Are Toxic Team Members Sabotaging Your Success?

As a leadership speaker, part of my job entails conferring with business owners about the issues they are facing. From time to time I encounter a business owner whose business has stalled, somehow, and he or she can’t quite figure out why. The product seems fine, the consumer base is still there, the underlying financials are all in order — but in terms of business growth, they’ve just hit a wall.

Invariably, I come at them with this question: Are you sure the problem is not with your team?

You see, one of the most common reasons why a business slows down is the presence of toxic team members — employees who aren’t working toward the same goal as everyone else, and who may be stymying the efforts of your other employees, too. To get your business back on track, you need to identify these toxic team members and counsel them, if possible — though frankly, in most cases, the only real solution is to let them go.

But what do toxic team members look like? They come in many different guises. Let me show you just a handful of the most common ones:

People who aren’t committed to the same vision. These are the folks who cause the most trouble — the ones who either can’t see the big picture or simply don’t care; the people who put in a baseline effort to avoid getting sacked, but aren’t…