Mistake #17 – Allowing Toxic Staff to Remain in Place

This post is excerpted from my Amazon #1 Best Seller for Nonprofit Fundraising101 Biggest Mistakes Nonprofits Make And How You Can Avoid Them. 

 

Mistake #17: Allowing Toxic Staff to Remain in Place

 

I worked in a nonprofit back nearly a decade ago. One of the key

reasons I left the organization was because the Vice President of

our organization allowed a horribly toxic employee to remain

in place. She was a technical specialist at the organization and

everyone knew it would be difficult and expensive to replace

her. But her attitude was toxic to the organization.

 

This person was manipulative, conniving, argumentative, and

only looked out for herself. She would routinely misrepresent

the true nature of a situation to make herself look better, would

blatantly disregard direction that I and several other managers

and directors gave her, and would lie about it when confronted

by our Vice President.

 

But the worst thing about this employee was her temper.

Without warning, she’d fly off the handle and scream at

people. One evening she and I were working late, and we had

a disagreement about strategy. She stood at the door to my

cubicle for what seemed like 20 minutes (I’m sure it was less

than 90 seconds, but it felt like an eternity!) and screamed. I

mean screamed. To the point that she was shaking, her face was

bright red, and if there was anyone else in the entire building

they could have heard her. All because I held a point of view

on donor segmentation that she didn’t share. It was impossible

to confront her about this kind of behavior because that only

made it worse.

 

When I brought this up to our Vice President the following

day, he dismissed it out of hand. His perspective was that she was

an important part of the team, and that addressing her behavior

might cause her to quit or not to work as hard as she was.

But her toxicity started to permeate the department. People

took note of the fact that she behaved poorly and nothing

was done about it. They started to question the organization’s

leadership. And what this meant for me personally was that I

made a decision. The day that my VP brushed the issue under

the rug instead of supporting me and helping me deal with the

situation, I decided it was time to leave.

 

More recently, I consulted with another nonprofit organization

that, on the surface, appeared to be healthy and well aligned.

However, they had a Director of Development who

was incredibly toxic. During executive meetings she’d nod in

agreement with everything the President said, expressing publicly

her alignment with the stated direction of the organization.

But after key meetings she’d convene her own private follow-

up meeting, where she’d lead complaint sessions about the

President and the direction he was taking the organization. It

was her way of exerting her own power and keeping the President

from accomplishing his agenda for the future of their

organization.

 

As a result, there was a large amount of confusion throughout

the ranks of the organization—with some staff members

supporting the organization’s formal agenda and goals, and

others maintaining an underlying concern and disregard. Ultimately,

the only way to resolve this problem was for the President

to terminate this Director of Development and remove

several other people who had aligned with her. This cost the

organization significantly in lost talent, disconnected donor

relationships, and in dollars spent on recruiting, hiring, and

training replacement staff.

 

When you don’t deal with toxic employees in your

organization, it sends the wrong message to the rest of your

staff. It communicates that you tolerate bad behavior, and that

you don’t care about how this negative behavior impacts the

rest of your people or the organization. You might think that

keeping that one toxic employee is important, but in reality you

are likely driving away your best people by not dealing with the

problems they create.

 

Here are the four biggest pitfalls of not dealing with toxic

employees:

 

1. If an employee is behaving inappropriately and you

do nothing about it, you’re reinforcing that inappropriate

behavior—you’re normalizing it.

 

2. Not dealing with toxic employees tells your best

people that you are a meek leader, and your best

people will walk because of this.

 

3. It creates confusion at all levels about what behaviors

are ok and not ok, and this will cause friction across

your staff.

 

4. Toxic behaviors and attitudes spread like a virus. If

you allow one person in the organization to behave

inappropriately, soon you’ll see that their behavior

has spread to more and more of your employees.

 

If you have a toxic employee, you need to take action before

your whole staff—and your organization—suffers. Clearly

communicate how the employee’s performance deviates from

your expectations, work with them to change their behavior

and if they can’t or won’t change given sufficient opportunity

to do so, remove them from the organization. Difficult as it

may be, your non-toxic employees’ well-being (and retention!) depends on you.

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