Bad Apples Or Bad Barrels?

Maybe you have heard the phrase “that one bad apple can ruin the whole barrel”. This adage has been used for centuries to relate individual behaviour to the ability of a rotten piece of fruit to spoil an entire barrel of unspoiled fruit. You may even have used this word picture to illustrate the need to beware of bringing toxic individuals into your teams and workplaces.

Unfortunately in virtually every organization there is one individual regarded as detrimental to the mission, vision, values and strategies of the organization. This is a person who comes to work every day intent on being disruptive and uncooperative. No organization needs a team member like this. If one of two employees exhibit toxic behaviour, that behaviour will show up across the entire organization.

As a leader, you must have the ability to identify toxic members of your organization and you must be introspective enough to recognize if you are creating and/or enabling a toxic environment that hinders a collaborative and cooperative work environment. This is why the sole key indication of an organization’s effectiveness is individual leader behaviour.

Using your skill of Positive Presence you understand ‘your natural human energy’ (or as you say in the business world, ‘your 20 square feet’) and you quickly become aware of a person’s negative energy when you enter into their biofield, or on the flip of that, you recognize when a negative person enters into your biofield. As a leader, your goal is to help others replace their negative with the positive through your influence using your skill and language of the skill of Positive Presence to drive a collaborative work environment.

Just as if you brought a bad apple into a good barrel, the same result would occur in bringing good apples into a bad barrel. The end result is a toxic environment, exhibiting dysfunctional and disruptive behaviour. Whether you have bad apples or bad barrels, you must recognize that negative work place behaviour will never drive performance and will always harm patients, drive down morale and create toxic environments, because negative behaviour will never bring people together to create anything of value.

The cure is collaboration, without it negative competition and conflict reign – two conditions in which medical error are likely to occur. Likewise staff morale and motivation are low, performance is inconsistent and unreliable, and communication and cooperation are non-existent. Who wants to work in this kind environment? As leaders if you want to succeed and create a workplace that promotes the goals of your organizations that exhibits the mission, vision and purpose, then you do so by first creating a culture of collaboration.