When you meet a person for the first time, you are seeing them at their best selves. So when I find someone hard to get along with or who displays behavior I can’t explain, I stay far away.
In my 20-plus years of being a CEO, investor and founder, I’ve worked alongside countless of big personalities in the private and public sector, from running NFL teams, building companies, and overseeing the rebuilding of the 9/11 site. The world is filled with toxic people, and working with them is a pain. The key is to learn how to identify them early on, but this can be challenging.
Over two decades, I recognized a recurring pattern of five toxic personalities that I’ve seen destroy teams from within. One of the most notable cases of a Gaslighter (one of the 5 toxic personalities) is Elizabeth Holmes, who made headlines this week for her widely-mocked New York Times image rehabilitation tour.
We’ll get to the defining traits of a Gaslighter later on, but there are four other toxic traits that can also derail even the most well-intentioned teams.
1. Withholders
Withholders are unable to deliver praise or feel happy when someone else steps up and contributes to a group success. They are wired by insecurity or the need for domination.
They resent anyone who possesses skills they don’t have or who doesn’t feel the same self-loathing that they are plagued with. If you are thriving, they see it as their mission to bring you down.
How to handle them: Withholders take advantage of those who don’t speak up. Actively point out the strengths you each bring to the table. Demonstrate that, with your combined efforts, you can both achieve positive results.
2. Hijackers
It’s not always so brazen and extreme, but Hijackers are essentially Withholders with the added bonus of aggression. They want to trade on your vulnerability, take what you are great at, and claim it for themselves.
I’ve seen a lot of Hijackers in managerial roles. What they don’t understand is that to extract value from creatives, they must be empathetic to other people’s deficiencies — instead of trying to exploit them.
How to handle them: Own your achievements and demand credit when it’s due. Hijackers are less likely to bully someone who is assertive and who displays a strong sense of confidence.
3. Victims
Generally, good performers live in a place of gratitude. They don’t feel entitled to success, so they’re thrilled and thankful when it arrives.
But Victims live in a place of constant injustice. They see every bump in the road as confirmation that they are being unfairly targeted.
How to handle them: A Victim’s central argument might be that they are burdened with an undue workload. So raise your hand to volunteer, but know that your offer will likely be rejected. Going forward, remind them that you are willing to help, while also shouting out colleagues who are team players.
4. Martyrs
Martyrs are like Victims who actually do the work, but they don’t do it well enough to justify the psychological drain they place on an organization.
They take on as much as they can handle — not to help the broader team, but to confirm the narrative they carry around about themselves as unjustly forced to take on the burdens of others.
How to handle them: Convince them that the greatest service they can do in pursuit of a cause is to delegate to people best suited to perform the individual tasks. Encourage them to redirect their energy into deploying others, instead of taking everything on by themselves.
5. Gaslighters
Gaslighters will spend their energy trying to rewrite reality, to the detriment of everyone around them. They often possess narcissistic traits.
They combine the qualities of Withholders, Hijackers, Victims and Martyrs all in one, attempting to convince people that they are not seeing what’s going on right in front of their eyes.
How to handle them: Put guardrails in place to keep them on track to deliver whatever value they can, and ignore the rest. If you don’t spend any energy engaging with their view.
LIGHTING THE MATCH
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A Special Operations veteran discovered Burn The Boats while transitioning from the military into the civilian sector. Having spent most of his career in special operations, the thought of completely changing professions and chasing a new dream seemed daunting. “Reading the multiple vignettes throughout the book helped to instill confidence in me that he was making the right decision to continue chasing the dreams that I have established.”