Managing Toxic Teams and Disruptive Behavior

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Disruptive behavior at work is rarely a clean policy violation. It shows up as the coworker who withholds information, the team member who argues over every assignment, the supervisor whose comments quietly drain everyone's effort. Everybody on the team knows something is wrong, but nobody can say exactly what it is, and that vagueness is precisely what makes it so hard to write down and address. In this session, HR consultant Teri Morning walks through the practical work of turning a fuzzy behavior problem into a factual, defensible case, and explains why the goal is always to create a solution rather than pile on to the problem.

About the Presenter

Teri Morning, MBA, MS, is Principal Consultant at Hindsight Human Resources and holds the SPHR, SPHR-CA, SHRM-SCP, and PHR credentials, along with certifications in mediation, project management, and IT management. She has more than 20 years of experience in human resources and training, specializing in internal investigations, employee relations, workers' compensation, and performance management interventions. Her approach is hands-on and built on real cases, which is exactly what you would expect from training designed for the people that do the work.

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Look for Patterns, Not Isolated Incidents

The single most useful filter for disruptive behavior is whether you are looking at a pattern or a one-time event. Everyone is human and everyone has an off day. What matters is repetition, and what matters just as much is the effect that repetition has on coworkers and on the work itself.

Morning used a deliberately small example to make the point. At a large retailer, one employee reportedly got frustrated and put excess boxes through the crusher, which left the grocery pickup team short on containers during a busy weekend. It sounds trivial. It was not trivial to the customers waiting in the parking lot. But notice how much is still unknown: is she actually angry, or is she responsible for crushing excess boxes and working from bad information about how many to keep? Has anyone asked her what the workflow is supposed to be?

She paired it with a second story. On a large military base, a supervisor told the employee who delivered supplies that he "just does boxes." On a base where destinations are 25 miles apart, that job matters, and the demeaning comment is what produced the drop in performance. The lesson is that the person who looks like the problem is not always the source of it. There are as many difficult supervisors as there are difficult employees.

Before you label anything, work through the ordinary explanations first:

Is this a training issue, or does the person know how to do the job?
Is information reaching them accurately and on time?
Is there a workflow problem nobody has solved?
Has anyone simply asked them what is going on?

Ask without blame. As Morning put it, you may find the person has an idea worth hearing, or you may find something else entirely, such as a supervisor who told an employee to skip quality control tests in order to hit production numbers.

Document the Behavior, Not Your Diagnosis

The employee handbook is a playbook. It is what the employer and the employee expect from each other, and when you do not follow it, you create mystery. But no handbook will ever cover every situation. People keep inventing new ones, and a policy that anticipated all of them would be unreadable.

That is why documentation has to describe behavior factually. Morning's framework is the five W's and an H: who, what, where, when, how, and why. Write what the person did and what effect it had on the work. Do not name other coworkers in the conversation, because that creates unnecessary drama. And do not diagnose the person. You are almost certainly not qualified to, it will not help your documentation, and nobody wants to be diagnosed by a supervisor who was watching social media the night before.

Weak Documentation Versus Strong Documentation

She walked through a sample entry that sounds thorough but is not:

Jay did not provide the revised schedule by the established noon deadline despite two requests from team members. This is the third documented instance in which information required by coworkers was not provided by the established deadline.

The structure is right. The detail is missing. Which schedule? What date was the noon deadline? When were the two requests made, and by which team members, in which positions, so it is clear why they needed the information? What were the dates of the previous two instances? What information, and required by whom?

Morning describes documentation as a map. You are not writing it so that people inside the company understand what happened. You are writing it so that outsiders can follow it: an unemployment hearing officer, opposing counsel, anyone who has never worked in your industry, does not know your company, and has no history with this employee. If the map has no landmarks, it does not work.

Document Everyone, Not Just the Problems

Her strongest piece of career advice for a new HR professional: from the beginning of the relationship, document performance for everyone. High performers, low performers, and everyone in between. High performing today can become low performing later, and documentation on strong performers has real value for comparative purposes from a compliance standpoint.

A few practices that make documentation hold up:

Use your policies as guardrails and attach the version of the policy that was in effect at the time. Policies change, and old versions are surprisingly hard to find later.
If you use an HR system, upload the policy to that employee's record. If you work on paper, keep a printed copy with the document.
Never write documentation while you are angry. Get the facts, then write it up.
Treat every note as discoverable, including the sticky note you meant to throw away. In a legal dispute, opposing counsel asks for those first.

