Which came first - the chicken or the egg? Who is responsible for creating (and perpetuating) toxic work cultures?

Armed with only curiosity and a quest for the truth, let me challenge you to reflect on a simple point before you read this article.

Why is it that we are only talking about toxicity in the workplace now?

Why is it that this topic is all of a sudden ‘topical because it's a fallout of the Great Resignation, Reimagination, or whatever word suits your philosophical perspective.

I've said it in a previous post before and I’ll say it again - We seem to be missing the point. This post has so far had almost 11,000 views, 40 comments and 8 reshares. That may not be significant ‘metrics’ for some of the clickbait influencers on this topic who are out there, though, for me, it shows that people are beginning to wake up to the true extent of toxicity in their workplace.

If I upset or offend anyone in this article, that’s ok. I present a different angle to the ever increasingly popular topic that few of us only seem to want to talk about on a surface level.

I’m going to highlight three main points in this article and these may make you and others uncomfortable:

1. Why are we only beginning to talk about toxicity in the workplace now?
2. We are treating the symptoms, not the cause
3. The true cost of toxicity in the workplace

1. Why are we only beginning to talk about toxicity in the workplace now?

It seems that everyone is jumping on the proverbial bandwagon to throw in their ‘two cents’ worth to the discussion about toxicity in the workplace.

Except it's not a discussion. It's not an open and honest and collaborative discussion about how to actually address toxicity in the workplace. I mean, sure, we’re seeing more and more ‘snake oil’ sales tactics offering products and services (from those who label themselves experts in such topics, though a deeper scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find they have little substance in the topic at all).?

We’re also seeing well-intentioned academic research in this area. But we’re not being completely open-minded in how we’re researching the topic. And I believe that is a smoke screen because it prevents us from addressing the real cause of why we have toxicity in the workplace.

Something that’s odd to me is that we’re also in an age where I don’t know about you, but I’m seeing more quotes, posts, or posts of billboards on LinkedIn than ever before that are increasingly telling us that ‘we need to own our own voice’, that ‘we must speak up’. These platitudes are supposedly an indication and green light to openly talk about toxicity in your workplace. Or at least I thought they were.

Allow me to share something even odder to me - trust levels in your organization and amongst your leadership are at an all-time low! All of the research indicates this and all of the work I've been doing with organizations and leadership teams indicates this too.

Am I the only one concerned by such incongruence - a rise in rhetoric to tell people that they need to own their voice and yet a reduction in the numbers inside organizations willing to do that because of fear?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m an advocate for the increase in surface-level discussion about this topic. I really am. If it means that the topic is front and center and on people’s minds, then that’s a good thing. I’ve been working in this area for over 25 years and over the last few years have started to see more and more posts on toxicity, yet the majority of the focus seems to only be on what I call the ‘symptoms’ of toxic cultures and not the real cause.

2. We are treating the symptoms, not the cause

We are beginning to see attempts at research in this area, such as some insightful research by MIT Sloan -? Why Every Leader Needs to Worry about Toxic Culture.

But it doesn't go far or deep enough. Sorry MIT Sloan and all those out there who think this is the answer. It's not. It's pointing us in the right direction, though we're not quite there yet.

Identifying the elements that one academic institution considers make an organization toxic is a good start - it can certainly help to shine a spotlight on the areas that can be addressed at the surface level. But we’re not going deep enough, opting to keep the discussion at surface level for fear of offending or actually peeling back the onion to expose the real reasons why we have toxicity in our workplace.

At this point, I’m reminded of what Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men said ‘You can’t handle the truth’.

But I think you can.

Ok, let's get some of the stats and highlights of the most recent research in this area out of the way first. These ones particularly appealed to me because they concur with some of my own global research and findings in this area.

1. Toxic work culture is 10 times more likely to get an employee to leave their organization (even higher than discussions on compensation)
2. Approx 20% of US employees have left an organization because of its toxic culture?
3. 75% of job seekers research an organization’s culture before they apply to work there

Whilst these are important and will no doubt ricochet in and around the brains of CEOs and others in your organization, please know this one thing:

Your efforts to address toxicity in the workplace will only succeed if the organization and its leadership have the appetite to create the conditions to have honest conversations about toxicity and the impact it has on the organization.?

