Toxic examples:

- "This is stupid" or other negative comments in code reviews (aka non-constructive criticism)

- Yelling or cursing at people because they question you and your decisions.

- talking bad about the company or other teammates to people behind their back.

- throwing a "temper tantrum" when you don't get your way when it comes to some architectural decision.

- refusing to work with certain people or only willing to work with certain people.

- Making large-scale decisions and changes without documentation, discussion, and buy-in from engineering leadership and your peers.

I agree with these points, however some level of quirkiness is defined as a hallmark of very effective workers here [1] I wonder if it might be possible to misconstrue behavior and label off such an individual as toxic.

[1] https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/8-signs-an-employee-is-except...

Thanks for the answer. I hope all firms have a formal HR process where they state expectations and confront the individual before he is labelled as toxic. I think everyone should have a chance!

Well, for truly toxic individuals, warnings or confrontations are useless (I’ve learned this the hard way, and not for lack of trying). It is impossible to get them to understand that they have a problem; anything you say, no matter how clearly articulated, fact-based, and objective, will be rationalized away. These individuals cannot accept that they may be wrong.

Since no one else has answered this I, a lowly developer IC, will give it a shot.

Start by writing up a detailed employee handbook and code of conduct. Have a conversation with new reports about how these inevitably jargon-laden documents translate to expectations in human terms. You don't need to use the word "toxic", but talk about assuming good intent, communicating respectfully and clearly with others, and sharing credit and responsibility with teammates.

Create a sense that serious feedback about teammates' behavior given to you, the manager, about teammates' behavior will be taken seriously and kept confidential. Do this by handling the smaller stuff competently.

Give feedback to employees who are creating bad team dynamics early and often. Allow them opportunities to reflect and improve. Emphasize if necessary that their behavior is not just problematic at an interpersonal level, but it's (presumably) disrupting the company at a business level as well.

Work with HR to keep a paper trail and document conversations so that when the time comes to fire an employee who is irredeemably "toxic", there is a rich timeline of unpleasant behavior, feedback and warnings, and a failure to sufficiently improve over time. Ideally only someone with their head all the way up their ass wouldn't see how the patterns of behavior relate to documented expectations and to termination, but unfortunately that's who you're dealing with.

I suppose all of this only works to immunize against "toxicity" in a work environment that isn't already toxic.

I think these are very good ideas, actually I don't recall to have seen an employee handbook that states expectations explicitly, even while working for very big firms. Well, at IBM they probably have something like that, I may be wrong about that.

There is a quote I once heard “Good teams are usually great for the same reasons, bad teams are almost always bad for different reasons”. This is the much the same for people. Generally speaking, the best people you have worked with are very similar in terms of what they provided that made you really happy to be with them. Example “good” traits:

- honestly - dependability - integrity - intelligence - humility - excellence - generosity - proactivity

Toxicity happens when people exhibit the opposite of any of those. A favorite example is folks who constantly bad mouth other people on the team. Well, if you work with that person, you just know they are complaining about you behind your back as well.

I think that quote comes from Tolstoy when he was writing about families in Anna Karenina. " All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"

I am not sure he was right here, different people may have different ideas of happiness.