That last point extends to AI tools. Morning noted that AI chat tools can genuinely help you draft documentation and prepare for hard conversations, but most of that activity is now considered discoverable. The move is not to vent into a chat window. It is to ask for help finding a supportive way to talk to an employee about attendance, dress code, or how they are working with coworkers, and to train supervisors to use it that way.

Having the Conversation

When a pattern is established and it is time to talk, the structure is straightforward:

State specifically what behavior must change and how it affects productivity and the business.
Explain what acceptable behavior would look like instead, in concrete terms.
Review the policy together. Print a copy for each of you, hand it over, and give the person a moment to read it before you ask for questions.
Ask whether there is anything else you need to know about the situation.
Set clear expectations and time frames, then follow up in writing.

Printing the policy is especially useful for dress code conversations, because it moves the discussion off personal style. If someone argues that what they are wearing is fine, you can say you disagree, point to the policy, and ask who the policy gives authority to make that decision. Then move on. Do not get pulled into the weeds, and do not keep arguing after the employee has already agreed with you. Morning has watched supervisors make the point, see it land, and then start the whole conversation over again.

The follow-up email matters more than most people think. Send it within about thirty minutes, summarize what you discussed in bullet points, and invite the employee to respond by end of day if their understanding was different or if they have something to add. That puts the record in writing and gives them one more opening to tell you something important.

Ask the Question Twice

"Is there anything else I need to know about this situation?" is worth asking more than once, particularly in serious cases. An employee may say no at the start. As the conversation goes on and the seriousness becomes clear, that answer sometimes changes.

Knowing When to Move From Talking to Acting

The question Morning poses is whether another chance is likely to produce a different result. You will not see overnight transformation, but you should see someone trying. If you have raised the issue three times and nothing has moved, it is fair to say so directly and ask the employee what they think is going on. Give them the chance to answer first. They may hand you useful information, or they may paint themselves into a corner.

She was candid that addressing behavior is harder than documenting it. Documentation becomes a skill and then a habit. Addressing takes a kind of internal effort that most people would rather postpone. But delay makes it worse in a specific way: a pattern does not disappear, and eventually the question stops being why the employee behaved that way and becomes why you let it continue.

Stop, Drop, and Roll

Employees do not use legal terminology. When something surfaces mid-conversation that changes the lane you are in, Morning's rule is stop, drop, and roll.

Stop. Do not argue and do not dismiss it, but do not continue blindly with discipline either.
Drop into investigation. Look into what you just heard and demonstrate good faith.
Roll it to the people who should see it: HR, employee relations, your attorney, or your manager. Smart people ask questions.

The example she gave: you are writing someone up for lateness and learn they are driving a family member to cancer treatment. If they are eligible, that is likely FMLA territory, and those absences should not be counted against them.

Questions From Attendees

How Do You Tell a One-Time Issue From a Developing Pattern?

If you can redirect it on the spot, do that. Praise in public, correct in private. If you address it and see no improvement, then address it again and still see no improvement, you have a pattern. Morning's approach is to be direct: we have talked about this, I am not seeing improvement, tell me what is going on. Then work through whether the person actually knows how to do the job, including whether the training you already provided is being applied.

Can These Corrections Become Part of PIP Documentation?

Yes. Even a verbal conversation should be documented. As matters become more serious, the documented pattern is what demonstrates that you tried in good faith to address the issue and did not get improvement. At that point the employee needs to see clearly what is documented and understand what happens if nothing changes. All of it becomes part of the employee record.

A Few Closing Principles

Be a supervisor at work and a parent at home.
Do not lose your temper. Be the person who stops talking last.
Unfairness can be as destructive in a workplace as a violated legal protection.
Do not promise what you cannot deliver.
Address behavior before dysfunction becomes normal.

As Morning reminded the group, every employer since the beginning of time has dealt with some version of this. It is not happening only to you, and it is not going to stop happening. What changes is how prepared you are to handle it.

Keep Building the Skill

If you want the full treatment of this material, including sabotage, cliques, gossip, passive-aggressive behavior, and how documentation connects to coaching, corrective action, PIPs, and defensible employment decisions, the complete course goes considerably deeper than this session could. Toxic Teams: Managing Dysfunctional Workplace Behavior has been approved for 1.5 general recertification credit hours toward PHR, SPHR, and GPHR recertification through the HR Certification Institute, and is valid for 1.5 PDCs for the SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP. Recertification credit applies to that paid course only and is not available for this free recorded session.

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