Toxic Teams
How Good Teams Go Bad
Every team starts with the promise of happiness, satisfaction, and glory. Every single engineer, product manager, designer, manager, and everyone else associated with that team is motivated to go solve tough problems for their customers, build some cool stuff, and, in general, go win. On the surface, this sounds magical, but the disappointing reality is that this happiness doesn’t last for the majority of teams. 75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional, and only 15% of companies report having a healthy culture. Those are pretty depressing stats. This post is about how happy teams devolve into toxic, unproductive, and unhappy teams. Caveat emptor, just like all my other posts, these are just my observations from my 20-year career in tech.
When Leadership and Teams Stop Speaking the Same Language
Every team and the leaders who oversee them start out with the right intent, but over time, there is a real chance their intents and goals diverge to a point where employees and leaders develop a deep mutual distrust.
A great example is the era of social justice causes. When leaning into social causes was en vogue, companies leaned in hard. Capital was also nearly free at the time, so for reasons I can only speculate (cultural cachet, recruiting, brand awareness), companies threw themselves into social causes like it was nobody’s business. All this virtue signalling never amounted to any real change to their bottom lines. All it did was let them score cheap social points. Brand teams leaned into it for social media wins, recruiting used it as a talking point, and so on. The problem was that this was somewhat of a one-way door. Inadvertently, these companies were conditioning their employees and customers to believe they were working for or buying from a social justice champion.
Fast forward to the lean years. Free capital is gone. Something charged happens on the social scene (the ICE raids, or the war in the Middle East, etc). Employees now expect the company to react just like it did before. But leadership is trying to dig out of the COVID-era hangover and would rather its teams focus on the business than spend energy on social causes.
To be clear, I’m not saying companies shouldn’t participate in socio-political discourse. But if they do, they have to be consistent, and their stances need to be codified as a corporate value, not a vibe. The root cause here is poor executive communication about what actually matters. If you are a for-profit company, leaders have to periodically remind their employees what that means: solving for customers, hitting goals, becoming profitable, and keeping investors in mind. Companies can change direction, but when they do, they have to be deliberate about communicating the what and the why. Lastly, leaders should always be very clear about which decisions will be democratic and which won’t be. This way, employees can decide if the company’s values and goals are something they can work with or not.
Poor Ownership and Accountability
Companies often have the tendency to hire smart people for a lot of money and point them in the general direction of a problem. They assume that smart people will work together to break down the problem and solve it. I can unequivocally tell you that doesn’t happen. A version of the bystander effect plays out in companies as well. People assume what their roles are and the problems they should tackle based on their comfort level, but that might not be the best use of their skills at that given moment. Additionally, a lack of clarity around who is empowered to do what encourages fiefdoms. Politically savvy leaders make plays for parts of the problem they shouldn’t be focused on, purely to keep justifying their jobs.
The best leaders are extremely prescriptive about who does what. Sometimes they calibrate incorrectly and veer into micro-management, but a little bit of micro-management is better than throwing a problem at your team and creating the corporate hunger games. Here is a simple framework for determining whether ownership lines are clear: for every employee on your team or in your org, write down their goals for the year. If more than one employee ends up with overlapping goals, you have an accountability problem.
However, if ownership lines are clear and you are still seeing toxic behavior, it might be that you have poor performers with very little ownership. A dead giveaway is when people say, “That is above my pay grade,” or “That is not my job.” To be clear, I am not suggesting that everyone should take on every single piece of work put in front of them, but a high agency person would: 1) not open with “that’s not my job,” 2) if there is a clearly identified owner, point the requestor there, 3) if no owner has been identified, either get the job done if they have bandwidth or escalate to their manager for prioritization help. But they will never say it’s not their job.
Running in Place
Nothing demoralizes a team more than not seeing wins. And winning, in most cases, doesn’t mean meaningful impact to the company’s bottom line. Teams just need to see their efforts manifest as a working product used by real customers, marketing campaigns seeing real results, or services being used by paying customers. In short, they need to see that their efforts resulted in something.
New teams working on zero-to-one initiatives run into this quite a bit. When ambiguity is high, the chances of analysis paralysis are very real, which can lead to stalemates, poor morale, and toxic teams. This is something leaders need to watch out for and intervene on when they sense the team is struggling to ship.
My rule of thumb is to intervene when a team misses its deadlines three times in a row. When I dig in, I usually find the same three culprits: nobody agrees on what to build, nobody agrees on how to build it, and nobody has defined what good enough looks like. My response to all three is basically the same. I make an executive call on direction, and we test our way to product-market fit. If there are no one-way doors, I tell the team to just pick a tool and get the damn thing done. And when people ask how we’ll know if it’s good enough, my answer is always the same: ship it, measure it, fix it.
Performative Caring
This one is more nuanced than it sounds. The leaders who openly treat their employees like cattle are easy to spot and easier to leave. The more insidious version is the leader who genuinely believes they care about their people but whose actions tell a completely different story.
You know the type. They kick off every all-hands with “our people are our most important asset” and then approve a compensation structure that pays below market. They say “my door is always open,” but make you feel stupid for walking through it. They celebrate “work-life balance” in the company handbook and then Slack you at 10pm expecting a response. They throw pizza parties after a brutal quarter instead of asking why the quarter was brutal in the first place. This is performative caring, and employees see through it faster than leadership thinks.
The employer-employee relationship is like a see-saw. What you want is balance, both sides pushing equally, essentially seeing eye to eye most of the time. The minute it overswings in one direction, you get problems. And the particular problem with performative caring is that it creates a specific kind of resentment, one that is harder to articulate and therefore harder to fix. Employees can’t point to a single villainous act. It’s death by a thousand small disappointments that eventually push the employee side of the see-saw way down.
The best leaders I have worked with or observed share one common trait: they are consistent. What they say and what they do are the same thing, whether anyone is watching or not. That consistency, over time, is what builds the kind of trust that makes teams want to go above and beyond.
Why Are They Still Here
Nothing reveals a leader’s true character faster than how long they let a toxic performer stick around. And in most organizations, they stick around way too long. The good people notice. They always do. And when they see someone who is actively making the team worse face zero consequences, they draw a very logical conclusion: leadership either doesn’t see it or doesn’t care. Neither is a good look.
In my experience, it comes down to three things. The first is conflict avoidance. Managing out a poor performer is an uncomfortable, time-consuming process, and a lot of leaders would rather tolerate the dysfunction than have the hard conversation. The second is over-reliance. Toxic performers are often technically strong or have institutional knowledge that makes leaders nervous about losing them. So they make an implicit trade: we will put up with the behavior in exchange for the output. That trade always costs more than they think. The third is denial. Some leaders simply cannot bring themselves to admit they made a bad hire, so they keep hoping the person will turn it around.
The cost of letting toxic performers linger is almost always underestimated. It’s not just the damage they do directly. It’s the good people who leave because they don’t want to work with them. It’s the team members who quietly disengage because they see that bad behavior has no consequences. It’s the cultural signal it sends to everyone watching: this is what we tolerate here.
My rule is simple. Be direct with them about what you are seeing and give them a genuine chance to course correct. If they don’t, move fast. Every day you wait, the damage compounds, and your credibility as a leader takes another hit. The team is watching. They are always watching.
Here is the uncomfortable truth. Most of the things that make teams toxic are not mysteries. Leaders know when communication is broken. They know when ownership is unclear. They know when someone on the team is making everyone else miserable. The question was never whether they knew. It was whether they cared enough to do something about it.
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