The doctor said to me, “I am admitting you to hospital immediately to do emergency surgery. We are going to replace your prosthetic hip.” You can imagine my shock as I had just gone to the Mayo Clinic to have the doctor check out some odd swelling around the hip. The doctor said I had a staph infection. I had to call my wife and tell her I was not coming home for dinner, or for days. She knew what this meant because I had my first hip replaced just a year and a half before. Maybe it was the skydiving and bull riding, maybe it was bad genes plus running too much, but it was definitely bad luck.
At 39 years old, I sat on the edge of the bed stunned because this meant months of recovery. I would have to go from a wheelchair, to a walker, to a cane, to my feet again. Because of the staph infection, I would be on IV antibiotics for six weeks. At that time, it seemed like a sentence more than a solution. Just then the physician’s assistant said, “I have a 12:30 p.m. opening in the operating room.” To which the doctor said, “That is not soon enough. If you have to get me a room at 5 a.m., get it!” It was then I knew the severity of a staph infection.
If your organization went to the doctor, would they diagnose something dangerous lurking just beneath the surface of your organizational skin? Is it possible that you are, like I was, going through the motions and not knowing the severity of what lies just below the veiled veneer? What if you have a staff infection? A living organism in the body you lead that is undermining the health, draining the energy and sabotaging the success of your team? In this article, I will highlight three types of influential infectious diseases that are silent killers to the health and organizational momentum of any team.
Staphy(negative)itus: A staff infection that is derived from a pervasive negative attitude and outlook.
Have you ever met someone who was so negative, if you put him or her in a dark room, they would develop? Perhaps they have staphy(negative)itus. As a young leader, I used to think if I were positive enough, I could convert the negative person to my positive ways. I would spend time trying to motivate, stimulate and emancipate this person from the bondage of negative thinking. On a scale of one to Zig Ziglar, they might be a negative one, yet I thought I could help them be free. While there were times I could at least get this person to stop being negative around the team, the fact still remained, the effort that should be poured into creating positive momentum in the organization was spent coddling the critical nature of these individuals. That is the nature of these types of organisms. They require energy to live. If they can’t produce the energy, they will rob it.
Symptoms: You begin to hear one person’s negative view repeated by others, as if it were their own thoughts. If there is anything modern North American politics has taught us, it is this. If it is repeated often enough, it becomes a true issue even if it is not a true statement.
Treatment: You have to, as Jim Collins puts it, “Get the right people on the bus.” That means you have to move some people around. If you are a church leader, move the negative person away from working with people to working with things. Continue to cast vision, lead them, encourage them, but move them.
Staphy(non-urgent)itus: A staff infection that drains the sense of urgency that should drive the passion and purpose of your team.
Staphy(non-urgent)itus occurs when individuals lose or never had a sense of urgency about their objectives and mission. Sometimes this can be a result of unclear directives by the positional leader or unclear objectives from the team members themselves. This can happen over time, and is not as obvious as Staphy(negative)itus. However, it is just as deadly to the organizational health. This infection has broad implications as it slowly lowers the bar of excellence to the point where leading becomes a maintenance task rather than a visionary function. Five-year plans take a back seat to five-o’clock quitting time. “That will work,” replaces, “I will work on that,” and the disease creeps into the lifeblood of the organization.
Symptoms: There is disconnect from purpose, and decisions are made not for what will cause more growth but for what will cause less grief. The high-risk, high-reward atmosphere is traded for a low-risk, low-yield environment that is safe.
Treatment: Revisit your mission statement as a team. Create buy-in by asking everyone to engage in a strategic planning session for the upcoming year. Ask each team member to bring three ideas to the table that will meet the goals laid out in this strategic planning session. Ask everyone to share their vision of where they would like to see their department in five years. Praise the ambitious and take note of the ambiguous. After prayer and vision casting, if a team member has a difficult time describing an ideal future then that could be the source of staphy(non-urgent)itus.
Once you have identified the source, then go into investment mode. Unlike staphy(negative)itus, staphy(non-urgent)itus is less resistant to the antibiotics of “Transformational leadership” (Peter Northouse’s phrase). Reconnecting one’s purpose to an ideal future can create urgency. If they cannot see themselves in that ideal future, then a transition is imminent.
