Becoming a Safe Place to Land: How to Support Employees Recovering from a Toxic Workplace

Increasingly I’m coaching executive leaders and managers who hire someone with a flawless track record and who seems to exemplify exactly what they’re hoping for, only to experience a team member who comes in and isn’t able to perform to the level they’d agreed.?

There are lots of reasons this might happen: poor onboarding, emerging life challenges like illness and sudden caregiving, or even differing standards of how to do the job or what “good enough” looks like. There’s also another factor that I see showing up in a lot of my client systems: folks who leave a toxic job and start a new one, without the processing time or support to recover from what they just experienced, and so bring a lot of the baggage from their last role into their new one. Add to that an organization that does not yet have the inclusive management chops to ensure all new employees are adequately supported and onboarded to thrive, and you’ve got a formula for a revolving door of talent. Worse yet, when this happens a few times in a row, even long-tenured team members start second-guessing their decision to stay when talented newbies bounce in less than a year.

In my own limited experience, of late this pattern has been especially true of high performing Black women and women of color and neurodivergent folks - folks with identities where they’ve often had to “code switch” or mask aspects of themselves to survive at work. What I am specifically noticing is folks leaving an abusive boss or organization to start at another.? When things go wrong, these highly talented and committed leaders find themselves hopping from another painful experience in less than a year, and sometimes the cycle even continues at the subsequent job. There are things we can do to break this pattern and support colleagues on their path to recovery and resetting their performance, and if you’re a leader that values equity, I invite you to improve your empathy and impact in these situations.

The Practical Impact of a Toxic Workplace

What I’ve learned from coaching clients that have exited challenging workplaces, is that individuals tend to underestimate the amount of time (and support) it takes to snap back from years of being mistreated at work. Sometimes, we think we’re healed, then we see someone who reminds us of a colleague or manager that wronged us, or who says something that lands poorly, and all the self-protection mechanisms from our past season activate again - and we may not even notice. If we’ve been through a series of toxic workplaces, reverting to survival mode happens even more quickly and can be even harder to shake.

On the ground, what managers and leaders cite in individuals recovering from a toxic workplace is an unwillingness to afford grace to others, a guarded nature, and a lack of personal accountability when concrete mistakes are made (while avowing to be an individual committed to accountability). At the same time, what recovering employees report is a perceived lack of trust in their abilities, an unsafe, micromanaging or unwelcoming environment, shifting goal posts or opaque cultural expectations and a perfectionistic focus on what goes wrong in their performance rather than the many things that are working. If this disconnect isn’t proactively repaired, it almost always ends in a termination, resignation, or career quicksand for one or both parties.

We can do better.

What to Do?

If you are an executive or manager that finds yourself supervising a new hire in this situation, how do you support them to reset and succeed in their role? Every situation is different, but here are some places to start:

• Ask for feedback and advice. Ask the individual, “It’s important to me that I create an environment for you and other members of this team to thrive in their roles. What are the top 3 things you need from me to ensure you are positioned to thrive here?” Or, if you know trust has been broken, ask directly, “I have a sense I’ve broken trust with you in some way, and I sincerely want to improve and repair trust where it’s possible. Would you be willing to share if there are any places where I have broken trust or damaged our relationship, and what you would need to see to improve that trust?”

• Establish working agreements that work both ways. Ask concretely about what their expectations are for you as a manager, and what they need from you to do their job well. Share your expectations explicitly, and name the why where you can. For example, don’t just share, “I need you to meet deadlines.” Share instead, “Your work has a downstream impact on many people on our team and as a leader, people expect that you have been thoughtful about what’s realistic when you set deadlines. When we set them too quickly and then miss them, we throw off multiple workstreams. Going forward, I need us to be super thoughtful about what we commit to, and to diligently prioritize the projects that we agree are most important, even if smaller things get dropped.” Then make space for what they would need to make that happen, for example, “I need us to calibrate on what the top priorities are and which smaller projects can be sacrificed. I also need your cover if team members push back on what we decide.”

• Tell the truth, with the right gravity. Sometimes, we sugar-coat challenges because we know someone is struggling, but our disappointment still comes out - albeit in micromanaging, passive-aggressive comments, or in our overblown reaction in the future when the pattern continues. It is so much more honest to tell the truth: “I am concerned about x. What can we put in place to ensure it doesn’t continue?” or “Your work products have missed my expectations in a few ways recently. Specifically, for the next draft, I need to see these changes…” You don’t need to have an unnecessary edge to your voice, or be disrespectful or sharp, but if something is a problem, no one benefits if you make your feedback feel optional.

• Advocate for realistic goals, timelines, and boundaries. Sometimes one of the ways someone manages imposter syndrome (particularly if they were fired/coached out at their last role) is they over-promise and say yes to everything and hyper-perform. When someone who is manifesting some of these traits has a pattern of overcommitting, then being overwhelmed and renegotiating, one way to support them is opposing timelines that do not feel realistic before they’re locked in. Be transparent that you would rather pad the deadline by a week given what you know about how long things take in the organization - but welcome them to beat your timeline if they want to. Additionally, put mechanisms in place to renegotiate if new priorities threaten delivery. Invite them to also set firm boundaries around personal time and tap you in if they’re repeatedly eating into evenings and weekends to get their core work done.

• Proactively help them navigate tricky relationships and tensions. If your organization has quirks that might be hard to read across lines of identity or workstyle difference, help them to navigate these customs or norms. If goals or values are often in tension, be explicit about how you might make tradeoffs if in their shoes. In check-ins, work through likely scenarios together or make space to process tricky interactions or to ask for feedback if they don’t understand something across teams. Proactively ask how they’re working with your manager, your peers, or others with more tenure and power on the team rather than wait for them to raise those issues to you. This is especially true if you know certain individuals are harder to work with or may be more hands-on than desired with their area of work.

• Create the conditions for both grace & accountability. Be explicit about trying to cultivate an environment where you and your colleague have the space to be real and honest with each other, have room to fail and learn, and have both grace to grow and accountability for our impact. Model and create space for your colleague to note when we are assuming or “telling stories” about intent or others’ motives that we haven’t inquired about based on our past experiences. Check in on a predetermined cadence (bi-weekly or monthly at check-ins) about how well you all are doing to cultivate these conditions and what could be improved.

When someone you once believed to be a high-performer is failing, it’s easy to second-guess your first impression and divest from them, thinking “I guess I made a bad hire.” I invite and challenge you to start from a different place: perhaps the environment around them or your own management practices could be having more of an impact than you think.?

I have coached dozens of managers over the years, and I have never heard one say, “I was too equitable - I shouldn’t have tried everything in my power to help a colleague succeed.” On the other hand, I have heard many lament a pattern of losing talented team members - especially women of color and Black women - and not understanding the role they played in those departures. You cannot control what someone brings with them when they leave a toxic workplace, but you can do everything in your power to disrupt that pattern on your team and in your managerial relationship. And I challenge you to do so.

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Melanie Rivera is the CEO and Principal Executive Coach and Trainer @ Breaker28, an organization focused on developing managers and leaders with H.E.A.R.T. - who manage in healthy, equitable, anti-racist, real and trust-centered ways. If your organization needs actionable, DEI-forward management training or executive/manager coach-sulting that gets results, schedule an intro call by emailing [email protected].?