to providing ideas and skills about how to interact better with anyone on your team and this article assumes you’ve employed all of them.
I’m not going to walk you through strategies for dealing with toxic people because you’re past that. This person is infecting the team with their toxicity and you’re vastly underestimating the daily damage this person is doing to the group.
This article is here to convince you it’s time to make a change.
Go Team!
A toxic person kills, and by kills I mean totally destroys teamwork.
Teamwork is one of those painful managementese buzzwords that is blindly used at inopportune times as a means of motivation. We need better teamwork to improve efficiency and productivity. Ew. I just threw up in my mouth. Fact is, teamwork — teams of people actually working together — is kind’a magical.
Listen, it takes all I can muster to get along with my brother who I’ve known my entire life, so the fact that a group of people sitting in close proximity to each other can build a product without killing each other is a fucking miracle.
It’s not actually a miracle. It’s years of practice, starting in elementary school where you learned the basics: raise your hand when you want to speak, say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and don’t eat the glue. In school, you learn just as much about how to deal with different types of personalities as you do about the world, so when it comes time to jump into the workforce, you already have years of experience in social interactions with a variety of personalities.
However, all of these hand-raising, glue-free pleasantries barely prepare you for a toxic personality.
Let’s go back to the personality buckets I described above: natural, work, and toxic. Let’s say the cost of natural relationships is 1x. It’s the base unit. It’s no work, it’s simple. Let’s say that the work relationships are 2x. It requires twice as much effort on your part to bridge the communication and social gap. It’s not difficult. It’s just work. You reduce this cost as you gather more experience and as you get to know people a bit, but these relationships will never be totally natural. Fact of life.
A toxic relationship cannot be measured in terms of these work units because, at its core, it does not work. You never get to a state of comfortable communication in these relationships. They are never predictable, nor very productive, because you are in a constant state of social corrosion. There are brief moments of clarity where you have a lightning strike of insight: She’s this way because I said that and this is how she always reacts to that… so I won’t do that. Brilliant!
These moments of respite are short-lived. For reasons you may never understand, you are incapable of reverse engineering this personality, or your patterns of reaction to it, and it’s only a matter of time before you rediscover this basic disconnect and move back to thrashing around, trying to figure out the unknowable.
Yes, this is a worst case scenario.
Groups of people get along because they all subscribe to a similar culture. Yes, these people are all unique, but they get along because they have a similar belief system and buy into the same goals. This similarity of beliefs has a lot of benefit, but the biggest win is that it reduces organizational friction. There are heated arguments, but they are arguments based on similar beliefs and the presence of these beliefs means these arguments have a chance of resolution.
Now, think about your base interaction with this toxic person. You sit down in the conference room across from them and the topic at hand is easy, really cultural easy. “We’re discussing a small change to the architecture, and since you own a big part of it, I wanted to get your opinion.”
Reasonable. Professional. Respectful.
THIS ISN’T A SMALL CHANGE. YOU HAVEN’T THOUGHT THIS THROUGH. WHY WASN’T I CONSULTED EARLIER? HOW COULD WE CONSIDER THIS GIVEN WHAT I SAID 14 MONTHS AGO ON THIS VERY TOPIC WHEN I WAS IGNORED…
It’s a flood of incomprehensible toxicity. Now, inside of the flood is a bunch of historic fuck-ups on everyone’s part, but go back and read that previous paragraph. Are you seeing any of the content or are you seeing the toxicity?
Do the math. This is one meeting, and while you might pull off a meeting win when everyone’s calmed down, you’re spending the first 30 minutes of the meeting in ALL CAPS, and here’s the bad news: a majority of the team is having similar experiences. Most of the folks interacting with this person are spending their time trying to figure out how to keep this person from going ALL CAPS rather than actually getting work done.
After a time, this results in even more damage. People stop scheduling meetings with this person. They stop traveling to their part of the building and, again, I’m not talking about one or two people here, I’m talking about the majority of the team.
