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I'm not sure it's that simple. Consider a situation where only one of two people A and B can stay; but if A causes B to leave it's obvious (because A is rude),

I'm not sure it's that simple. Consider a situation where only one of two people A and B can stay; but if A causes B to leave it's obvious (because A is rude), and if B causes A to leave it's non-obvious (because B writes bad code and lowered the project standard enough to torpedo A's enthusiasm). In that situation, if iterated, it would look like 1. jerks clearly cause people to leave, but 2. projects get worse over time for no reason anyone can clearly identify. Identifying that you are in situation 2 would be difficult, in part because you'd kicked out everyone rude enough to point fingers at B. I don't know how to solve that, if it's real.

runlevel1 4y ago
That would be a failure in leadership. Two people conflicting doesn't necessarily mean either are toxic. If a legitimate complaint falls on deaf ears, even people who aren't toxic can become rude in their frustration. It could be a legitimate problem with the underperforming person (that may or may not be fixable), an overreaction to a perceived problem, an interpersonal conflict between two people, a toxic employee, or some combination of the the above. If you have a toxic person and an underperformer dragging the team morale down, you have two problems that need to be fixed. A good leader will dig deeper to try to understand what's really going on and act accordingly. In the scenario you've described, digging deeper would mean having the person making the claim present concrete examples and soliciting outside opinions if folks on the team are unwilling to give theirs. In my experience, things usually fall apart due to a failure to act rather than acting on false positives.