Of course, we're choosing people so it's the most complicated task I believe to see in advance who is that person and what is the personality and whether it's matching or not. What are the worst case scenarios you had? Maybe you could share some stories.

I mean, what is the worst maybe, different for different people and for different managers and for different recruiters, we have had various situations. We have been hiring not only in Lithuania. Well, this is our main market when it comes to the employment. We're hiring in the United States, we have been hiring elsewhere, anywhere because well we have some employees who are working remotely. So we have experience you know from all over the place and I would say that the worst hiring failures are maybe when you hire, so to say like crazy people. And I don't want to be very rude here. So there are you know some personalities which well do not fit that well into the cultural environment of the organization and then they either you know, completely disagree with how we run things here or they are becoming toxic and are trying to influence other people, to support them into their distractive behavior. So, I would say that this type of people is the worst. The ones who are trying to kind of build their relationships with the upper management and you know always into something. Trying to collect support from the colleagues and that leads into ruined relationships, broken processes and broken results at the end. So I would say that this kind, this type of employees is like the most complicated one, because it becomes really complicated to navigate the whole process when it comes to the separation. Of course for such type of people, it's always a surprise that they are being terminated, it is always for them a huge drama, they are trying to somehow affect everybody emotionally and they are using all the arguments, which make you feel bad about the decision that you made. So yes, this is a little bit more problematic as other cases because well it's least professional I would say you know these cases are the ones where the employees are driven by emotions and feelings and they are not thinking clearly, they are not thinking from the professional perspective, from themselves as the employees they are seeing everything you know as a very tight, family type of relationship and then the separation is not easy at all.

How are you dealing with this? Because it's not like a work organization, right? It's more like dealing with some personal issues and how to deal with that and still to stay professional?

Yes, that is correct. These people will usually they have some you know personal problems which they are trying to either cover or somehow influence by what they do in their professional environment. So I mean we only had a couple of such cases. So it's not that we have many of that or that I have a lot of experience in such cases. But well yeah, we had a couple of those and each time the most important thing is the flawless preparation. So it means that you have to have your processes in place. You have to know the legal side of the things. You have to prepare for all the possible scenarios because while these such people they are unpredictable and it's hard to it's hard to decide how they are going to react once you announce the termination to them. So of course it is important to be well prepared in terms of the legal part, in terms of the processes, not to miss anything because that might be you know something what these people could bring to some legal processes as well. So yeah, good preparation, good knowledge of the labor law in your country and the procedures are very important. So if you have any in-house procedures about how you normally terminate employees you have to follow that for sure, very precisely.

But how not to get personally involved, right? If that person starts sharing emotions. It should be complicated.

Yes, it is complicated. First of all, you have to be able to recognize that you are being played and then you are being you know torn into the side where you have to make judgments you know, then you have to choose sides. So it's important to recognize once that starts to happen, because this is the very typical behavior of toxic people. They are trying to build teams, they are trying to attract people to their sides, to support them. And this is very important to recognize, that behavior. And then, if you recognize that on time then you are able to kind of make that separation, to separate the strictly work related issues from what's being emotions and feelings, so that is important. Of course, it's hard and it's very different from case to case, but I guess that asking yourself all the time, like are we still talking about business, or are we now talking about, relationships, feelings.

And so first, how to notice because it's not very easy to notice that this is a toxic person. Sometimes it's like they have a pretty strong argument and you might think that you are doing something wrong about it. How to see what is the reality?

Well I would say that one thing that can help you to recognize such behavior and such people in your team is to have an established and working proper feedback process, so you can do that either you know on whatever cadence you like you know, monthly, quarterly whatsoever just don't do that once a year because well it will be too late. So to have that process, to have that feedback process well established and working will give you as a manager the possibility to see all the sides of the things you know, just because well then, if there is only that person talking to you all the time, of course you are being affected by what that person is saying and you are not thinking clear. You are not, you know, seeing all the possible sights and that's why I think that having something like 360 feedback process is very valuable, having peer-to-peer feedback process is valuable, just you know for people to exchange what they, how they see each other as colleagues you know in the professional life, and so this helps to collect data,  this helps to collect information about whether the relationship and the environment in your team is still is healthy,  and yeah, so you can start from that you can start there just talking to people basically talking to people and getting to understand how others perceive the same person whether they all see each other in the same light. Because that type of people they usually have a very different approach and a very different perception of what is happening actually. So this is just checking from time to time are we still on the same page? Is all team on the same page,that would be helpful.

Yeah I think it's the trigger number one, if you get, if you collect all the feedback from the team members and they say one thing and that particular person say totally different thing so something is not matching, right? And I remember I had one case when team lead had a real big problem with one of the developers, because he was just not delivering and he was having many 1-on-1 and even I was involved and well the person explained that everything is okay, he is working, he's delivering. He doesn't see any problem and then we had this 360 degree feedback collection and we heard that all the team members said that he is playing video games during his daily work and it was like so obvious you know. So like regular 1 on 1 is not enough. You really have to get more feedback from that other team members to see the whole picture.