My definition of toxicity isn’t based on the idea that you are incapable of getting to a professional place with this person; it’s based on the idea that the culture of your group, your company, is literally rejecting this person. Everyone is avoiding this corrosive person and this avoidance is affecting productivity and morale across the board. It’s a daily emotional tax of frustration and demoralization.
A culture rarely changes for one person and in the case of a toxic person a culture will protect itself through rejection.
A Toxic Paradox
Rands, he’s just not getting along with the right people.
No.
This is not high school. I’m not talking about cliques here, I’m talking about culture. Cliques are inevitable micro-collections of people who like the look and sound of each other. Culture is the foundational broad strokes of beliefs, values, and goals in a group of people, and a healthy culture is inclusive. It seeks out new members who evolve the culture into something new and better. It’s constantly growing in interesting ways because of the people it’s built on.
A rejection by the culture, while not pleasant for anyone involved, is not a rejection based on individual taste, it’s not because someone doesn’t like someone else. It’s a rejection because of a lack of shared core beliefs. Vastly different personalities get along famously when they share a common goal.
Yes. People get petty and people dislike each other for seemingly inane, reasons, and yes, it’s a manager’s job, along with HR, to figure out how to build a constructive working relationship among these people, but this is not the situation I’m describing. I’m talking about trying to shove a toxic square peg in a cultural round hole. It doesn’t work. Keep pushing all you want, but… it’s not happening.
It’s hard to remember this when a toxic person is yelling at you, but they’re not actually yelling at you. They’re yelling at the culture. They’re pissed because their belief structure isn’t a fit with just about everyone else’s and they know it. They know that they’re not winning this argument… ever. They know that in order to win this argument, they’d need to restart the culture of the company and such an endeavor makes a re-org look like a walk in the park.
And, here’s the worst part, they might be right.
The history of the Silicon Valley is full of stories of toxic people who were, well, right. These people were physically removed from their respective companies, but their agenda, their ideas, however unpalatable to the existing cultural regime, were actually the right thing to do for that particular company.
The paradox is we often need these toxic people. We need these self-centered assholes to totally ignore cultural conventions and to mix things up beyond recognition. They don’t need social grace and they don’t need charisma. Both help, but their value lies in their intense belief in their own culture.
We need these folks, but it can’t be at the cost of the existing culture. Yes, this toxic person might have a core cultural contradictory belief that is key to the future of the business, but assess the risk. What if the cost of integrating that idea is half the team quitting because they can’t work with the idea’s toxic architect? Is that a viable solution?
No? Maybe?
The deportation of a toxic asset is a judgement call and it’s based on the fundamental idea that fitting in is easy, but real change is hard.
A Deep Breath
I admit it. I love it when the sky is falling. There is no more delicious a state of being than the imminent threat of disaster.
During these times, I’ve done great work. I’ve taken teams from “We’re fucked” to “We made it”. Yeah, we had to cancel Christmas that one time and there was that other time I didn’t leave the building for three days straight, but it was worth it because there’s no more exhilarating place to hang than the edge of chaos. We’re wired to escape danger.
There’s a reputation you get after successfully performing the diving saves. You’re “The Fixer”. You’re the one they call when hope is lost and while that’s a great merit badge to have, it’s a cover story. It’s spin. See, someone upstream from you fucked up badly. When the sky falls, it means someone somewhere underestimated the project, didn’t make a decision, or let a small miss turn into a colossal disaster, and while fixing a disaster feels great, you’re not actually fixing anything.
Management by crisis is exhilarating, but it values velocity over completeness; it sacrifices creativity for the illusion of progress.
Still, right now, the sky is falling and rather than let it fall, immediate action is necessary and my first bit of advice is that everyone takes a deep breath.
Sigh
When you see an impending crisis, your body has a distinct natural reaction. In your consideration of the crisis, you take a long, deep breath. You often don’t notice this, but if I was sitting next to you, I would hear sigh.