Contrary to what others may tell you, most employees and leaders in your organization right now don’t want to ‘drink the Kool-Aid'. They want to talk about these things and until they aren’t stigmatized or treated as pariahs or whistleblowers, they won’t come forward. Instead, they’ll continue to disengage, have more and more ‘sick days’ and then eventually leave or be forced to leave. And this will continue to have an impact on these and the other statistics that measure the costs that toxicity in the workplace can cause.

By the way, I’m not here to espouse or endorse the outputs of MIT Sloan’s research. Or to criticize them for having a limited range of elements that they have used to define what ‘toxic culture’ means as part of their research. I’m not even going to dive deeper to scrutinize their research methodology, approach, or findings. I’ve done that work behind the scenes.

This article isn’t about them or their work. It’s about seeing this topic through a different lens. A lens that up until now has been blurred because we’ve never seen it that way.

And that has been by design.??

Whilst I applaud MIT Sloan’s efforts (and others like them) to bring this topic further into the mainstream, they are unfortunately missing the key point in what causes and sustains toxicity in the workplace because they are focusing on the symptoms and not the cause.

Let me repeat that last sentence - they are focusing on the symptoms and not the cause.

Toxicity in the workplace has long prevailed in the corridors (now virtual corridors) of organizations and actually been a 'normalized' component of organizational and leadership culture. Yes, even pre-Covid.

It just turns out that few to no one has really wanted to openly discuss this topic for fear of retaliation.

This is what such retaliation looks like in a typical organization - ideas and perspectives being discredited, dismissed, sidelined, and/or the person being removed from the organization. Another lens to see this through is that organizations may, in fact, be firing talent who dare to raise the topic of toxicity in their organization. More on that in a future article that will explore and explode the previously held assumptions that we hold about the true impact and cost of staff and leader disengagement in our global economy.

The real cause to assess whether an organization is toxic is to look at how that organization and approach to leadership has been designed and how in fact, such toxicity has become ‘normalized’ within the organization.

Sloan’s research began to ‘hint’ at it, then navigated to safer waters.?That's a shame.

For instance, in one of the elements used to define a toxic culture ‘cutthroat’, the research authors state that comments raised by participants about ‘friction or silos’ were not considered a warning sign of a toxic culture.?

In my experience of working with hundreds of leaders from over 15 different industries, I have to disagree. This is indeed one of the clearest indicators of actual or pending toxicity and is how toxic cultures emerge and begin to manifest on the surface level. Silos are themselves a product of entrenched and outdated ways of working and thinking that are continually reinforced through existing and ineffective organizational systems and processes.

In all cases, this road leads to the realization of a toxic culture and it’s not until the ‘autopsy’ phase that people like me come in and trace the root cause of your toxic culture back to this very notion of siloed working and thinking.

Don’t feel bad at this point - the rhetoric of ‘that’s just how things are done around here' in the organization is what normalizes this dysfunction and such dysfunction then leads to engrained toxicity.

I should also state that I’m not here to debate what is included in the definition of ‘toxicity’. With all the available research and shark-infested waters of toxicity ‘experts’ now readily at hand, we won’t agree on a definition. One thing I can tell you with 100% accuracy is that if dysfunction is left to fester, it becomes toxicity. And quickly.

I wrote an ebook on this topic about a year ago which explores how toxicity in the workplace manifests - Creating Non-Toxic Leadership Cultures.?

Alongside some practical advice and tools for how to address toxicity in an organization, it takes the conversation to a level that few want to or are ready to openly talk about - that the toxicity in our workplaces is systemic and institutionalized and has been engineered by design. I’ve also found that few want to openly ‘bite the hand that feeds them’ for fear of impacting their reputation or losing many coveted contracts with organizations that are, intentionally or otherwise, complicit in ongoing toxicity.

3. The True Cost of Toxicity?

And if that wasn’t enough for you to comprehend the true costs of toxicity in the workplace, take a look at this and I challenge you to run the numbers in your own organization - The True Cost of Toxicity. A deeper understanding of the true costs that toxicity results in also features in the above ebook.

Rather than explore the root cause of toxicity, we get fixated on the end result and output of such toxicity (bullying, harassment, discrimination etc) and how damaging those things are to people in the workplace.?

Let me be abundantly clear - these things are extremely critical to bring out into the light and to address. Without a doubt.

