We Are Not Alone: How to Break the Cultural Cycle of Toxic Workplaces
I could not have imagined the overwhelming response to my article, “Identifying a Destructive and Dysfunctional Workplace: How Do You Know if Your Organization is Toxic?” Many of you reached out with public and private words of encouragement, and even more of you read it and shared it with your networks, very quickly making it one of my most read posts, even trending on LinkedIn.
One of the things that became clearest to me is that my experience is not at all uncommon.
We are not alone.
According to a 2019 Gallup study, more than one-fourth of employees reported feeling burned out at work “very often” or “always,” and almost one-half said they felt that way “sometimes.” In total, more than three-fourths of employees are feeling burned out at work with some regularity. The prevalence of this phenomenon results in higher absenteeism and higher turnover, and when people are at work, they suffer from lower levels of confidence, inhibiting their ability to bring their best selves to work.
But what does that have to do with destructive and dysfunctional cultures in the workplace? As it turns out, everything.
Gallup’s study identified five factors that are the biggest predictors of burnout:
Unfair treatment at work
Unmanageable workload
Unclear communication from managers
Lack of manager support
Unreasonable time pressure
While Gallup found that three-fourths of people are feeling burned out as a result of destructive and dysfunctional cultures, one 14-year-long study has found that 98% of workers have experienced incivility on the job, and half of them said they have experienced rude behaviors at least once per week.
Again, we are not alone.
If so many of us are not only experiencing such treatment at work, but also the emotional, physical, and relational results of that treatment, why do we continue to perpetuate the cultural cycle of toxic workplaces?
In his book, “The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety,” Timothy R. Clark said, “Peter Drucker coined the term knowledge worker in 1959, and yet we’re still trying to break down industrial age orthodoxies. We continue to elevate hard-core authoritarian bosses, conditioned in another time and place, to lead organizations,” (2020, 60). Clark adds that the dynamics of today’s workplaces demand leaders who are coaches, facilitators, guides, and servants.
I disagree somewhat with Clark’s assessment of our workplaces. In my experience, organizations are not simply promoting bad people into leadership positions, but rather toxic cultures are conditioning otherwise good people to behave poorly.
We have been conditioned to think that “a few bad apples spoil the barrel,” meaning a few bad individuals are responsible for bad cultures at work. However, it is far more likely that bad barrels, in the forms of destructive and dysfunctional cultures, are spoiling otherwise good apples. In other words, we have good people who are exposed to bad cultures who are then perpetuating those patterns.
In “Identifying a Destructive and Dysfunctional Workplace,” I provided an example of destructive and dysfunctional behavior I experienced at work. As I said in the article, my point in sharing the story was not to make the boss look bad. Instead, my goal was to shine a light on the characteristics of toxic cultures.
Although it is important to hold individuals responsible for their behavior and the choices they make, addressing the culture itself is the only true path of transformation. Any toxic culture will continue to corrode and corrupt those who succumb to it, including boss after boss after boss as long as the culture remains unchanged.
Cultures can be more incessant and insidious than any individual, able to overtake even those who they have hurt the most.
The boss and I, after all, once had an altogether different relationship.
One day, I was waiting for the boss to return from lunch for one of our regular one-to-one meetings. The boss was running a few minutes late, which wasn’t a big deal since it was summer and both of us had less busy calendars that day.
On most days, the boss would lean in to my doorway if she was running late and let me know she was ready to meet with me. That day, however, she walked in to my office, sat down, and slowly closed the door. Immediately seeing that she was visibly upset, I asked if she was OK.
She proceeded to tell me that she was coming from lunch with a friend that day and during lunch, that friend had shared with her that the boss’s boss had been gossiping to the boss’s peers that she was incompetent, insecure, and “in over her head.”
The boss sobbed as she described how devastated and humiliated she had been by her boss’s behavior. She asked if what I thought of her as a leader and what I would do in that situation if I were her.
Unfortunately, as the story I shared previously showed, the boss later chose to perpetuate the same toxic culture that had hurt her rather than work to transform it. This type of “trickle-down” abuse in supervision is a predictable pattern within organizations, according to a 2012 research study.
When we know that we are not alone and that there are so many who are suffering in toxic workplaces, we hold the power of choice. We can choose to be better. We can choose to be better leaders for others than the toxic leaders that we ourselves had. We can choose to do better than the destructive and dysfunctional behaviors we have seen rewarded in our workplaces.
We can choose to cultivate courageous cultures.
If you have your own story of a toxic workplace you are comfortable sharing, you can do so anonymously or confidentially (if you choose to share your name) here: https://bit.ly/ToxicCulturesAtWork