A sigh is associated with despair. We’re screwed. Sigh. My interpretation is different; this long, deep breath is one of preparation. Let’s break it down: Breathe in. Gathering your strength. Oh shit, how am I going to deal with this? Hold it. Hold it. Ok, breathe out. Ok, not sure what the plan is, but let’s roll.
The interesting part of the deep breath is when you hold it. Try it right now: deep breath and hold it. What are you doing when you’re holding your breath? Well, first off, you’re slowly asphyxiating, but in that moment of life-threatening tension you’re doing interesting work. It’s a subtle transformation from building tension to calm release. It can also be a deliberate moment of consideration.
You can let that breath out now.
It’s a metaphoric stretch, but it’s around the deep breath that I build my team’s communication structure. I’ll explain, but first a story.
The team at the start-up was in a design crisis. The 1.0 version of the product was out and doing well and everyone wanted to do, well, everything. Every feature was being considered. Unbridled ambition is a good problem to have for about a week. After a month, we had three different design directions in play with various levels of support. The creative rush of developing a new release was degrading to useless design meetings where different camps were building strategic fortifications rather than talking. Decisions were being made and not communicated. Confusion was replacing creativity.
In times of crisis, a few human behaviors can make everything worse:
- In the absence of direction, people make shit up. Nature abhors a vacuum and in the absence of solid information, people generate their own information to fill that vacuum. They’re not lying, they have no ill will, they’re just trying to build a semblance of structure amongst the confusion. This is only exacerbated by the fact that…
- Human beings provide mutual group therapy by endlessly talking about the crisis at hand. This isn’t the creation of new content; it’s just the regurgitation of the latest new. At the right time, this hallway cross-pollination is a great way to evolve an idea, but if all we’re doing is talking about the crisis, all we’re doing is scratching at the worry rather than dealing with it.
- Lastly, everyone wants to know everything. Combine the communication vacuums and the group therapy creating a fire hose of additional questionable content and it’s not surprising that everyone on the team wants to know everything. Before I proceed, I want total disclosure. I have something unique to add and I better get a chance to do so.
It was an information communication disaster. There were brilliant ideas wandering the hallways, there were stickies with great ideas hanging from monitors, but in the confusion that was our communication structure, everyone was running around panicking and no one was taking a deep breath.
Three Meetings
Starting on a Monday, I imposed a new meeting structure. Let me first describe the meetings and then we’ll talk about the purpose. There were three types of meetings:
1:1s with my staff. Monday morning. First meeting of the week. 30 minutes for the folks who are cruising. One hour for those in crisis. The agenda is a simple deep breath:
- What are you worried about?
- Here’s what I’m worried about.
- And discuss…
Staff. With air from our 1:1s still in our lungs, I have my staff meeting. Two hours, right after the 1:1s are complete. It sounds like a long meeting, but when this meeting is run well and full of the right people, it’s almost always over before you know it.
Staff is where we can continue to publicly worry, but Staff is where I want to turn the corner, where we turn inhale to exhale. Ok, we’re worried about a lot, but what are we going to do about it?
The tone and content for this meeting vary wildly by where we’re at in the development cycle. If we’re early in the cycle, we’re talking about the state of design. If it’s late in the development cycle, we’re looking at confidence in the quality.
There are three buckets of topics that I work through at my Staff and they’re increasingly slippery. We start with Operations (Where are we?), move onto Tactics (What are we going to do about that?), and, finally, Strategy (No really, what are we going to do about it?) I’ll explain each.
Operations — Where are we?
Operations topics are hard non-debatable measures. How many bugs we do we have? Where are we at with hiring? When are we moving? Any hard piece of data that we collectively need to know. No debate, no discussion, just alignment.
Tactics — What are we going to do about that?
