My grandmother use to read tea leaves. She gave up when she accurately predicted a tragedy. She certainly had a sixth sense about people and where they were heading. It wasn’t a job. It was a vocation until she spooked herself.

After a while in various businesses, I started to see patterns, behaviours and cultural results that were less than favourable for those organisations.

Whether you have job titles or not in your organisation, there are 3 positions you should get rid of now or avoid hiring in the future:

• The Shit Collector
• The Twit Wrangler
• The Fool Sufferer

All three will embed themselves in your culture and weave their magick, and that, and you can trust me on this one, is not a good thing. An additional word of warning, all three of these entities can appear in multiples and at all levels.

The Shit Collector
Shit Collectors usually disguise themselves as highly effective managers. They have nothing good to say about anyone or anything. Their radar is tuned to things going wrong. Sometimes their mere presence on a project can stress others out so much, that school boy errors occur at an alarming rate and in doing so creates more shit for The Collector to collect.

If there isn’t any available shit to collect, The Collector will set individual team members against their colleagues, by suggesting to their managers that they are not doing their jobs and what are you (the manager)going to do about it. Suddenly, as if by magic, others are now looking for shit.

With shit now piling up in every part of the office, people are so busy trying to avoid stepping in it that they take evasive action in updating their to-do lists and filing their inboxes. Nobody can concentrate on any work because, like mere cats, they’re having to continually raise their heads over their cubicles to see if the shit collector is collecting any where near them.

Your productivity and profitability has just taken a nose dive.

The Twit Wrangler
Unlike The Shit Collector, The Twit Wrangler is a far rarer beast. It is, however, equally disruptive and insidious. If you have one or more of these in your business you are going to have to get yourself the equivalent of an executive exorcist to get this one out.

The Twit Wrangler make themselves seemly indispensable. They are very organised and for the ill-trained manager or leader, they can be difficult to catch up with. As you come into close proximity of a Twit Wrangler, parts of your body will tense up with their self-righteousness. They pride themselves in criticising everybody else’s skills, including those of their own manager. To them everyone is a Twit and only they can save the organisation from these ‘idiots’.

There is nothing a Twit Wrangler likes more than creating a chaotic situation which they can, just in the nick of time, swoop down to repair at seemly much personal cost to themselves. The other face of the Twit Wrangler is that of self-appointed victim. This is easily spotted with frequent late night and weekend emails; not taking holiday at the last moment and texting from their honeymoon.

Over time, senior managers are seduced into believing it would be impossible to replace such a devotee of the business; while colleagues walk around with their self-esteem in tatters.

Never, ever underestimate the destructiveness of The Twit Wrangler.

The life blood is being sucked out of your business.

The Fool Sufferer
Every once in a while, you’re going to hire a fool. That’s ok, we are human and we make mistakes. What is far less acceptable is becoming a Fool Sufferer.

Six months into a hiring and you are following the least line of resistance. You’ve done the probationary review and our fool has done enough to scrape through. Hooray, you don’t have to go through the long process of recruiting for that position for some time. You, my friend, have inadvertently become a Fool Sufferer.

As a Fool Sufferer you are now at liberty to suffer at leisure and hope nobody else realises that you hired an idiot. A few more months in and you have convinced yourself that nobody has noticed because nobody has mentioned anything.

But just like the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, everybody in the business can see that you are tolerating a lack of performance and an all- embracing fecklessness. It’s bringing everybody down.

Nine times out of ten the fool can’t believe their good fortune. They turn up (usually late) sit at their desk, take a long lunch, collect their pay check and go home every evening without approaching anything like a sweat. How cool is this job!

Meanwhile, other team members are picking up the slack and quietly becoming resentful whilst trawling the job boards. They’re just about to join your competition — yippee!

Now you’re losing staff and your professional integrity is in question.

Careful construction and maintenance of positive organisational structures doesn’t require a crystal ball. It requires us to keep our eyes open and to see the world as it is and not as we wished it would be.

Where there are improvements and changes to be made, we must be fair and decisive. Sometimes it takes courage, sometimes it requires a sixth sense to get to the root of long-standing problems, sometimes it requires both.