Is your culture making good people bad?

No employee — in my experience — ever gets up in the morning determined to be the worst version of themselves. They don’t look at themselves in the mirror and boldly declare that they’re going to be the worst kind of employee. One that gets in the way of productive work. One that openly disrespects those around them or acts selfishly when part of a team.

And yet… we’ve all been there. I definitely went there many times as a former employee myself! I once sent an email to the entire leadership team email group bad mouthing the value that a consultancy added and disrespecting their managing director. Except… the MD was part of the email group and this led to a very public (and utterly humiliating) apology from which I learned a lot.

My excuse at the time was that the stress of work had forced me into losing control of my emotions and sending the late night email.

Of course, it was simply that: an excuse; and yet there was an element of validity to it. At the time we simply had too many priorities, for which we had little clarity, my boss was unapproachable (or went missing for long periods) and as a leadership team we were all focused on our own thing rather than working together to better serve the team.

It wasn’t just me. In the same organisation one employee punched another in the face, we had pockets of active and vocal dissension and, over a period of about three months, we lost some really good people.

As a leadership team, we’d dropped the ball and were presiding over a culture that was making good people bad. Now, culture should never be used as an excuse for physical or emotional attacks that undermine the wellbeing of others, however, there has to be an acknowledgment that if the right conditions bring out the best in people, then the opposite is also true.

And this is happening in organisations around the world right now. In a survey at the end of last year, almost a third of respondents said that they actively disliked their manager, citing that they lacked emotional intelligence and empathy, focusing instead on micro-management. All things to make good people go bad.

Other examples include:

• Bureaucracy
• Tolerance of brilliant jerks
• Disparity of pay and conditions
• Unclear priorities/overwork
• Tracking online activity
• Inefficient use of technology
• Endless meetings
• Poor management
• Unreasonable targets
• Unclear strategy
• Lack of safety
• Lack of inclusion
• Rigidity of working location.

Yes, this blog is about creating safe cultures where staff feel able to bring their best self to work, but it’s more than that. It’s about managers recognising that their behaviours have a direct impact on how people feel. It’s about managers understanding that they continually set the tone for culture (positively and negatively).

Many continue to talk a good game with regards to culture. There is growing recognition (finally!) that the culture of an organisation is the difference between success and failure, however, any euphoria I may feel about this is tempered by the fact that many simply don’t want to do the hard work to create it.

In a McKinsey survey last year, only 43% reported a positive work culture, despite recognising its importance to its long term success. This is still where many are at.?

When I work with teams now, I talk about this issue in terms of fruit — it only takes one bad apple to spoil a fruit bowl.?

When apples start to rot they release a hormonal gas called ethylene. It has a sweet, musky smell that you will definitely have noticed, along with the fruit flies that circle the source! This gas then ‘infects’ the other fruit around it, causing the ripening process to accelerate and before you know it, the whole fruit bowl is bad.

To prevent this, science can find a way to genetically modify the fruit so that it doesn’t do that, or else you can eat/remove the over ripe apple!

This is a good metaphor for toxic culture, as too often organisations try to ‘modify’ the culture by restructuring, launching a new operating model, implementing a new way of working or simply sending the leadership team on an offsite to ‘refresh’, rather than addressing/removing the root causes of the cultural rot.

Here’s an example.

One team I worked with last year, had — until 2018 — a really fantastic, vibrant culture, led by someone high in emotional intelligence, who knew how to communicate and get the best from the people around them. Employees — ?as I read about in their engagement survey for that year — ?were happy, motivated and excited about the future.

At the end of the year, that individual moved on to another organisation and was replaced by someone with greater technical skills, but fewer emotional skills (according to the HR Director I was working with). In six months, the engagement score had receded by 20 points and the excitement had been replaced by anger, stress and cynicism. Chief amongst staff concerns were the loss of people skills from the entire leadership team, the reactive nature of work, the lack of clarity around priorities, the blurring between work/home life and the favouritism being displayed at the top. That’s how quickly a culture can change and good people can turn bad.

All of this is completely avoidable, providing that those who are accountable for culture ensure they create and maintain the conditions where human beings can flourish.

No-one wants to be a ‘bad’ employee, but sometimes the culture drags them down.

Have you ever been dragged down by the culture that you’ve worked in? What did you learn?