Now we’re working. Tactics are changes, tasks, events, things we’re going to do as a team over the next week to address the worry we found in our 1:1s. Like operational topics, tactics are measurable, consumable things, but these are not topics we’re reporting on, this is where we’re taking action. We are going to scrub every bug in the next product milestone to make sure it belongs there. Jason is going to provide the new design by Thursday. By defining these tactics, you’re defining the agenda for the last meeting on my list, but we first need to talk strategy.
Strategy — No really, what are we going to do about it?
All of these well-defined tactics are great. They are real work, which, hopefully by the end of the week is going to define measurable progress. Go you. There are some organization, product, and people problems that you won’t be able to tackle in a week… or a month. Strategy involves deep changes to policy or culture. Our quality isn’t great, so we’re going to institute a code review culture. Our design is all over the place, so we’re going to define a style guide. Strategic topics during Staff are my absolute favorite because they represent the biggest opportunity for substantive change in the group. They’re also the hardest to define as well as the hardest to measure.
Worse, strategic changes are also tricky to implement during sky-is-falling situations because everyone is working to prevent the sky from actually falling - they’re intensely and correctly tactical. This doesn’t mean strategic discussions aren’t important during Staff. You might not discover a strategic change, but just having the discussion around the idea of change will give a glimmer of future hope to those who are hyperventilating.
When my Staff meeting is done, I’ve not only taken a deep breath, I’ve also begun the process of calmly exhaling… I now know what we need to do this week… This is generally where people screw up. They confuse the relief associated with the exhale with having a plan, with actual progress. You haven’t done anything yet except sit through three hours of meetings and we need one more.
Look What We Built Meeting. 4pm on Friday. This meeting exists for one reason - to measure the tactics we defined at Staff. Did we do what said we were going to do? From an agenda perspective, this meeting is a no-brainer. The list of topics and measurements were hopefully well-defined on Monday. Again, the content varies as a function of where we’re at in the development cycle, but some version of this meeting always occurs on Friday. Let’s review the design. Let’s look at the bug charts. Let’s confirm that we’ve made that big decision.
The “Look What We Built” meeting is the time to demonstrate progress, to show that even when the sky is falling, we know how to kick ass.
Invest in the Boring
It’s not just during a crisis that this calm, repetitive meeting pattern pays off. It’s always. I know you’ve been working with your favorite designer for three years. I know you believe you’re totally in each other’s heads, but this psychic confidence doesn’t mean you should ever skip your 1:1 with her even when the sky isn’t falling.
Communication in a group of people is an endless exercise in alignment. No matter how well you know your team, you can never predict where the internal dialogue of your team is going to wander. What this meeting structure does is set organization expectations:
- Everyone knows when they’re going to get their moment to speak in private.
- Everyone, whether they’re in the meetings or not, knows the system by which a lot of information moves around the building.
- Everyone knows, whether the sky is falling or not, how we’re measuring success on a weekly basis.
Equally important to these meetings’ existence is that they occur with obsessive robotic regularity. Years from now, when your team has been disbanded, I want you to look at your clock at 10:15am on Monday and think I’ve got my 1:1 with my boss in 15 minutes. This regularity is not a threat, it’s not a stick, it’s the basis for building trust in a team. I know I have a say.
And I haven’t even told you the best part yet.
All of this structure, all of this boring meeting repetition, exists to make room for something else. Whether you’re designing as an individual or a team, when you’re being creative, you need two things: an environment that encourages the random and time to live there. An obsessive meeting schedule is an investment in the boring, but by defining a specific place for the boring to exist, you’re allowing every other moment to have creative potential. You’re encouraging the random and random is how you’re going to win. Random is how you’re going to discover a path through a problem that no one else has found and that starts with breathing deeply.
The Screw-Me Scenario
It had all the signs of a good meeting. And I hate meetings. We were:
- Talking about a product we loved
- In great shape from a feature, quality, and schedule standpoint
- A group that historically did not kick ass
- A group that was kicking ass.
