Make sure the rats don’t win

Within 15 minutes of each other, two seminar participants who struck me as sincere took me aside. They told me that two co-workers were taking advantage of the company and of fellow employees. They both described irritating, mean-spirited and destructive behavior. Almost as if they were speaking from the same script, they told me the offending employees had hoodwinked their immediate supervisors. Their complaints were ignored.

They were convinced the two supervisors were too chummy with the offenders and nothing would ever improve. Both workers were seriously considering leaving because the behavior was so disruptive. They were convinced that top management would follow the lead of the supervisors and ignore their concerns.

When I returned to my desk I found an e-mail from a retired manager who wrote about a company that continually promoted an irascible, destructive manager because “management was looking for someone with a larger dagger than anyone else.”

A frequent theme and lesson of this column has been that a company and its leadership are often judged by the people who are allowed to succeed. If the people who are promoted, or allowed to flourish in their positions, are backstabbers, gossips and lazy louts, we build a culture of such behavior. Leaders can tell themselves they are warm, fuzzy and lovable. But if the rats are winning, leaders will be judged to be rats.

The associated lesson is that our supervisors and managers are the gatekeepers who determine which people will succeed and which will fail. If, through cronyism or sloth, they allow disruptive people to wreak havoc on the rest of the workplace, a negative culture is created, no matter what the top leaders profess.

So how do we prevent negative forces from thriving? Here’s where the advice gets familiar and even redundant. We have to listen, listen and listen some more. Too often when we hear complaints about Harry, we make excuses for him. If Harry kisses up to the bosses, or if he has helped us out in an occasional tight spot, we are apt to dismiss Jack’s contention that Harry is a negative influence. Ignoring one such complaint is not a great sin, but ignoring a second complaint is a ticket to disaster. We end up sending a clear signal that Harry’s behavior is just fine with us, even if we don’t fully understand Harry’s misdeeds.

A workplace that tolerates mean, destructive behavior will drain people of positive energy and fuel stress. If productive people cannot find a solution, they will do one of two things. They will leave and you lose a potential positive influence. Or, they will decide that negative behavior has a payoff in this organization and they will copy that behavior.

These five steps can help you respond to complaints about co-workers:

“Train first-line supervisors to avoid playing favorites.

“Coach supervisors to pay attention to everything they hear even if it goes against long-held perceptions.

“Build safe places into the organization where employees can go to communicate workplace problems without fear they will be punished.

“Deal firmly and swiftly with bad behavior. Make sure there are no rewards for people who contribute to a negative culture.

“Always check back with people to see if they think the problem is fixed. It’s not enough if you think the problem was addressed.

Tip for your search: Have faith. So many problems in the workplace stem from employees’ lack of trust that problems will be fixed, or from management’s lack of trust that rank-and-file workers know exactly what’s going on. If everybody works harder at trust, the culture will get better almost immediately.