### TL; DR: 13 Signs of a Toxic Team Culture

What looked like a good idea back in the 1990ies — outsourcing, for example, software development as a non-essential business area — has meanwhile massively backfired for a lot of legacy organizations. And yet, they still do not understand what it takes to build a decent product/engineering culture. Learn more about typical anti-patterns and are signs that the organization has a toxic team culture.

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/0*5GfsOi_xxyGJsdwy.jpg)

13 Signs of a Toxic Team Culture

### The Toxic Team Culture: Internals vs. Externals

20 years ago, many large companies tagged along with Jack Welch’s philosophy of outsourcing non-core business areas — such as software development — to third parties. Today, they find it hard to compete in the war for product and engineering talent with the GAFAs and other agile and technology-focused organizations. Software is finally eating the world.

The lack of a product/engineering culture in those legacy organizations usually results in hiring numerous contractors and freelancers to get at least some projects going. Which in return often leads to some typical anti-patterns as the internals find it hard to team up with the externals:

**No equality:** There is a pecking order among team members. This order is not based on an individual’s contribution or capability but whether that person is on pay-role or not.

**Externals to the shop floor:** Externals are expected to deliver the work items. Accepting accountability and developing a sense of product ownership is regarded impeding this purpose.

**Career issues:** Internals focus on advancing their careers by other means than building an outstanding product, for example, by getting involved in the organization’s politics game.

**Hiring minions:** Internals claim the final say who to hire and tend to use it to select submissive minions. (As the saying goes: B people hire C people.)

**Lonesome decisions:** Internals consider themselves responsible for the product and hence insist on making all decisions themselves — often single-handedly without involving the team or by overriding the team’s decision.

**Assigning tasks:** Internals dispatch work items to either externals or juniors. (It is even worse when externals accept the situation and ask internals what is the next work item for them is.)

**No WiFi for you:** Externals are excluded from the use of ‘internal’ infrastructure, for example, WiFi and calendar applications.

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### The Toxic Team Culture: Equality and Diversity

And then there are other issues beyond the internal vs. external question that might prevent a group of people that happen to be in the same place at the same time from becoming a team:

**Not all developers are created equal:** Merges need to be requested and are utilized as code quality stage-gates beyond a reasonable level.

**Outsourcing to juniors:** The senior team members consider writing tests, fixing bugs or documentation as a minor task below their pay-grade. Hence, it is outsourced to the junior team members.

**Remote minions:** Remote team members are not fully included, for example, they never meet the co-located team members in person.

**The silent treatment:** Team members are deliberately ignoring communication only to point at a later stage at a perceived lack of communication.

**No diversity:** The team members basically look the same, probably white dudes in their twenties and thirties.

**Voting with their feet:** The team suffers from a high fluctuation among its members.

### Conclusion:

What is difficult to understand is that legacy organizations complain that they cannot hire top engineering talent. On the other side, they do not invest in making the company a great place to work for in the first place. And by “great” I am not referring to sushi chefs on the premise or sparkling water from eight different countries in the fridge.

Creating balanced, diverse teams where rank does not have privileges — that are ready and willing to accept accountability — is essential for organizations striving to build a product/engineering culture or even become agile. Their return on investment will largely depend on achieving this goal as early as possible in the transition.

What signs of a toxic team culture have you observed? Please, share with us in the comments.

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[13 Signs of a Toxic Team Culture](https://age-of-product.com/toxic-team-culture/) was first published on Age-of-Product.

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