Disgruntled Employees Can Disrupt Your Entire Team
Posted in Employee Engagement, Team Management on September 10th, 2011 by Barbara Brenner – Be the first to commentDo you have a “bad apple” on your team?
You must have heard the expression “One bad apple spoils the whole bunch”. In an office setting, bad apples are employees you must interact with who create a divisive or caustic environment which poisons relationships, generates mistrust, and will dilute the effectiveness of a team by distraction.
Bad apples stir up trouble like a mixing stick in a witch’s cauldron. They promote dissension and conflict. This spreads out across the entire team. Little by little, the team deteriorates, achievements lessen, unhappiness abounds and, in short, things are a big mess. It’s like a giant ball of wool that has been unraveled.
When the team is functioning at top level, it is because everyone wants everyone else to win. There is a great mix of cooperation, openness to new ideas, and a desire to learn new skills. Special efforts are appreciated by all, and all tend to strive to become a “giver”. Bad apples don’t work that way. It is to their benefit to focus everyone’s attention away from their own poor performance. Everyone is focused on all the chaos going on, so they don’t immediately identify the source of the chaos. I was guilty of experiencing — and falling for — the “smoke and mirrors” dance myself. In my case, it was a personal crisis of my own that caused me to delay my very much needed intervention. Eventually, I had to admit that no matter how hard my efforts, I could not salvage that employee/company relationship, because it required a good deal of effort by the employee, which was not forthcoming.
I write this post as someone who has had a failure. I admit to it in the hopes it will help others. I’m not an expert — I had to learn from experience, like everyone else. I learned the most from my team, and thank them for their honesty and insight.
Once you’ve eliminated the negative personality, can the team be repaired? It can if your past behavior was primarily positive, and you’ve built up enough trust to sustain you through a poor decision. You have some good will there to help you, but once you get rid of the poisonous influence and its effect, you will have to work at it very hard. If you are a leader/manager who has let an employee divide your team, you may have lost their trust as the guardian of workplace harmony.
Oddly enough, in some instances, the resulting harmony and strength of the team will increase upon seeing your resolution of the problem.

And who the heck is Suze Orman?





