How the Team Responds to a Disruptive Member Reveals the Culture

We’ve been talking about what one person is doing. I want to shift the conversation to what the team is doing.

Because the way a team responds to a disruptive member tells you more about the culture than the disruptive member does. Anyone can disrupt. Not every team responds well.

So: how are we responding?

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

Paul’s instruction to the Galatians is striking in two ways. First, the goal is restoration, not punishment or exclusion. Second, the instruction to watch yourselves — the team is not immune to what they’re trying to correct in the individual.

In practice, teams respond to a disruptive member in one of three ways.

The first is isolation: they pull away from the person, reduce communication, and essentially ostracize them. This usually makes the disruptive behavior worse, not better.

The second is enabling: they absorb the behavior, make excuses for it, and lower the standard to accommodate it. This makes the whole team worse.

The third — the one Galatians is describing — is gentle restoration: someone goes toward the person, names the behavior honestly, with care and without anger, and invites them back to the standard. This is the hardest of the three and the only one that actually works.

Who in this room is willing to do the third thing? And who is close enough to this person to do it well?

This may surface real barriers — fear, conflict avoidance, not feeling it’s their place. Take those seriously.