Neutralising poisonous personalities in the workplace

Toxic personalities in the aged care workplace need to be managed but things could backfire if the wrong neutralisation strategy is used, an organisational psychologist will tell the sector’s first major conference of 2015.

Toxic personalities in the aged care workplace need to be managed but things could backfire if the wrong neutralisation strategy is used, an organisational psychologist will tell the sector’s first major conference of 2015.

Lixivium Consulting director Warren Senn will tell delegates how to manage toxic personalities in the workplace at the Tri-State Conference, which takes place from 22-24 February in Albury.

Warren Senn
Warren Senn, organisational psychologist

Mr Senn said that in his 10 years of doing benchmark studies and psychological profiling in aged care, how to deal with a problematic person had been a consistent problem raised by managers.

Toxic people could destroy team morale and job satisfaction and negatively impact on productivity, but it was important to use the right performance management approach to neutralise the impact for each different negative personality types, he said.

“If you are trying to deal with a control freak and you try and control them, that is going to backfire on you because that really is the red rag to the bull,” Mr Senn told Australian Ageing Agenda.

“Rather than engage in behaviour that triggers the negative personality reaction, you need to find ways of making them feel secure so that the negative behaviours are not triggered.”

He said research showed that 94 per cent of all employees have worked with someone toxic and 27 per cent experienced direct mistreatment by a toxic person, half of whom had contemplated leaving their job as a result.

Mr Senn said the seven key types of personality traits to watch out for are:

  1. Obsessive compulsive – if it is not perfect, it is not good enough
  2. Histrionic – the drama queen
  3. Sociopathic – the person who is all about power and control; the con-man
  4. Paranoid – they trust no-one, suspect everyone; a control freak
  5. Borderline – which is hard to deal with because behavior is so erratic
  6. Narcissistic – who makes everything about themselves
  7. Passive aggressive – they seem to comply on the outside but create problems and sabotage in the background

The relationship with the toxic person was also important when forming a neutralisation strategy. How one deals with the problem would differ depending on whether they were their manager, peer or subordinate, Mr Senn said.

“Obviously if you are subordinate to the toxic person you can’t just walk into their office and demand that they change their behaviour; if you want to keep your job that is,” he said.

However, Mr Senn said just because someone was toxic it did not mean they could not be effective at a particular type of job.

Someone with obsessive compulsive tendencies will have an attention to things others don’t. Similarly, in a sales context, a narcissist might be persuasive, good looking and manipulative but have fantastic sales figures, he said.

“Sometimes your toxicity does not stop you from achieving successful outcomes in work. But it’s the damage you reap around you that is the problem, particularly in aged care, you have to deal with.”

He said it took a judgment call to determine whether a person’s output was more important than the interpersonal turmoil that they might be creating.

Mr Senn will explain the characteristics of each of the seven personality styles to watch out for, the reasons behind them, and the strategies to neutralise their impacts, in his presentation on 24 February.

Clarification: AAA incorrectly listed dates for Tri-State Conference 2015 on our wall planner. The correct dates are 22-24 February 2015.

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