In a previous column, I wrote about a shop owner struggling with a leader on her team whose behavior was becoming problematic: The employee had stopped contributing during staff meetings, referred to company leadership as “they” rather than “we,” and sometimes would hold a “meeting after the meeting.”
As I told the shop owner, toxic behavior cannot be tolerated. But the step that often gets missed is understanding what’s driving the behavior. What belief does that employee hold that’s leading her to act the way she is?
Get to the root of the behavior
Before you pull someone into the office to address the eye-rolling or the parking-lot conversations “after the meeting,” do the harder work first: Get curious.
What does this person actually believe about the direction of the company? About leadership’s intentions? About whether their contribution matters? You may not know the answer yet. And the only way to find out is to ask in a genuinely curious, not confrontational, way.
In my consulting work, I often start with individual conversations before anything else happens — before team meetings, before action plans. I sit down one-on-one and I ask questions. What’s working? What isn’t? Do you feel like you have what you need to do your job well? Do you feel like leadership cares about your success? What would help you feel more connected to the direction this shop is heading?
The answers are almost always illuminating, not because people are hiding the truth, but simply because no one has ever asked.
It goes back to what Stephen Covey wrote in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” Seek first to understand, then to be understood. If you go into a hard conversation trying to be understood before you understand, you’ve already lost the person.
Understanding isn’t the same as tolerating
Let me be clear: None of this means you tolerate bad behavior. This is where leaders sometimes get stuck: Getting curious about the belief underneath the behavior is not the same as letting the behavior continue.
Passive-aggressive behavior in meetings, eye-rolling, undermining leadership in side conversation, speaking about “they” when you are part of the leadership team — these are not just personal preferences or communication styles. They are toxic behaviors that, if left unaddressed, can spread.
In his book “The Energy Bus,” Jon Gordon calls these people “energy vampires,” and it’s a suitable description. One person who consistently drains the energy out of a team can unravel a culture that took years to build. The employees around them are watching how leadership responds. If the behavior is tolerated, the message sent is clear: This is acceptable here.
So yes, seek to understand the belief, have the honest conversation, find out what’s driving the behavior and whether there’s something legitimate that leadership needs to own and address. That matters.
But then hold the line.
Because understanding someone’s pain doesn’t require accepting their cancerous behavior. You can have empathy for why someone arrived at a certain belief and still be clear that the behavior flowing from that belief is not acceptable in your shop. Those two things can be true at the same time.
What leaders need to ask themselves
There is one more layer here that is easy to skip over: Sometimes the belief is rooted in something real. And leaders who want to build cultures where people are genuinely engaged and not just compliant have to be willing to sit with that possibility.
If someone on your team doesn’t believe leadership has the best interest of the whole at heart, ask is there anything in how decisions have been made, communicated or followed through on that would have led them to that belief? Again, this is not an excuse for the behavior, but this step is important as an honest audit.
Belief drives behavior in leadership. What your team believes about you — whether you’re consistent, whether you follow through, whether you treat people fairly, whether you say what you mean and mean what you say – it all drives how they show up every day. You can’t build a culture of trust if the behaviors of leadership are giving people reasons not to trust.
The behavior won’t change until the belief does
The shop owner who called me wasn't looking for a quick answer. She trusted my perspective and wanted to think it through the right way. And that's exactly the kind of leadership posture that gives a situation like this a chance.
Because the fastest path to resolving it isn't skipping the hard conversation; It's having that conversation.
Getting underneath the behavior to understand what belief is driving it. Addressing that honestly, both what leadership might need to own and what the team member needs to be accountable for. And then being clear about what is and isn't acceptable going forward.
That is the work. It's not fast, and it's not comfortable. But it's the only thing that actually works. Because if you change the behavior without changing the belief, you haven't solved the problem. You've just moved it somewhere you can't see it anymore.
