“Deadwood”. Nasty term, isn’t it?
But the term survives, because the pain is real.
We all recognise deadwood energy when we see it. The grump. The malcontent. The toxic one. The blocker. The slacker…
As leaders, we’ve been led to believe that it’s people who are deadwood. Heck, the whole idea of performance management – enshrined in most of our enterprise bargaining agreements – bakes in the notion that poor attitude or job performance starts with the individual.
But what if all that’s wrong?
The idea that deadwood is an individual problem is not accurate, and it’s certainly not helpful. It gets cause and effect backwards, and it suggests that we should simply cut away the very person who, it turns out, has the most potential.
The biggest hidden hindrance to developing high-functioning teams is the same thing that drives the “deadwood” phenomenon. At Upsides, we call it Decay©. Decay drives deadwood.
Decay© is the disease; “deadwood” energy is the symptom.
If you could look inside the heart and mind of the “deadwood”, you’d see there’s so much more going on than all those awful behaviours. Much of it, good! It’s just really hard to see the good, through the haze of all that bad energy.
You work with at least one “deadwood”, I’m willing to bet. Think about the most toxic person in your office; I guarantee you, they will be deeply committed to your organisation’s cause. Yet they’ll have failed in the past, for whatever reason, to get the impact that they want.
Let me share a story
Many years ago, I managed a challenging woman I’ll call Kate. I was new to management and way out of my depth. Kate clocked this in about 30 seconds.
She once told me, “It’s not my job to teach you how to do your job.” I mean, she wasn’t wrong, but ouch.
Kate would chew the ear off anyone who would listen. She’d tell them, in detail, exactly how awful everything was. How useless management were. How the organisation was heading in the wrong direction. How the really important stuff wasn’t happening.
I sat right next to her, so I heard it all. And at first, Kate drove me nuts. But as time went on, I noticed something else.
While Kate would barely give me the time of day, she’d also spend hours each day on the phone to junior officers in other units, even in other agencies, carefully explaining the ins and outs of her area of expertise. No question from them was too dumb, or too much bother. She’d walk them through legislation, procedures, whatever it took to help.
She even got nominated for an internal award, for exemplifying excellent teamwork! I wasn’t the only manager scratching my head that day.
In time, I was promoted out of that team.
I went on to be a union rep, which involved me advocating for lots of staff who were in trouble for one reason or another. Talking to their managers, I’d hear words like angry, stubborn, unmanageable – words I’d used, to my eventual shame, about Kate. But talking to their colleagues, I’d hear words like dedicated, passionate, a mentor.
After working through dozens of these cases, a clear pattern emerged. They all had the same problem: they were deeply committed to their work but for a variety of reasons these staff never got the traction to have the impact they sought.
This combination of high passion but low impact sent them spiralling into Decay.
People who are in Decay are wasted. My goal is to make sure it doesn’t happen to you.
The worst fate that can befall someone in a workplace – short of physical injury – is to fall victim to Decay. It poisons their spirit and sours their team.
It also thwarts management’s ability to execute their organisation’s strategy. That represents wasted resources and lost opportunity to make that agency’s patch of the world better. Ironically, that’s generally the opposite of what the person in Decay really wants.
Decay is a downward spiral. Over time, as someone enters Decay, people start avoiding them, causing them to lose more organisational traction. That makes them go deeper into Decay, and more people avoid them, more traction is lost and so it goes until that person is so deep they’re radioactive. At that point they generally have few options – quit, get “managed out” or spend years serving in misery.
You probably think that there’s no way you’re going to become that. Here’s the thing: nobody starts out in a job intending to land in Decay. But it does happen. Ask Kate. She was a fantastic person, and she deserved better than to end up how she did.
So in part one of my latest white paper, we’re going to blow the wind of fresh thinking right through the haze of Decay, to let you see through the bad energy, to what’s really going on. I’ll show you the three components that enable Decay to take hold. By showing you these three components, you’ll see how to prevent Decay in yourself, and even gain some insights into how to head it off in your team.
I’m doing this for two reasons.
Firstly, every one of us can fall victim to Decay; leaders not excepted. And as they say – fit your own mask first.
People can enter Decay at any level, at any point in their career. The high-ranking people control the resources. The low-ranking people deliver most of the work (and they’re the ones you’ll spend the most time around). Decay at either level is dangerous.
Secondly, recognising and resolving Decay within ourselves is about 100x easier than trying to coach away Decay in someone else.
So let’s teach you to walk (tall) before teaching you to dance the tango, ok?
What I want for you
I want you to be able to dodge out of the path of Decay – not by quitting (though of course, that’s an option – your job doesn’t own you). But by recognising each step as it happens, and giving yourself permission to examine why it’s happening. You can’t solve a problem you can’t see, so use my Formula of Decay© to help you see the problem clearly.
