Behavioral characteristics of toxic colleagues & how to deal with them

What behaviors characterize toxic colleagues?

You can recognize the following behaviors from toxic colleagues:

• Constantly gossiping about other colleagues: Toxic colleagues talk a lot about other colleagues when they are not in the room. However, too much backbiting has a negative impact on the working atmosphere and can quickly lead to bullying in the workplace.
• Wanting to harm other colleagues: Some people actually enjoy putting obstacles in the way of other colleagues. This should make them feel better about themselves if they want to harm other employees.
• Negatively devaluing the performance of other employees: There are people who can judge others quite quickly. Unfortunately, their judgment is usually negative. As a result, such toxic colleagues only perceive their own way of working as the right one and are very rarely open to change.
• Make yourself the focus: Toxic colleagues love having to constantly put themselves at the center of everything that happens. This type of work is very stressful for other colleagues and takes up a lot of your own energy.
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• Manipulate other colleagues: This type of manipulation is very insidious. Toxic colleagues try to befriend you in order to use the knowledge the colleague has acquired to better assert their own will.
• Taking advantage of other colleagues: Toxic employees want to better establish their own point of view in the team and create an even greater feeling of power. As a result, the other colleague is screened until he recognizes the toxic colleague's way of working as only "the one" and has thus submitted to it.
• Control and monitoring of employees: Toxic colleagues are only too happy to monitor other employees. They try to get to know every little detail about the way other colleagues work or their private lives in order to be able to cause discord in conversations with other colleagues.

How can you deal with toxic colleagues?

Once you have identified a toxic colleague, the best way to avoid them is to simply say goodbye to that colleague keep out of the way. If you still need to work with this colleague, so be it define the work tasks clearly and clearly, so that everyone knows their area of ​​responsibility and document them in writing.

Furthermore, you should tell such a colleague Don't tell everything about yourself, so you don't run the risk of the toxic colleague not being able to use this information against you. Please stay friendly but firm when talking to such colleagues. You can't always be equally nice and polite with all your colleagues. Even if these can make your everyday work more difficult, just keep your distance from these colleagues. If you can safely recognize these behaviors and know how to counteract them, nothing will stand in the way of a peaceful everyday working life.