Veteran radio consultant Fred Jacobs has a blog that’s pretty good reading for those in the industry or interested in it. Last fall, he wrote about a member of the Detroit Tigers who’d been sent home by the team before the end of the season for “a lack of effort.” Jacobs used the incident to talk about effort as it relates to broadcasters. “If radio is your chosen profession, it’s your obligation to work your butt off,” he wrote. And also: “Who’s walking in the station every day, giving it the old 110% on good days and bad ones? Who’s a cancer in the building, fanning the flames of dissent and paranoia?”

There are people in every office—not just in radio stations—who are happy to be there, who find their jobs a continuing source of joy and fulfillment, who are energized simply by walking in the door. And there are people who are not—those who radiate negativity, by accident or by design.

There are degrees of negativity, and some are more harmful than others. No diverse group of individuals who gather to achieve a common purpose will ever operate in complete harmony; organizations with any degree of bureaucracy at all will occasionally get snagged in the machinery. It’s not just radio, it’s every workplace. Things happen, decisions get made, people act or react in particular ways that make you shake your head or grin ruefully—but then you go on about the day. Head-shaking and brief commiseration with your fellow sufferers is completely normal, and even therapeutic. It’s scarcely worth describing with the term “negativity.”

A more damaging type of negativity is the kind Jacobs mentions: a cancer in the building. This person might be a straight-up asshole who takes pleasure in messing with people, or who pits them them against each other to watch the fireworks. He or she might be somebody dissatisfied with colleagues or management, and who actively tries to bring others over to the dark side by “fanning the flames of dissent and paranoia.”

There is also a type of negativity somewhere in the middle—the burnout case, somebody who’s long past their expiration date. Somebody who’s unable to “give the old 110 percent,” either because they’ve made the decision not to, or they’re simply unable to.

I have been that person, who goes to work with no energy, sleepwalks through his off-air duties, ends his airshift happy if he hasn’t butchered more than a couple of breaks, goes home exhausted, and starts dreading the next day the moment he hits the couch. A person who can’t do the job his employer expects of him, or the job he expects of himself. A person who can’t give 110 percent—not even close.

I once got fired precisely because my employer recognized the person I had become. I also quit a job once because I recognized it in myself. The latter was not an easy thing to do, but I hope I earned some good karma by recognizing the fix I was in and getting out before it got worse . . . for everybody.

In a good radio station, Fred Jacobs says, “There are too many people working too hard and giving their all.” If you can’t be one of them, you shouldn’t be there.