The Healthiest Team I Ever Ran Wasn’t The Nicest One

Positivity can be toxic, and in a workplace it kills more businesses than negativity does. Most people, when they think about a healthy workplace culture, they think it means everyone likes each other. Everyone’s happy, everyone’s agreeable, you got positive vibes all over and—listen, there’s a little truth to that—like you obviously don’t want a toxic, mean-spirited environment. But positivity itself can be toxic. And agreement itself can be toxic, and I’ll tell you why.

The healthiest cultures that I’ve been in in business were the ones where we were winning. And it didn’t mean we were winning all of the time—like yeah, we hit speed bumps, we had setbacks, we had dips. But ultimately we were winning. And that winning created a far healthier culture than any amount of "let’s all agree and be positive" ever could. Right? Have you ever tried to be really positive when you continue to take loss after loss after loss after loss? Like by default, getting your ass kicked and losing is going to make your workplace negative. Right? It kills morale. Like nobody wants to lose all the time.

And if you accept that premise, that it’s a hell of a lot easier to build a healthy culture when you’re winning, you’ve got to ask yourself: what does it take to win? And what it takes to win is candor. It takes honesty. It takes really learning from what you’re doing and implementing it back into the business to improve your execution. Because the best teams on the planet aren’t worried... like they’re not pretending to like each other. That is not their core focus. They’re learning the fastest. They’re implementing the right things. They’re executing on the right things.

And how do you get there? How do you figure out if you’re doing the right things and actually incorporate the learning into your business so that you can keep winning? That takes honesty. Like that takes candor. It takes being direct at times because if you’re not winning, and you’re off the beaten path, and you’re doing the wrong things, I assure you there are tough conversations that need to be had. Right? About what you’re doing, about who’s doing what, about how you’re doing—or how you’re doing it—and if you’re not capable of having those conversations honestly because you insist on an environment of, "like hey, it’s got to be positive," and "you know everyone’s got to be feeling good," and "we’ve got to be agreeable"... that’s coming at the expense of winning in the long run. The two things are diametrically opposed because you can’t learn and implement the things that need to be implemented the right way if you’re off the beaten path and losing unless you have the candid, honest conversations about it.

So my belief is, in order to build a solid culture and start winning consistently, candor and honesty are the fundamental components of that. And to get there, it helps to acknowledge something like toxic positivity. Right? And it’s, to me, I define that as insisting on positivity at the expense of honesty. It’s where people are smiling, they’re high-fiving, and you know like they’re agreeing with each other while they’re secretly thinking, "dude, you’re doing that wrong," right? Or, "or you should have never really done that."

And a really good way to illustrate this is actually in the book No Rules Rules. It’s about the Netflix culture. One of the co-founders tells a story about an idea that he had early on. And it was to break the mail business off from the streaming business. And he shares it with the team, team says, "yeah, let’s do it." Now obviously the Netflix leadership team, these are smart, talented people. Right? They’ve got their own track records, their own experience. They go execute the plan and it bombs. It fails miserably, it backfires, there’s cleanup, there’s damage control, there’s like all this shit goes into it.

And as they’re assessing what happened, they find out that multiple people on the leadership team thought it was a bad idea from the get-go. Like they just they didn’t say anything because they either thought they were wrong or they didn’t want to be critical or they didn’t want to challenge the idea of someone obviously very smart, very successful, with a great track record. So they thought better not rock the boat. Or they thought, "well, maybe I’m the one who’s wrong, like nobody else is saying anything so I’ll just so I’ll just agree." And multiple people did the exact same thing. They were thinking the same thing as it happened.

After that, they end up making changes with the culture. He was basically... he went to the team and said, "like listen, guys, like you can’t let me do stupid shit. You’ve got to speak up. You’ve got to be candid." And from that point on, it became a toxic behavior at Netflix to not tell the truth. We sell what we deliver—or like actually deliver—type of truth. Like not just lying to customers level, although that too, like the actual truth of what you think of somebody’s idea. The actual truth of what you think the outcome is going to be. The actual truth of what you think the right thing to do is. Because toxic agreement and toxic positivity is what kills businesses.

By the way, if you like breaking ideas like this down and the frameworks and actually applying them, I’ve got a newsletter you can subscribe to at raizemail.com—completely free. So why am I sharing this? We’re rolling out some things internally at my business, the MSP Sales Partner, and we’re rolling this out right now and this came up as a topic of conversation. And from the many businesses that I’ve had the opportunity to work with, I see this pattern everywhere. And almost every time it stems from really good intentions. Like people who genuinely want to create an upbeat, positive workplace. They want to create a strong, healthy culture where they can attract the right people, retain the right people, it doesn’t suck to work there, everything like that.

But the result ends up being a team that takes a whole bunch of losses. And I don’t care how positive you’re trying to be, if the team is taking losses, that’s going to come at the expense of the culture and morale eventually at some point. It is inevitable. So the best thing that you can do is tell the truth. Tell the truth so that you’re candid with one another, so that you’re actually learning, so that you are actually executing the right thing, and so you actually start winning. And then let success create that wave that you can ride into the culture that you actually want. Difficult to do it otherwise. Hope this helps. Adios.