The Most Dangerous Traits in Employees

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. Today, I am giving you eight characteristics that make people super unpleasant and dangerous to work with. Let's hop into it. 

The 8 traits of dangerous employees

So I want to preface by saying, I am listing these characteristics of The Most Dangerous Traits of the worst people I've ever worked with so you can basically practice what is known as inversion. So inversion is this mental model I've talked about on a past Founder's Journal episode. It was at least I don't think it was created by him, but it's been talked a lot about by Charlie Munger, who is Warren Buffett's right-hand man. And he talks a lot about mental models. And the idea of inversion is basically think about all of the things you don't want to happen or don't want to do so that you can then ask yourself, what do you need to do to avoid those things from happening? And so, as I share these dangerous characteristics with you, basically what you can be saying in your head is, one, how do I avoid doing these things in the workplace so I'm not like the worst person ever to work with? And two, when I am hiring people, how do I keep kind of my eyes and ears open for glimpses of any of these traits in candidates so I make sure not to hire those people if I think they have one of these horrible characteristics? So that's how I would look at this episode. 

#1: Avoiding accountability

Let's start with number one. Dangerous characteristic number one is avoiding accountability by using excuses. At the end of the day, businesses live or die by accountability. One of the first mistakes that we made in building Morning Brew was we either didn't set specific goals or benchmarks so we didn't hold anyone accountable, or what we did is we assigned accountability to two people. And that is like the worst thing that you can do, because if multiple people are accountable, no one ends up being accountable. Because if something doesn't work out, people start pointing fingers at the other accountable person. But even when you hold people accountable, some will try to avoid the accountability by constantly making excuses. And we've experienced this multiple times in building the business. Now, the danger of this tactic of excuse-making is that in the beginning, those excuses seem to be very reasonable. They don't seem like excuses. They just seem like good reasons for why something didn't happen, but slowly but surely you realize that the person is a chronic excuse maker, that they won't end up working within your business, and because it is their habit to make excuses but you didn't realize it in the beginning, they wasted you many months where you were diverted by their excuses. So look out for the person who uses excuses to shirk accountability. 

#2: Someone who has strong opinions while lacking critical thinking

Dangerous characteristic number two: someone who has strong opinions while also lacking critical thinking. So I did an earlier episode of Founder’s Journal where I talked about this, basically two-by-two grid. On one axis was open-mindedness from low open-mindedness to high open-mindedness or closed-mindedness to open-mindedness. And on the other axis is level of conviction, basically high conviction or low conviction, also known as high opinionation or low opinionation. Now I personally consider myself to be high on open-mindedness and low on conviction, which basically makes me really good at understanding other people's perspectives, but it gave me room to work on being more opinionated, because I think that actually is really important in certain aspects of work. Now go to the other end of the spectrum away from me and you have someone who is closed-minded and highly convicted, which while it can be difficult to work with people who operate in this way where they're really closed minded, it isn't always bad because if the person that you're working with knows what they're talking about, like they are steeped in whatever decision you're making, then you can still succeed, it's just going to be hard to get them to change their mind. But some of the most dangerous people I've worked with are people that are closed-minded. They have really strong conviction, but they also don't know what they're talking about. So basically they have strong views on something from a place of ego and insecurity about being right, not from a place of having deep intellectual conviction around an idea. 

#3: Phony leadership 

The third dangerous trait in the worst employees: I call this smoke and mirrors leadership. This is someone who tries to motivate and give direction to their team without knowing what they are talking about. You see, the best leaders have done the jobs that they oversee, or at the very least, they deeply understand the jobs that they oversee. It is super hard to gain respect when you give your team pump-ups and give direction, but people know that you don't fully understand what you're talking about because you haven't been in their shoes or studied their shoes. It basically can come off as you overcompensating with leadership tactics and pump-ups to cover up your lack of actual knowledge. Again, this doesn't mean that you had to do all of the jobs because sometimes that's not possible and there are a lot of leaders who didn't do every job that they manage. But if you didn't do all the jobs, you need to work really, really hard to deeply understand them so that you can gain the respect and the context of the people who you oversee. 

