It can be incredibly frustrating to be part of a team that has toxic teammates. Many times the response to this situation is to distance yourself from the toxicity and hope it goes away.
Waaaaaayyyyy wrong approach!
It won’t. The toxicity will fester until your team’s culture fails.
Good teammates are people of action, and that means confronting the toxicity.
How you confront—the words you choose—can make a big difference in whether or not your message comes across the way you intended. (I’ve written about this on previous blogs.) But sometimes so does where you confront.
In this instance, I am not referring to your actual geographical location, but rather your physical positioning—your posture and where you are positioned compared to the individual you’re confronting.
Height can play a role in how you are perceived. Studies have shown that Western societies historically tend to prefer taller leaders. There’s a reason for that. Taller leaders are often viewed as being more powerful and authoritarian.
While towering over someone can be a position of power and authority, it can also be intimidating and even threatening—which can trigger an unintended emotional response from the recipient of your message and complicate your ability to deliver it.
When we confront, our psychological predispositions to height kick in and can affect the way the message is received. Those predispositions, however, can be artificially replicated or manipulated to suit the desired intention.
If you intend to convey your authority, be above the individual when you speak. Teachers often accomplish this by standing while their students sit. Sports coaches do the same thing when they make their players “take a knee.” Positioning yourself above your audience can be attained in a variety of ways, like utilizing stairs or other elevated platforms.
If you intend to convey equality, be at eye-level with the individual when you speak. Sit down beside the person. Create an open environment that suggests equality by removing any obstacles that may be separating the two of you, like desks or tables. This is an effective position to take whenever you want to collaborate with someone on even terms.
If you intend to convey praise or gratitude, be below the individual when you speak. This is a position of respect and reverence. It literally and figuratively causes the individual to whom you are speaking to feel as though he or she is being looked up to.
There are certainly exceptions to these suggestions. Great disciplinarians will tell you that putting yourself in a position to convey authority, like standing while the individual you are speaking to sits, doesn’t always yield the desired outcome.
The same is true for confronting a toxic teammate.
Sometimes, it is more advantageous to get below the individual you are confronting. Although it may seem counterintuitive, this position sends a psychological message of you needing that individual’s help.
You are not coming at him or her as an authority trying to force compliance, you are coming to him or her as a teammate seeking their help in solving a problem.
It’s a Jedi mind trick of sorts and a clever way of getting that individual to become invested in the problem.
As always…Good teammates care. Good teammates share. Good teammates listen. Go be a good teammate.
