I am sure we have all heard the age-old proverb “One bad apple spoils the whole barrel”. Well, this might be a perfect metaphor for your workplace culture. Here is some news that every business and organization should take notice regarding their own team culture. A recent study and research was conducted on behavior in the work environment. What they found was that behavior, whether good or bad was contagious.
The results found that even when other team members were exceptionally talented and intelligent, one team member’s negative attitude and poor performance brought down the effectiveness of the entire team. In dozens of trials conducted over monthlong periods, groups with one underperformer did worse than other teams by an alarming rate of 30 to 40 percent. Wow!
To make matters worse, the other members started mirroring the poor team members. Surprising was how the others on the team would start to take on the poor team member’s characteristics.” When one team member was a “slacker”, the rest of the group lost interest in the project. If the team member was a “jerk”, others in the group also started being jerks by insulting one another speaking abrasively. When a team member was a depressed pessimist, the rest of the team became lethargic and gloomy.
The bottom line is every business leader and manager needs to evaluate their team culture and identify those poor performers as soon as possible. If not those poor performers can be affecting the performance of others on the team. Here is what every manager needs to consider.
ONE BAD PERFORMER WILL AFFECT THE LEADER AND TEAM:
- Will sap the leader’s time and energy so they have far less time for the top performers.
- Will reduce the quality of group’s discussions lowering the overall team’s IQ
- Will force ways for others to work around the poor performers thus reducing efficiency.
- Will drive team members who seek excellence to quit or give up.
- Will show the rest of the team that the leader accepts mediocrity which will multiply the problem.
Here are my thoughts. If you spend most of your time trying to coach an employee up, trying to get them to ‘get it,’ you are hiring poorly.
You get what you pay for. Hiring great people takes time and is an investment in your business or organization. Every employee is like a stock in your investment portfolio. It has been said that one high performer delivers more than ten average employees in a creative environment. Not to mention, average employees bring down high performers.
“It’s hard to soar like an eagle when I work with a bunch of turkeys.”
The bottom line is that performance is contagious. It used to be that average employees would conform but today just one poor performer will contaminate the performance of the rest of the team. A great workplace is not about a lavish office, pool tables or free snacks. It’s about the joy of being surrounded by people who are talented and have a good work ethic. Now that would be MAGICAL!