Nine toxic behaviours that we must all keep at bay

By Neil Patrick

Many self-help books and coaches talk about the dangers of toxic people. We should distance ourselves from them they say. Better still remove them from our lives. I'm not so sure about this.

Sometimes that’s easier said than done. Just how would you go about removing a person from your life I wonder? Like your boss, or a colleague or a family member? Short of committing illegal acts, it all seems a bit tricky to me.

There's a much more realistic alternative option I think. We all have some of these toxins within ourselves. And it’s a much more practical proposition to change ourselves than attempting to change or remove those around us.

So not only should we be alert to toxic character traits in others, we should also try to purify our own system.

I am not here to preach or claim I am above criticism. I can count at least two or three traces of these toxins within myself. I don’t quite need a Betty Ford Clinic-style detox I hope, but relentless alertness to them and removing them is a sure way to purify ourselves I think.

And just as toxins in others make them destructive and debilitating to be around, toxins within ourselves don’t just erode our own strengths, they drive a wedge between ourselves and those we want to have productive and happy relationships with.

Here're my top nine poisons and how to detox from them.

1. Control

Controlling people think they know everything and the best way to do anything. They’ll never give anyone else a chance to contradict them, express a conflicting idea or influence their opinions. Learn to value and listen to the opinions of others. Don’t try to find fault in their views, but seek to find ways to improve their ideas.

2. Arrogance

Confidence and arrogance are totally different things. Confidence inspires; arrogance intimidates. Arrogant people always think they know best and feel superior to others. Remember to celebrate and show more enthusiasm for the success of others than your own.

3. Victims

Negatively charged people see themselves as perpetual victims. Victims look at their own situations and mistakes and seek to find others to blame, from their boss to their staff or their customers. Take ownership of your own life and change to adapt to the world around you. Don’t expect the world to change to suit you.

4. Envy

Those infected with jealousy don’t feel pleasure when good things happen to you. They can't appreciate it when others achieve success or move forward; they feel that if anything good is going to happen, they deserve it more than you. The success of those around you should be just as important to you as it is to them. Help others succeed as a matter of course. Sure, not everyone will reciprocate, but which is better a whole heap of goodwill, or a whole heap of indifference?

5. Lies

Liars are impossible to rely on. You can never know what to believe. You can't trust their promises or their statements. They will lie to you about others, and they will lie to others about you. Likewise we should tell the truth, always. Even if it’s bad news, sharing it now, is better than hoping it will disappear and be forgotten. It won’t.

6. Negativity

Some people are always suspicious of everything and everybody. Negativity destroys relationships, and spending time with negative people makes you feel the world is a much worse place than it actually is. My mantra is this: trust everyone and disappointment is a risk. Trust no-one and disappointment is guaranteed.

7. Possessiveness

Consumer culture relentlessly nags us to want more, achieve more and possess more. Sure, desire and ambition can be good things. But it turns toxic when people want everything for themselves and when possession, rather than doing or being, becomes the focus of their life. Aspire to success not as a way to have more for yourself, but as a way to be able to give more back to others.

8. Judgmentalism

Making a judgment and being judgmental are not the same thing at all. Judgments are objective and based on discernment, while being judgmental is just about criticism. Judgmental people are poor listeners and communicators and always too quick to jump to conclusions. Seek to understand before you seek to judge. Then consider how something can be made better.

9. Gossip

Gossips see themselves as being interesting because they share fascinating information about other people. And the more sensational this is the better. They do it because they secretly believe that their own lives are less interesting or deserve more privacy than those of others. They make little distinction between speculation and fact. We all talk about others – that’s natural. But if we bad-mouth someone, we can fully expect that those who hear this criticism will suspect that we will do the same to them.

So personally, I’m not about to remove anyone from my life. I’d much rather try and make others’ lives better by forever striving to become a better person myself. It'll keep me out of jail at least.

Any thoughts on what I should add to round this up to make a top 10?

Why you should think twice about taking a job with a huge bonus plan

By Neil Patrick

We work to earn money. And the more money we earn, the happier we will be. Well not quite.

Research shows that the happiest and most productive workers are not the ones who are given the largest bonuses, but the ones who are given the greatest autonomy and freedom of choice in how they go about their work.

There’s a nasty secret about businesses which pay large bonuses. The giveaway is if these bonuses are linked to sales and/or profits. The companies that do this, even if they are completely legal and ethical are sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

Of course businesses must make profits. And they often reflect this by using monetary incentives to give greater rewards to those who make the most profit. But here’s what’s strange. Studies have shown all over the world that greater monetary reward for success with cognitive tasks result in poorer performance.

Huh? How can this be?

The tests have been repeated in different nations, in different types of business and at different levels of employee. And the results have been exactly the same. Greater monetary rewards result in worse performance.

There’s a qualifier though. This only applies when pay is high enough for it not to be a factor. If people are paid enough so that they don’t need to worry about paying their bills, they exhibit this behaviour. If they are struggling to make ends meet, then it doesn’t apply. So this is clearly not an argument to reduce pay. In fact it’s an argument to pay people well, but not to incentivise them with huge monetary bonuses for sales and/or profits.

The most obvious business where this behaviour is the norm is the financial and banking sector. And the collapse of 2008 is strongly associated with behaviors which were influenced by excessive monetary rewards. The provision of large bonuses linked to profit directly led to an increase in bad things. Like making riskier loans, interfering with exchange rates and miss-selling products which customers didn’t want or need. And as these behaviours continued unchecked over years, we all know what happened next.

I’m not arguing against bonuses. What I am arguing is which behaviours these bonuses reward and encourage.

What the studies show is that when work is cognitively based rather than manual, performance declines when simple productivity bonuses are applied. This is explained by the fact that encouraging profit seeking behaviours at the individual level, leads to worse products and services. Corners are cut. Quality is reduced. Prices are inflated.

But this age old practice is now being increasingly challenged. Giving things away for free. Not crappy incentives like pens or free monthly trials of software, but a whole service. Like Skype. Or Twitter. There are of course plenty of people who will argue that Twitters’ IPO was way overvalued. That the whole social media explosion is a bubble which must burst. But the cat is out of the bag now. Regardless of what happens to these businesses, there’s no turning back.

Business sustainability depends on growth and profit. That remains as true today as it has always been. But also at the base of the most sustainable businesses is customer satisfaction, goodwill and preference. The question is how should businesses reward and recognise their staff in the pursuit of these goals?

Monetary reward for greater profits isn’t the answer, at least in the long term. Ensuring the business consistently delights its customers is.

If you want a job with huge bonuses for the sales and profits you deliver and you can get it, that’s fine. Just don’t plan on the business surviving long enough for you to receive your bonus more than a few times…

If you’d like to see a little more about the research on this topic, this RSA video by Dan Pink is a really insightful watch…