#4: Being competitive over being cooperative

Next up, dangerous trait, number four competitive over cooperative. A number of times I have worked with people that worry about competition more than they worry about growing with me or with someone else. At times, they'll literally keep their information close to chest because they think they'll lose their unique advantage, or if they do show you the information, they'll show it begrudgingly, basically making you feel like they've done you a favor. Even in something like a sales org, which traditionally is considered to be, you know, highly competitive cutthroat, I still believe taking the approach of competing with team members at the expense of cooperating with them is a one-way ticket to everyone losing respect for you. 

#5: “The eggshell creator” 

Next up, dangerous trait number five: I call this one the eggshell creator. One of the most powerful things to grow quickly as a professional and really just in life is to solicit the feedback of those around you, especially those people you trust or who are domain experts in the thing you're getting feedback on. And one of the most empowering things as a manager or a leader is working with people who you feel comfortable giving feedback to because they're super receptive to it. Some of the worst people I've ever worked with create zero psychological safety. Basically they get defensive, they get stubborn. They default to disagreeing whenever you try to give them guidance and it makes it wildly uncomfortable to try and support them because you feel like you're walking on eggshells and it completely caps their potential in their career.

#6: Having low integrity

Next up dangerous trait number six: people who treat their word like dog shit. The best people are those that tell you that they're going to get something done in five days and they end up coming back four days later, and they've done two times what they had promised. It's basically the person you feel like you could close your eyes, go to sleep for a few weeks, and you just know everything would be taken care of. The worst people treat their word like shit and its value basically goes to zero, like a depreciating currency. They are late to meetings. They miss deadlines. They say, they're going to remember to do something and they forget about it. And in this ironic way, they actually become very dependable. You just end up being able to depend on them, to do exactly the opposite of what they say they were going to do. 

#7: Lazy finger-pointers

And that leads us to dangerous trait number seven: Let's call these lazy finger pointers. Delegation is a really important tool in managing and working. You actually, you need it in order to grow and do well in your job. But the right delegation happens when you are giving up work because there's higher leverage work for you to spend time on, or because you actually think someone else will do a better job than you at the thing that you're delegating them. Now, lazy finger pointers on the other hand, they delegate because they just want to work less. You do not want to be a lazy finger pointer. 

#8: People who see the worst in everything

And finally dangerous trait number eight: People who see the worst in everything. Basically I bucket people in four ways, four ways that they can see the world. There is the healthy optimist, the healthy skeptic, the unhealthy optimist, and the unhealthy skeptic. I believe you actually need both healthy optimists and healthy skeptics in every single business to be successful. But the worst way to be is an unhealthy skeptic, because it means you are skeptical and cynical even if the information provided to you about the business or the product tells you that there are things to be optimistic about. And the reason that unhealthy skeptics are so dangerous to business is they suck energy out of a business that could actually have a great opportunity, but they end up destroying the culture in a way that you never end up realizing that opportunity. 

I want to hear from you

Now, those are the eight most dangerous traits in the worst employees I've ever worked with or for, but I want to hear from you. Think of the worst person that you have ever worked with in your career, then think about what is one trait that made them so incredibly bad. Shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com with that one trait and I'll share a few of the best responses either in an upcoming episode or on social media. And finally, I need to thank the team behind the show because we are at 300-something episodes in and none of this would be possible without them. Our show is produced and engineered by Dan Bouza. Our associate producer is Bella Hutchins. Brian Henry is our executive producer. Alan Haburchak is Morning Brew’s director of audio. Holly Van Leuven is our fact checker. Noah Friedman is our video producer and editor. And I'm your host, Alex Lieberman. Thanks so much again for listening and I'll catch you next episode.