The slides looked great and the dry-run was flawless, so why hadn’t I slept in two nights?
I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t see the Screw-Me.
You Might Be Lying
There’s an article to be written about the different kinds of meetings you’re going to be exposed to, but for now I want to talk about the executive cross-pollination communication clusterfuck. The point of this meeting is alignment. Big alignment. You’ve likely got several different groups who don’t normally spend a lot of time together being forced to sit in the same room so the execs can compare stories, measure reality, and figure out who is lying.
Before I explain how to get your head around this meeting, I want to talk about intent. Intent starts with a question: “Why does this meeting exist?” If you’re responsible for the presentation in this meeting, it exists because someone hates you.
It’s not personal hate. It’s professional hate and it’s exacerbated by a simple fact of organization: different groups speak different languages. Marketing speaks marketing, Legal speaks legal, and Engineering speaks engineering. There’s a fundamental communication breakdown somewhere in the building and someone is feeling wronged. They’re feeling bullied and since they don’t speak your dialect, they’re complaining up rather than across.
Normally, we deal with these Tower of Babel situations with the direct application of middle management, program managers, and other folks we pay big bucks to sit in meetings and translate between organizations. However, translation has not worked in this case. Someone high up on the org chart is hearing two very different stories and wondering which is true. Story reconciliation is certainly on the top of your list of items to resolve in this meeting, but job #1 is to figure out who hates you.
A Rubber Stamp Affair
For these critical meetings, your goal is to make them a rubber stamp affair. In the week before the meeting, you will have personally vetted your slides with each of the meeting invitees. You will have heard their concerns and made the appropriate adjustments to your deck. When the cross-pollination meeting arrives, your goal is an utter lack of drama and the finishing pronouncement of, “Yeah, we should do that and you know how.”
It never happens like this.
We’re “busy” and we have “things to do”, but mostly we’re “looking forward to blindsiding you with a Screw-Me at the least convenient moment in front of your executive team.”
It’s a disappointing trait of human nature that folks who feel wronged like to exact their revenge by flaunting their knowledge and dishing out the Screw-Me at the worst possible time, but, roll with it, you’re already a step ahead just expecting to be screwed. Besides, your enemy is working more with emotion than content and that will turn into their own personal Screw-Me Scenario at a later date.
Right now, your job is data.
No Guilt, No Doubts, No Fear
Ideas get better with eyeballs and before this meeting goes down, your job is to get as many eyeballs on your presentation as possible. You’re not going to get everyone in the meeting, but that’s not the point. The task is cross-pollination. Casting the information net as wide as possible and incessantly asking:
- Does this make sense?
- What is missing?
- How am I going to get screwed?
I’ve got the Russian Lit Major for vetting my strategy; who do you have? I’m not talking about your boss or your co-worker, I’m talking about the person who can objectively look at your presentation and start poking holes. These people are rare because it’s another disappointing trait of human nature that we often think we’re doing each other a favor by listening well, but then tell each other what we want to hear.
You lose yourself in any significant project. You’ve long forgotten your strategic initial assumptions, but, more importantly, you’ve forgotten what other people need because you’re furiously worrying about the daily tactical fire drills. A fresh perspective is a chance to test your entire idea and find the Screw-Me. You need someone to poke holes. You need to find and fill the gaps, and as each gap is filled, you’re going to build confidence around your pitch because, well, that’s one less potential Screw-Me entry point.
You’re not going to find them all. That’s ok, because in the process of constantly refining your pitch, you’re mentally refining yourself. You’re preparing yourself by seeing each of the different perspectives in your deck,. That improves the chances that you’ll know what to do when someone starts dishing out the hate.
Game On
The meeting’s on. You’re walking in with a head full of data and my hope is that through your constant cross-pollination you are legitimately the most informed person on this particular topic in the room. There’s still work to do.
