How to Avoid Hiring Category 5 Hurricane Employees

 In case you hadn’t guessed it, hurricane employees (a term coined in a recent Wharton piece ) are not a good thing; they are what you might describe as the bad apple in the team, or they could be the ‘poison leader’ at the head of the team. They might be described as:negative, toxic, narcissistic, parasitic, psychopathic and so on. The thing that they all have in common is no matter what level of employee they are, they manage to disrupt the work environment for everyone and leave a trail of destruction on their wake before moving on—a lot like a hurricane.

It might be easy for some of the more sage observers to suggest that this is all a bit melodramatic and that one employee can’t have such a negative influence on strong-minded team members. Well, at study by Will Phelps, Terence R. Mitchell and Eliza Byington, “How, When, And Why Bad Apples Spoil the Barrel: Negative Group Members and Dysfunctional Groups,” shows without doubt that hurricane employees can bring the whole team down. In fact, in their study they revealed that one negative employee can bring the overall team performance down by 30-40 percent and can cause other team members to start displaying negative attitudes and behaviors.

Of course, if employers are to start focusing on screening out hurricane employees, we need to come out of the clouds and identify some clear behavioral signs of a hurricane employee, which recruiters can look out for. Fortunately, the study cited three specific behaviors that characterize hurricane employees, and they are:

• withholding effort from the group
• expressing negative emotions
• violating interpersonal norms (bullying, aggression, intimidation, etc.)

Clearly, one of the most effective ways to spot these category 5 hurricane employees is to question candidates on their ability to work in teams. But, this also requires you to have clearly understood the kind of behaviors that characterize good team working in your business. This means you need to review your team cultures and list  the kind of behaviors that successful team members exhibit – and you can then screen for that in the interview. While you may like the sound of a results focused, aggressive and driven employee, you might want to probe and find out what methods they use to achieve such results, which may not be acceptable in your business.

However, the most skilled interviewees may be able to obscure or hide their hurricane employee tendencies under typical behavioral questioning. That is why you need to take hurricane employee screening to the second level, which means to actually re-create a team working environment within the interview setting. This means that the interview situation itself is actually a team cohesion assessment setting and it will be much harder for a hurricane employee to mask their destructive tendencies in these environments. This could involve doing a team exercise as part of an assessment center, which is arguably crucial for leadership and team-based roles where you can potentially uncover any hurricane employee tendencies.

Also, think about using team interviews and incorporating junior staff members into interviews as a disregard or disrespect for junior staff can be a sign of toxicity.

There are many steps you can take to avoid hiring category 5 hurricane employees and considering the fact that they can reduce team performance by 30-40 percent, hurricane employee screening should be a core part of your hiring process.