#Teams 365 #37: What toxic Communication Patterns Are Happening within your Team?

I often get called in to work with "teams in trouble" - teams that have lost their way, or are not pulling in the same direction. Some of the characteristics of these teams are low levels of trust, and toxic communication patterns. I have spoken quite a bit to leadership teams about toxicity in teams and have also blogged on the topic before over at the BizToolkit blog. You can read one post here.

Whether it is a rolling of eyes in the workplace, or water cooler gossip, these are symptoms of something generally much deeper and toxic within the team.

Toxicity is very important to address and has a huge cost. As Porath and Pearson (2009) found with employees  who indicated they were impacted by toxic relationships,

• 48% decreased their work effort
• 47% decreased time at work
• 38% decreased work quality
• 68% said their performance declined
• 80% said they lost time worrying about it
• 63% lost time avoiding the person
• 78% said their commitment to the organization declined"

What's the cost of toxic communication in your organization? What does it look like?

Tomorrow's post is going to look at what do we do in addressing toxic communication. Stay tuned!

Best wishes,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton, MES, PCC, CPT
Potentials Realized - Leadership and Team Development, Coaching, Retreats
Author of Effective Group Coaching (Wiley, 2010) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (Jossey-Bass, 2013)
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