That's right. And even more, if it's only you against that person then it's your opinion against that person's opinion and it's the opinion game, then, who has stronger arguments, right? And so it's important to collect the feedback and also I guess that it's also very important to basically manage by numbers, and to manage by metrics. And metrics they cannot be interpreted. And just simply you know having all the performance evaluated by some numeric metrics, KPIs, OKRs, you name it. But basically that would help to avoid opinions. And to talk about the hard numbers, hard data.

Yeah, right. But as you mentioned before, toxic people tend to go after other team members and gain their support. So have you had the situation when you did that feedback collection and more people are supporting that opinion, right? Not yours or how it should be. And how to deal then with that?

Not really, you know, not really and all the time, well in these couple of cases, it was very clear actually so and it became clear after talking to more and more people, after asking the right questions and then suddenly it escalated and many more and more people came to the same conclusions and provided the same information and same opinions. So not really. This was not the case in our situations.

That's nice. I think I really believe that if you're sharing with other people you can get more knowledge, more information and feel stronger, because the worst case scenario is to hide this, that you are not having a good relationship with a new employee. And then you're suffering from that and you don't have any support because you haven't shared about this at all. So yeah, it's really important to stay strong and to say how it is. And you mentioned that separation might be tricky and even a drama thing. Did you have any drama by terminating a person?

We did, we did. Yes, we did have drama a couple of times. Yes, after we kind of announced the news to somebody who we terminated. We did have drama, we did have well I don't want to go into these you know cases deep enough but some of the terminations were not easy and were not well received by those being terminated. But so far so good like we don't have any legal cases going on. We don't have anyone  writing emails to us complaining about the situations that happened in the past. We managed to close all the cases properly without any like loose ends hanging still and not being solved.

Yeah, that's the most important. And when did you notice that the person is toxic? Was it very obvious from the very beginning when they just started working or it lasted more?

I mean it also differs from case to case and sometimes it took us like more than a year to start understanding that something is wrong here and that we should be putting more attention into some particular cases. Sometimes it was three weeks and became pretty clear that this will not work out, that something is really wrong, that the perceptions are very different from what the manager sees and how the manager sees the situation and how the employee sees the situation, so yeah, that was very different.

And when you mentioned a year lasted and just then you started noticing that something is wrong - what were the red flags? What were the first signs you noticed?

Again I don't want to go much deeper into these particular cases. But I mean atypical behavior, mixed messages, different perceptions on the same issues, by different employees. And this toxic person started to actually affect others that sometimes take some time, to build that whole artificial story. So sometimes it really takes some time,yeah, so basically we just started to hear different perceptions on events by different employees. Which triggered our curiosity and after investing some time and investigating the cases we came to the realization that it's not good. That the situation is not good enough.

Do you think that companies could use something about their environment or team organization or something you know to help those people? Because most of the time people get toxic because they have some personal issues or some personal misalignment with a company or team goals. Do you think there could be something done to help to get that person back on track?

Also, maybe in some cases you can still do something, in other cases I would say that you just have to let it go. And that would be you know better for everyone. Because one thing is very clear - when you are having toxic people in the team and the team is being affected by them you are actually not doing a big help for your team if that person is still there. So the sooner you get rid of that particular toxic person the better that would be for the entire team. So I would say that in some cases perhaps it's not even worth to try. If the situation is not that dramatic and if there is no harm yet done and you manage to kind of point out that behavior in the early stages then perhaps I'm talking with that particular person, being completely honest and open about how you see the situation and what might be the consequences of that person continue the wrong behavior. Of course it might be with a positive outcome. But you have to kind of be able to recognize this behavior in the early stages.

It really depends on how many people are affected, right? Okay, great. So to sum up - what would be the key takeaways? The key advices for other startups, if they would ever have these kind of the situations?

Well I would say that the good old saying hire slow, fire fast is still applicable. It's very important what is the recruitment process and what are the measures in place to to check, if people have certain professional skills as well as if that person would be a good cultural fit. So this is important, then the second thing is basically open feedback process is also important having constantly going feedback process where you involve peers as well as managers and giving the feedback both ways or all the ways is also important and then being able to read that feedback, to understand that feedback and to understand that sometimes people are talking between the lines and what's then going on for real. And then you know not hesitating when it comes to some toxic behavior just not letting those people to stay longer because that would influence the huge part of the organization and then it would be really hard to remedy the situation. So yeah, so getting these people terminated as soon as as you are able to grasp what's really happening - I would say that it is also important.

Great! Great! Thank you so much Rimante for your time and for sharing.

Thank you Indre! Thank you everyone, have a good day.

And thank you to all the listeners. For more podcast please visit http://jobrely.com.