 | Toxic Workplace!: Managing Toxic Personalities and Their Systems of Power |
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Product Description
Praise for Toxic Workplace!
"Toxic Workplace! describes how to identify and best work with toxic personalities. It also provides a systemic approach for creating a culture that's positive and respectful while improving the bottom line. Kusy and Holloway share how their national research translates into real-world practices in organizations. I endorse their practical, concrete approaches that will make a significant difference in organizations today and in the future."
—Gregg Steinhafel, president and CEO, Target Corporation
"Toxic Workplace! brings a rare and valuable view of one of the great challenges facing leaders in today's organizations. It is a significant guidebook to the healthy enterprise of the future, not only because of Kusy and Holloway's systems approach to dealing with toxic personalities, but also their unique practice of creating communities of respectful engagement. This book demonstrates how this impacts both organizational social responsibility and the bottom line."
—Frances Hesselbein, former CEO of the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A.; founding president and chairman of Leader to Leader Institute, formerly The Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management
"Transforming the culture to support the strategy and mission is the real stuff of leadership. Toxic Workplace! gives you the research-based tools to identify and deal with the 'dark side' of this important dynamic. Read it and you will engage your organization in new, more authentic, and effective ways!"
—Kevin Cashman, author, Leadership from the Inside Out and senior partner, Korn/Ferry Leadership & Talent Consulting
- Amazon Sales Rank: #242730 in Books
- Published on: 2009-04-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .90" h x 6.30" w x 9.00" l, .95 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
From the Inside Flap
"The day this person left our company is considered an annual holiday!"
This quote, taken from Kusy and Holloway's research on toxic personalities, echoes the frustration and confusion that come from working with or managing an extremely difficult person. Just one toxic person has the capacity to debilitate individuals, teams, and even organizations.
Toxic Workplace! is the first book to tackle the underlying systems issues that enable a toxic person to create a path of destruction in an organization, pervading others' thoughts and energies, even undermining their very sense of well-being. Based on all-new research with over 400 leaders, many from the Fortune 500 list, this book illustrates how to manage existing toxic behaviors, create norms that prevent the growth or regrowth of toxic environments, and ultimately design organizational communities of respectful engagement.
Kusy and Holloway's research reveals the warning signs that indicate a serious behavioral problem and identifies how this toxicity spreads in systems with long-term effects on organizational climate, even after the person has left. Their two-year, cutting-edge research study provides very specific actions that leaders need to take to reduce both the intensity and frequency of toxic personalities at work. No other book provides this menu of options from a systems perspective with practical relevance in real work situations.
You'll learn how to identify the toxic personality and describe the leader reactions and approaches that typically don't work. Toxic Workplace! provides hands-on approaches that work with research-based strategies at the individual, team, and organizational level.Toxic Workplace! will provide new insights on how leaders lead, how organizational cultures sustain themselves, and how teams deal with toxic personalities.
About the Author
Mitchell Kusy, PhD, is a consultant and full professor in the graduate program in Leadership and Change at Antioch University. A 2005 Fulbright Scholar in international organization development, Dr. Kusy consults globally in strategic planning, leadership development, 360-degree feedback, organization development, and designing organizational communities of respectful engagement. He is a visiting professor at several universities internationally.
Elizabeth Holloway, PhD, is a consultant and full professor in the graduate program in Leadership and Change at Antioch University. A Diplomate of the American Board of Professional Psychology and Fellow of the American Psychological Association, Dr. Holloway has had more than 25 years' experience as a practitioner, educator, and consultant with organizations, groups, and mental health clients. She consults globally on system approaches to mentoring, coaching, and creating organizational communities of respectful engagement.
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
You will never look at people the same way again
By Ralf Weiser
Hello there,
This book is really great in that it tackles the subject of toxic people by using the three-fold strategy - instead of the old and highly unreliable approach: "Just kick this or the other person off the team and thing will improve automatically". That does not work, or at least not well. The author did a great job in explaining that it does take addressing toxic people directly, and it recommends to also deal with the aftermath (usually the confusion and power vacuum) as well as with my favorite topic: Instill a great deal of integrity, honesty, but most of all purpose into your top leadership and thus the whole organization.
I found this book so captivating that I read it on a plane ride from Arizona to Philadelphia.
Ralf Weiser
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful.Evironmental Protection Agents for Corporate America
By Larry Underwood
It's a sad commentary on business life in general, when very few of us can truthfully assert that (a) we've never had to deal with at least a couple of toxic losers on the job and (b) those who are most inflicted with highly dangerous levels of toxical substances in their soul are actually shocked when confronted with this reality. "Me? It's them, I tell you; it's them!"
Of course, it's no shock to this reviewer that many companies, world-wide, are plagued with this syndrome; but help has arrived----this wonderful and very timely book, authored by a couple of brilliant Ph.Ds, no less.
What gives me even greater hope for the world of business in the future are the recent releases of several other books dealing with the elimination of toxic waste in the workplace.
"Employee engagement" seems to be the best remedy companies can use---the simple, common sense approach of giving employees positive feedback on a regular basis as their skills improve, while keeping an eye out for any possible early warning signs of toxic symptons. Early detection is the key.
If the toxic employee somehow gets into management, results usually don't vary. Everbody in the company is slightly worse off now, and in some cases, significantly worse off, depending on who is most infected by the inept, mean-spirited and toxic manager. The correlation between that situation and lower employee morale and productivity is well documented.
This book is certainly a wonderful guide for best dealing with the toxic power that infiltrates so many otherwise outstanding organizations. The critical point delivered to help create a toxic free work environment is by enhancing the spirit of teamwork along with the power of positive employee engagement, throughout all levels of the company.
That's the best pest control service available, and it doesn't even require a swine flu shot. With any luck, the toxic swines will fall by the wayside. However, they'll usually emerge somewhere else; so no company is ever immune to a possible toxic outbreak.
Be prepared by being informed; and by all means, read this very cleverly analytical book.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
One Bad Apple
By Sylvia Lafair, Ph.D.
With the demand for transparency in the workplace it is high time for books that tackle one of the most corrosive aspects of work: toxic employees. So much time and effort is spent both helping and being afraid of this often "squeeky wheel" person that it is vital leaders learn how to handle the toxins without causing even more pollution.
This book offers important suggestions about how to handle the either passive or aggressive or combination of traits that set people's teeth on edge. What is most vital is the idea that an organization is a system and needs to be condsidered from this vantage point. The best way to limit toxicity is to design communities that limit bad behavior and that is what the authors suggest.
We need to understand that "Work is not a rehab facility" and yet acknowledge that people who come to work bring their past history with them and that needs to be monitored. I recommend this book to those in leadership and supervisory positions. It can help eliminate many work related headaches!
Sylvia Lafair PhD author "Don't Bring It to Work: Breaking the Family Patterns that Limit Success".
http://astore.amazon.com/amazon-book-books-20/detail/0470424842
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