Nice Person, Toxic Teammate

There are three major work relationships among the members of a team: coordination, cooperation and collaboration. While coordination may be easily automated, cooperation and collaboration require social relations to work properly. Furthermore, high level of collaboration is often correlated with a great, high-performing team.

A single toxic teammate can easily bring down a whole team. With a toxic teammate leading tasks, other members in the team would knowingly switch from a collaborative mode of work to the cooperative one, or even worse, a coordinative one. The downgrade of work mode strips the whole team of its integrity and creativity.

What further complicates the matter is the fact that, many toxic teammates are otherwise very nice people in non-work settings. We may chat happily with them, share personal anecdotes during a team building session, or even become good friends with them. And yet, they still suck whenever it comes to work. It’s as if there’s a split personality, a toxic one for work and a nice one for life.

Being a nice person is not enough for becoming a good teammate.

What, then, makes a good teammate?

What makes for a good manager? If we put all of their heads together, the great management thinkers at the end of the day give us the same, simple, and true answer. A good manager is someone with a facility for analysis and an even greater talent for synthesis; someone who has an eye both for the details and for the one big thing that really matters; someone who is able to reflect on facts in a disinterested way, who is always dissatisfied with pat answers and the conventional wisdom, and who therefore takes a certain pleasure in knowledge itself; someone with a wide knowledge of the world and an even better knowledge of the way people work; someone who knows how to treat people with respect; someone with honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, and the other things that make up character; someone, in short, who understands oneself and the world around us well enough to know how to make it better. By this definition, of course, a good manager is nothing more or less than a good and well-educated person.

Matthew Stewart, The Management Myth

By the same note–

A good teammate is someone with a facility for analysis and an even greater talent for synthesis; someone who has an eye both for the details and for the one big thing that really matters; someone who is able to reflect on facts in a disinterested way, who is always dissatisfied with pat answers and the conventional wisdom, and who therefore takes a certain pleasure in knowledge itself; someone with a wide knowledge of the world and an even better knowledge of the way people work; someone who knows how to treat people with respect; someone with honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, and the other things that make up character; someone, in short, who understands oneself and the world around us well enough to know how to make it better. By this definition, of course, a good teammate is nothing more or less than a good and well-educated person.

Have you ever met toxic teammates who are otherwise very nice people?

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