What does a toxic culture look like?

Why is the team’s culture not working? Mostly companies assume that having smart and experienced people is enough. You would think that if I have a smart team and then everyone will act the same smart way. It should work, logical. But we humans are not logical beings. We still live the maslow hierarchy principles. We tend to think group performance depends on measurable abilities like intelligence, skill, and experience. We overvalue smartness and undervalue basic human instinct — safety and reward.

Amy Edmondson (psychological safety at Harvard) said: “We have a place in our brain that’s always worried about what people think of us, especially higher-ups. As far as our brain is concerned, if our social system rejects us, we could die. Given that our sense of danger is so natural and automatic, organizations have to do some pretty special things to overcome that natural trigger.”

What this means is that at work everybody has a “secret” second job! As Daniel Coyle said: “people at work on every position has kind of like a secret second job, job of managing our status” — protecting their status, and being careful, and watching their place. Jim Dethmer described this “secret” second job as follows: “For most people or leaders, survival is a matter of protecting the ego or identity or image. And the ego firmly believes that if it is not “right” it will not survive.”

A great culture can get rid of this defence and “always being right” mechanisms, and rather focus on creating connection, and cohesion, and therefore help people grow.

Let’s have a look at these “check” boxes of bad culture:

How many boxes could you check?

Toxic culture: “Burned-out, stressed-out, frazzled leaders foster organizations that experience high turnover, low employee engagement, steep healthcare costs and dysfunctional teams that often work against each another.”

Failures aren’t really failures, they are little nudges and they’re your guide points for moving forward. So the more attention you pay to why they go wrong, the more you can figure out how to make it right.

Organisations that invest in employee experience are more productive, valuable, attractive, innovative, profitable, and have superior stock performance than those who don’t. These organisations crush the competition in every metric.

Here you can check “the employee experience index” of your company.The Employee Experience Index ranks and scores 252 organizations around the world based on seventeen variables across three environments which are: culture, technology, and the physical workspace. These variables and environments are what employees care about most at work.

Resources cited:

• The Employee Experience Advantage- Jacob Morgan
• The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership- Jim Dethmer
• Culture Code- Daniel Coyle
• How To Spot A Toxic Workplace Before Accepting A Job Offer

PS: if you have any more boxes to check, please share them with us in your comments below or leave any feedback.

Thanks for reading.