How to Protect Your Team From a Toxic Work Culture
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, a staggering 4.4 million people quit their jobs this April. You might assume people are leaving because they want more money or better benefits, but you’d be wrong. A recent Sloan Management Review study indicated people are 10 times more likely to quit their jobs today because of toxic work cultures rather than subpar compensation or work-life balance.
In other words: People aren’t running to better pay. They’re running from feeling overworked, undermined, and unappreciated.
In researching our new book, we spent three years scouring a combined 40 years of data from our work as coaches at hundreds of companies. We wanted to learn why some of the leaders we’ve advised have succeeded in building cohesive, healthy corporate cultures that outperform their peers, while others built low-performing companies marred by toxic behaviors like back-stabbing, credit-taking, and burnout.
Though the dataset could not prove causality, we did notice a consistent connection between the quality of the business and culture and the quality of the conversations those leaders and managers regularly had with their teams. They didn’t just engage in casual chats about sports or the weather with their direct reports. Nor did they hold people accountable to task lists and KPIs. Instead, they consistently checked in with their people and had five specific conversations to inspire creativity and purpose. They made their teams feel seen, heard, appreciated, and supported, and as a consequence, their teams delivered better results.
These conversations can be tough to have and often can take a great deal of courage to conduct, but for any new or aspiring leader, they are essential to initiate during your one-on-ones.
1) Get curious about what your people need to be creative and resourceful, not just what needs to get done.
Every manager should keep an eye on what they need from people to stay on track with their larger team goals, but they should also stop and ask what their teams need to deliver on those goals. Each person has their own unique needs. Some may need better snacks to feel happy and energized while others may need to feel more psychologically safe or the freedom to work from their living rooms.
A one-size-fits-all approach won’t work. While you can’t have separate policies for everyone, making an effort to meet people’s needs at the individual level and being flexible is paramount, especially with your top performers. Getting curious means listening actively, showing empathy, asking questions, and really hearing what people are saying.
Questions to ask:
What do you need to be at your best?
What impact are your needs (physical, emotional, or environmental) having on your productivity and creative well-being?
2) Learn about your team’s fears and insecurities, and be courageous enough to talk about your own.
It’s well documented that humans have natural biological and behavioral responses to fear. Fight, flight, and freeze in the office looks like hoarding resources, undermining each other’s projects, and managers setting unreasonable deadlines. In our research, we found that these behaviors are almost always the result of a scarcity mindset that stems from unexpressed fears. Employees fall into these patterns when they don’t know where they stand or are overwhelmed with stress.
Our fears are often alleviated when we talk about them openly and honestly. However, in an office setting the leader must share their own fears first to make others feel psychologically safe talking about theirs. Once the entire team can openly talk about fear, many of the toxic behaviors that have been cropping up will go away on their own.
Questions to ask:
What fears are holding you back?
When you’re feeling stressed, what is your go-to response?
3) Help people get what they really want, but to do so without derailing them.
Most people want to win, to learn, or to feel of service. But taken to an extreme, each of these core motivators can be derailing. Too much focus on winning can lead to unscrupulous behavior. Spending too much time learning and researching and not really doing can lead to frustration. Wanting to be of service is great in the right context, but it can descend into ruinous people-pleasing when one stops getting their own needs met in the name of helping others.
You’ll motivate people when you tap into what they really want, but you have to make sure they don’t get too much of a good thing. If you give someone who wants autonomy too much space, they can actively resist or undermine colleagues who seek to collaborate with them. When people get derailed by their desires (when they’re overly competitive or have a constant need of validation), they easily fall into toxic territory. The key is for managers to look for is the earliest signs of toxic behavior. Small flare-ups are easy to put out; house fires are not.
Questions to ask:
What desires drive you?
Which desires might derail you?
4) Put people in roles that help them do the best work of their careers.
If you exclusively focus on what needs to get done, you’ll make the mistake of asking people to perform tasks beyond their competency. Yes, pushing people to grow is good, but setting them up to fail is not. In 1970, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi introduced the flow theory. In that, he found that enjoyment didn’t result from relaxing or living without stress, but by doing activities for pleasure, even when people were not being rewarded by money or fame. These were activities or tasks in which their attention was fully absorbed, and he called it “being in flow.”
The activities were usually difficult, involved some risk, and stretched a person’s capability and skills. Similarly, at work, functioning at the peak of our abilities requires being pushed to the edge of our abilities. It makes us feel competent, and helps us grow. When you push people too far, however, they feel incompetent and lose motivation.
If you slow down enough to understand what people are really good at and place them in the right positions, you’ll enjoy the increase in productivity that only comes when people are using their greatest talents. They’ll also be more likely to feel like they’re doing the best work of their careers. Leaders can help their teams find their gifts by providing them opportunities to work on different teams or entirely different projects. Rotating high potentials through various departments and allowing them to explore their curiosities may unlock untapped talents.
Questions to ask:
What are your greatest gifts?
When do you feel most engaged?
5) Remember that everyone wants to feel like they’re fulfilling their highest purpose.
We all want to feel like we’re a force of good in the world. How can you help your teams realize that their role is critical to the organization making the world a better place? Whom does your organization serve? How do you, as employees, improve lives? What is most important to your team? Whom do they want to serve?
Recent employee survey data suggests that managers who connect employees’s work to the broader purpose and mission of the company are more likely to retain and motivate employees. By getting curious and having these conversations, managers can help their teams put the role they play into larger context and feel less like a nameless cog in the machine.
Questions to ask:
Do you feel there is purpose in the work you do? If not, what would fill that gap?
Can you describe an “aha” moment that resulted in you feeling a renewed sense of purpose in or outside of work?
Company cultures don’t start out toxic. They get that way when managers stop having the conversations that make people feel seen, heard, appreciated, and invested in. Toxicity is best treated by engaging your people in conversations that help them get their needs met, dispel their fears, uncover their core motivators, do the best work of their lives, and fulfill their purpose.
It’s only when managers stop their relentless focus on what needs to get done that their teams will feel engaged enough to get it all done.