A Toxic Work Culture Rots From The Top
I got the chart above from this Stowe Boyd newsletter, which is in turn from here via MIT. It’s funny because MIT has apparently developed a little chubby for discussing toxic workplaces; I wrote about another study they did re: “The Great Resignation.” Breaking news: toxic work cultures are, uh, bad.
But what’s happening in the above chart? I’ll tell you, friend. In the above chart, you’re seeing correlates with toxic culture. What’s the big one? You got it: senior leadership. It’s funny because then they quote Ed Schein, who is a big name in these organizational development spaces, and he says this:
The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture.
Now we come to the first problem
Leaders — sorry, “leaders” — absolutely do not believe that the “only thing of real importance” they do is create and manage culture. In fact, if you asked many leaders if they do that, they’d say “No, HR does that.” The more in-tune senior leaders would at least acknowledge they have a hand in it. But before you heard words like “create and manage culture,” you’d probably hear these words:
All those words would probably come before the single word “culture” if you asked an exec, off the record, what the most important thing they do is.
Stowe Boyd then pulls out this section
Model the behavior you expect from employees — Senior management must walk the walk, not just talk the talk. What is done in the C-Suite signals what behaviors are allowed.
Here’s the “1” vs. “0” on those paragraphs:
In reality, pretty much the only situations where executives talk about culture are:
Out of those bullets, 90% are in the top two bullets, with most “culture” references as a nice slide during an all-hands. Companies with forward-thinking leaders is ideally better than it was (higher number, that is) years ago, but it’s not at scale.
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Most companies exist to make money. If people get in the way of that, or restrict that, those people are gone. Why do you think so many are chasing automation so hard?
There’s also a lot of sociopaths out there
Boyd quotes this:
Estimations are that while about 1% of junior employees are corporate psychopaths (assuming an even distribution of psychopaths across society) they exist at a higher incidence of about 4% at senior organizational levels. Notably, these percentages may be even higher in certain types of organizations, as corporate psychopaths are thought to gravitate towards organizations where they can acquire money, power and control, as well as honours and prestige, rather than to the less rewarded and less well-remunerated caring professions. Caring for other people is simply not on their agenda.
The sociopath leader is a very real thing, and if you have those in different corners of your organization, you’re not fixing toxicity. If anything, you’re scaling toxicity.
Remember this?
“All monkeys do what they see.”
If the way to advance in a company is to ape the guys who already have success, ya know what? People who want to get ahead will do that. That’s the whole game. So if you have toxic leaders, you get toxic companies because of emulation.
It also should be noted that you get this / this is a problem:
A different topic, but relevant to this whole discussion too.
Takes?