Dealing with Toxic Workers: 10 Evidence-Based Coaching Practices
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Dealing with Toxic Workers, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
About 2 minutes
Try it here: list the moments you have seen
List what you have seen in your own words, and what each one cost the team. Naming the cost shows what to address first.
What have you seen, and what did it cost? One per line.
Practices that may help
- Give voice to those with uncomfortable perspectives
Actively surface and protect the dissenting or marginal voices the system wants to silence.
Adaptive Leadership, Made Practical - Teach speak-up skills, not just encourage speaking up
Give team members specific language for raising concerns, not just permission to raise them.
Psychological Safety in Teams - Respond productively to failure and bad news
How you react in the first thirty seconds after a mistake either banks or burns safety.
Psychological Safety, Made Practical - Regulate the level of distress in the system
Keep productive pressure high enough to motivate change but low enough to prevent shutdown.
Adaptive Leadership, Made Practical - Show up for the person, not just the deliverable
Acknowledge what is happening in someone’s life when it is clearly affecting them — before addressing the work.
Caring Personally: The Foundation of Radical Candor - Respond non-punitively to mistakes
When someone brings you a problem or mistake, make your first move curiosity, not blame.
Psychological Safety in Teams - Name frustrations without shame
Frustrations are not weaknesses — they’re a mismatch signal that the team can act on.
The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni) - Apply anti-goals to relationships and collaborators
Naming the relational patterns you refuse to accept prevents you from optimising for the wrong things in who you work or live with.
Anti-Goals: Defining Success by What You Refuse to Accept - Recognize and replace the Four Horsemen
Criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling each have a specific antidote.
The 5-to-1 Positivity Ratio in Relationships - Repair a damaged leader-follower relationship deliberately
Take active steps to reset a deteriorated relationship, rather than allowing avoidance to compound the damage.
Leader-Member Exchange (LMX), Made Practical
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- There’s one person on my team everyone’s decided is just a complainer, and I keep noticing they’re actually pointing at the thing nobody wants to face
- I’ve told my people a hundred times they can disagree with me, but they still don’t
- Something just blew up and I can feel the whole team watching how I take it
- When I push my team on the hard stuff they either shut down and start blaming each other or just nod and carry on as before
- Someone on my team is clearly going through something heavy and I’ve just been carrying on talking deliverables like nothing’s wrong
Related concerns
- Dealing With Toxic Employees
Actively surface and protect the dissenting or marginal voices the system wants to silence.
Give voice to those with uncomfortable perspectives
- Deal With Toxic Employees
Actively surface and protect the dissenting or marginal voices the system wants to silence.
- Dealing With Toxic Coworkers
Actively surface and protect the dissenting or marginal voices the system wants to silence.
- Employee Creating A Toxic Work Environment
Give team members specific language for raising concerns, not just permission to raise them.
Teach speak-up skills, not just encourage speaking up
- Examples Of Toxic Employees
Actively surface and protect the dissenting or marginal voices the system wants to silence.
- How To Deal With Toxic Employees
Actively surface and protect the dissenting or marginal voices the system wants to silence.
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.