It’s October. Where is 2025 going? Young friends of mine are settled into new schools and new classes. They are starting to speak of what they will do in half term. In my world it is time to do the out-turns to see if the yearend actual results will meet the budget. I know not everyone calls it that but I have lived with the term out-turn for too many years to change it now. So before I start my October thinking how is your outturn looking? Will the last quarter make you what you need to achieve year end budget?

So what have I been thinking about?

Lots of things which took me to consider toxic employees.

It started with an idle conversation with a friend about the difference between a motto and a strapline. My argument is that a strapline is what we are. A motto is the principal value we live by.

I was at Sutton Coldfield Girls’ Grammar School. There the motto is Not for our own advantage but for the common good. There is no strapline, but the vision is for all to have a love of learning, a positive, independent and resilient approach with a strong sense of community. Each individual will be encouraged to be aspirational, prepared for their future and inspired to make a difference.

So the motto is all about community and its importance. The vision is about the culture.

One school motto I love is Goldington Academy’s here in Bedford “Keep going, keep growing”.

Culture whether in a school or any other organisation is what keeps the wheels on the bus. What we care about and how we deliver it are the features that take us to work in the same role but at different organisations. We differentiate. I spent some time recently explaining to a young friend that he might want to own Waitrose when he grows up, but he cannot because everyone is a partner. He is now wondering if all the things he loves about Waitrose are because of this.

Way back at the turn of the century I was involved in a merger. I had done sales and purchases of businesses before and had to think about integration of people into a new culture but never a merger. The intention was to bring the best of each organisation to the new one. So for the first time I wrote a values and code of conduct policy. They are now fairly common but then there was lots of head scratching about what to cover. How do you define your values and the behaviour that lives them? I am not sure whether it was a good document – it is lost in the mists of time – but it caused people to really consider and argue about what was acceptable behaviour. Nowadays we use words like “appropriate behaviour” and “kindness” to explain what we mean but back then there was no real vocabulary that was right for a commercial environment so it was a bit cumbersome.

Now you can see why my thoughts ran to toxic employees.
I never thought I would use that phrase but in the last couple of months I have been coming across issues in organisations which are not management failures but generated by employees. I do not mean competence problems. I do not mean people lacking interpersonal skills. I do not mean neurodivergent people who think differently. I mean spiteful, malicious people who seem to like making trouble.

Now I have all sorts of ideas about why people and groups become toxic but I am not going to share those here. The reasons can be many and varied. They are usually situation specific so I cannot generalise. If you have problems like this please give me a call and we can work on it together.

What I do want to speak about is what we can do about it. So yes, I say you need one of my values and codes of conduct/behaviour policies. Do the thinking. What does your organisation stand for and what does that look like. Then you have a standard to measure against.

Then let’s do some diagnosis. Is a toxic person spreading the disease or do we have a toxic group here? They do need to be treated differently. An apparently toxic group can stem from a management problem that has been missed. An individual person is something different. Like most people problems if you do not address it early it will only get worse. So if you have one please start to sort it today.

Toxic people usually start by being very negative about everything. Nothing is good enough and it is always someone else’s fault, so there is someone to blame. I am going to call this person Toxic Chris (what do they say in novels – any resemblance to any person living or dead is only by accident). Sometimes it progresses and Toxic Chris moves from negative to getting their knife into a particular, often a completely innocent person. They start by spreading talk of the victim in a situation where they put the worst possible construction on an event. In the main the audience, whoever they are, might like a bit of gossip but when it goes too far they do not want to call the person out. Then it starts to escalate. Toxic Chris thinks they have a captive, even sympathetic audience so they start to wind up the stories and the awfulness of them. Sooner or later it will come down to the story being of poor Toxic Chris being treated badly, picked on, abused and worse.

If you have a policy you can pull Toxic Chris up; if you don’t it is very difficult.

This can work very well. It empowers employees not to have to put up with Chris’ constant whinging and also gives managers confidence to manage. However not everyone wants to enter into what they see as a confrontation, so it has to be led by managers and supervisors.

However what happens if it is in a WhatsApp group? My answer is that I don’t know. Personally I will call it out it but I know lots of people just keep their heads down and ignore it. I think that is neither appropriate nor kind, but we cannot force people to cause waves if it is not their natural inclination.

Toxic Chris is not a bully in the true sense because they may never say or do anything to someone. Bullying can be dealt with in other ways.

So this is a fairly useless thought. It highlights a problem but gives you no answers. Hopefully it has given you some courage that if you have a Toxic Chris you are not the only one. If you do not have a policy, one would certainly help. Lead by example and call out the inappropriateness and unkindness.

In specific situations maybe we could work on it together. If it rings bells for you then please give me a call. I would love to explore the situation with you.

I love hearing about people’s lives and businesses, off the meter, to help them explore possibilities for making their aspirations a reality. I hope you will be one of them.

And take care watch behaviour every day and tell people straight away when they are not living the values.