However, just focusing on these things is missing the bigger picture and a wider point. Too much of our focus is on these things rather than exploring the actual root cause of why these things have been allowed (or designed) to happen in the first place.

We have designed our organizations and approaches to leadership to enable, facilitate and promote toxicity.?

Whether or not we have intentionally done this or whether we are openly complicit in such endeavors is not the point. The point is, we now have a choice as to how we move forward because the true cost of toxicity isn’t just about the dollars and cents. It's about the impact that such an environment has on you as a human being.

Think about this - MIT Sloan’s research found that 73% of US job seekers will only apply for a job if their corporate culture aligns with their personal values. This is corroborated by recent research by EY that reveals 96% of leaders surveyed indicated purpose was more important to their job satisfaction.

I’d also speculate that of that 96%, a significant proportion would either leave their organization or not join in the first place. EY also found in their research organizations that operated without a ‘purpose-driven’ culture, underperform their competitors by up to 42%.?

I discuss many of these areas further in a recent live session that can be found here - Co-creating Independence from the Matrix

Moving Forward.....Together?

Notwithstanding some of the limitations of existing research in this area, or those offering magical (and yet only surface-level) solutions, there are things you can do in order to address toxicity in your workplace.

A simple tool you can use right now in your organization is to ‘name what you see’. I explain in my ebook (linked above) how to try this out in your own organization.

A Senior VP in one of Canada’s largest Wealth Management companies applied the 'name what you see' tool with their leadership team and realized that it resulted in increased sharing of ideas, improved teamwork, and productivity of each leader and the leadership team.

Try it and see what happens.

Something else I’ve been developing (and I look forward to it being ‘leveraged’ by the plethora of copycats out there) is a ‘toxic organization barometer' that actually shows you how toxic your organization is. I predicted a few years ago that we’d see a day where agencies like Glassdoor openly displayed a toxic barometer alongside the employer rating.

Many laughed at the idea…come to think of it, many laughed at the ideas I was surfacing a few years ago that toxicity in the workplace was the most cancerous thing to destroy an organization.?

The one thing that I do know from immersing myself and my research in this area, is that toxicity in the workplace will continue to worsen until or unless we actually address the root cause of it rather than the symptoms.

Here are some radical ideas that you may want to consider as ways to address this topic in your own organization:

1. Bring the elephant out into the middle of the room: If a toxic culture is the best predictor of an organization experiencing higher levels of employee attrition, then how about beginning to openly address toxicity and not stigmatize those who bring it to the surface (before they leave, are fired or disengage)
2. Explore the deeper causes of toxicity in your organization: Rather than solely focusing on how toxicity in your workplace has negatively impacted women, under-represented minorities, those whose sexual orientation differs from yours, and age-related discrimination - look deeper into how your organization has been designed and structured. Openly question outdated practices and focus on creating the conditions to have honest conversations inside your organization about the true causes of toxicity in your workplace
3. Reintroduce honest conversations: The first step to improving a toxic culture is not (in my opinion and experience) to pinpoint its symptoms.

We must recalibrate our organizations one conversation at a time and infuse honesty into how we communicate because that is how we reclaim trust. Try it

1. Be publicly accountable: If having a toxic brand makes it harder for employers to attract talent, what will those employers do to address their toxic organizational and leadership cultures? How will they publicly be held accountable? If you’re an organization that has amassed a ‘toxic brand’, how about putting something out there publicly to show how you are going to address it. Unless, of course, you don’t want to address it?
2. Create a healthy organizational culture blueprint: We know from the research and our own experience that employers with reputations for healthy cultures will lead the fight in retaining talent. If your organization isn’t currently so healthy, why not simply adapt the ‘blueprint for creating healthy cultures’ from countless other healthy organizations and unveil it inside your own organization, rally support from a cross sample of employees and leaders to help refine it and see what happens. Again, unless, of course, you don’t want to?

And finally, for all of us ‘practitioners’ out there - here’s a radical idea for all of us.?Why don’t we create a global body that advances this topic, and offers insights, guidance, and detoxifying programs for toxic organizations and leaders?

I know, I know, ‘that’ll never work’ blah blah blah.

To which I ask - why not?

To all still reading, think about this before you go - you have a choice about whether you passively condone toxicity in your workplace, are actively complicit in its promotion, or decide right now to take one small step in addressing it within your organization.

The choice is yours.

www.paulmacleadership.com