Size the room. Who is here? What groups do they represent? What do they want? Any unexpected visitors? Really? Why would they randomly show up? Who brought them? What possible Screw-Mes could they represent? Ok, let’s get started.
Carry the room. Start your deck. You’ve got it memorized, right? They can tell this is the 32nd time you’ve done it, right? Good. It’s smooth. You’ve already diffused two Screw-Mes by slide 12. Really well done there. Amanda, you have a question?
Manage the room. Questions aren’t Screw-mes. You can clarify and stay on track. You know that Amanda is going to ask about hard data, right? Don’t let her take over the conversation. Say, “I’ve got your data in the appendix, but let me get through this first, ok?” Yeah, you just shut down a Senior VP. Nicely done. No way you can do that without serious confidence in your preparation. Yes, Tim?
Tim’s got the Screw-Me and you didn’t see it coming. Total left field. Completely valid strategic observation and you don’t have a clue how to answer. Shit.
You will recognize the Screw-Me by the complete silence that fills both the room and your head. That’s the realization everyone is having that you’re Screwed. First, let’s not make it worse…
The Unforgivable Spin
Tim: “Rands, what about THIS?”
I’m a poker player and an experienced meeting surfer, so the room will not immediately know from the look on my face that This has Screwed me, but what I choose to do next will define my ongoing relationship with the room.
There are two options when you are cornered by This. Your animal brain, when cornered, will try to find a way out. You can taste this approach even before you begin. I am going to spin. I am going to talk quickly and confidently about This and I am going to hope that in my furious verbal scurrying they are going to believe I’ve got This handled.
That’s not what they’re seeing or hearing.
This is not your staff meeting where a little verbal soft shoe is going to entertain and delight. These are the execs and no matter how many meetings you’ve surfed, they see straight through spin, they know this dance, and the longer you sit there spinning, the longer you give your boss an opportunity to step in, try to make the diving save, and make you look like a blithering fool.
It takes a little practice to make the correct move when you feel the spin coming. You are going to do three things:
- Acknowledge the Screw-Me.
- Admit “I don’t know.”
- Concretely explain the steps you’re going to take to find out and give yourself a deadline.
You have completely defused Tim. See, Tim was pissed which is why he waited until precisely the wrong moment to throw down the Screw-Me. He wanted to see you spin and make a fool of yourself in front of your management team and what you did with the instant acknowledgement was crush emotion with structured sanity.
You can get lucky with spin sometimes. There are times when you spin so hard that you actually talk yourself into a Screw-Me solution that actually makes sense. But this is rare and unreliable and in my experience this frenetic verbal journey erodes confidence and wastes time.
The only question on everyone’s mind during the cross-pollination clusterfuck is, “Do you know what you’re talking about?” It’s lame that Tim doesn’t speak engineer and waited until precisely the wrong moment to Screw you, but my hope is that through your incessant vetting of your slides that you can deliver the “I don’t know” with confidence. Tim just knows what he’s pissed about and you, through your preparation, can see the entire picture.
A Screw-Me Detection Policy
An aggressive Screw-Me detection policy is, I believe, essential to navigating groups of people. It’s not just constantly knowing the potential worst case scenario in any situation, it’s that you are instinctively always looking for it. When I am looking at any situation, I’m always trying to figure out what sequence of events could occur that will screw me.
This strategy sounds a lot like paranoia and yes, an unchecked Screw-Me detection policy can result in a conspiracy theory lifestyle where THEY are out to GET YOU.
Yes, only the paranoid survive, but paranoia is a lot of work. You can burn a lot of calories worrying about all possibilities, but this is not an approach I recommend. What I’m asking is that you look at specific key events strategically. Step back and look at the whole board. Ask “What sequence of moves is going to benefit me? Can I see what is coming? And how could I get screwed?” because teams which kick ass aren’t just ones that deliver, it’s that they deliver when they’re screwed.
