When Good Teams Go Bad
The Surprising Truth About How Workplaces Become Toxic (And How to Fix Them)
I started writing about toxic workplaces a week ago, thinking it was a straightforward topic, but I was so naive. Initially, I believed it was simple – you just needed a bad boss (or a bad leader, CEO) to have a toxic work environment. However, diving deeper into the topic became more interesting and eye-opening.
What really opened my eyes was realizing that creating a toxic workplace is actually a team sport. For example, if you have the wrong person in the wrong place and keep them there for too long, you're slowly building a toxic environment. You can easily transform a good environment into a toxic one with good intentions or without even noticing it.
This wasn't exactly breaking news, but it hit me like a Monday morning without coffee – crystal clear and slightly uncomfortable.
Enough talk – let's dive into what this all means.
How to define a toxic work environment
After going back and forth between different definitions, I asked AI to help summarize various perspectives, and here's what emerged:
A toxic work environment is a workplace characterized by negative behaviors, dysfunctional relationships, and harmful practices that severely impact employees' wellbeing and the organization's effectiveness. It typically involves personal conflicts, bullying, poor communication, chronic stress, and lack of trust, creating an atmosphere where employees feel unsafe and undervalued. This toxicity not only damages worker morale and health but also undermines the organization's productivity, leading to high turnover and reduced viability.
This shouldn't surprise anyone who has spent a couple of years in a workplace, but it doesn't really help us understand why these "harmful practices" (personal conflicts, bullying, poor communication, chronic stress, and lack of trust) occur.
Adam Grant defines workplace toxicity in an interesting way:
A toxic company culture is always about a lack of balance. Companies become toxic when they go way too far toward one side on a couple of scales of competing values: relationships versus results and rules versus risk.
Relationships vs. Results
If not stepping on toes or upsetting people is all that matters at a business (i.e., doubling down on relationships), it's no surprise that actually getting things done falls way down the priority list. In such mediocrity, even if you do a terrible job, you can still get ahead as long as people like you. Before long, you end up with the Peter Principle, where everyone is promoted to their level of incompetence and gets stuck there.
On the opposite end, there are organizations that value relationships so little that they throw human decency under the bus in the name of performance. Organizations that tolerate disrespect, abuse, selfish cutthroat actions, exclusion, and unethical decisions for the sake of results are toxic organizations.
Rules vs. Risk
If you stray too far toward rules, you end up with creativity- and initiative-killing bureaucracy. On the other end of the spectrum from rules and bureaucracy is the chaos of rules-free anarchy. When everyone can do whatever they want without coordination or alignment, people end up working at cross-purposes, valuable lessons are never learned, and a whole lot of effort gets wasted.
What Does This Mean in Practice?
In simple terms, leaders should always keep an eye on the balance between these four elements. For example, if you have an employee who is burning out, you need to ensure that you help them recover and fix the burnout causes. If you have someone who acts like they know it all and everyone else is stupid, you might need to consider letting them go (even if they're genuinely skilled). Similarly, if you have someone who isn't delivering, you should manage them out to avoid impacting team morale.
These are all tough decisions, but they're exactly what's required from a leader who wants to build a high-performing team.
In the same article, Adam Grant continues by describing what differentiates a healthy environment from a toxic one:
But culture isn’t about one leader’s behavior– it’s about how widely shared and intensely held the values are. So I want to know how committed others in power are to curbing mistreatment, and what the consequences are. In healthy cultures, no level of individual excellence justifies undermining people. You're not a high performer if you don't elevate others.
For example, you might talk about work-life balance and how the team should balance personal life and work, but then work long hours yourself (I have to confess that this is my biggest sin). Or you might regularly brag about how hard you worked or how many things you accomplished today.
I once worked at a company where the director would walk the floor daily after regular working hours to see who was still there. He'd usually have a quick chat with everyone, and it seemed really nice at first. Initially, I felt supported by leadership and believed they were working as hard as I was, but slowly I realized they were actually valuing this behavior (working longer) rather than ensuring people had the right balance. They were doubling down on hours worked rather than people's productivity.
I also worked in another organization where they repeatedly reminded everyone to focus on customer needs, but when it came time to make decisions, we started with what leadership wanted – even if it wasn't related to customer needs or was, at best, very low in customer priorities.
You get the picture: Toxic work environments are created by imbalance between relationships, results, rules, and risk-taking. This imbalance happens when leaders either allow harmful practices to creep in without taking action to continuously eliminate them, or when the organization no longer walks the talk – i.e., the spoken/written culture doesn't match the actions.
What Should You Do About It?
Now that we understand the problem, we've probably reached half the solution, right? Remember the saying: knowing the problem is half the solution.
For Individuals:
Keep your overall behavior in check. Even small sentences or poor word choices can impact team morale.
Constant bragging about your workload won't help anyone, not even yourself.
Acting like you're the best in the room undermines other values and harms everyone around you.
Speak up and raise concerns you have. Come up with ideas about how to make things better for the team.
If you're a Type A person and highly competitive, help elevate others as part of the process instead of focusing solely on your success.
Share credit with others and ensure everyone is part of the process – it's not a "me" moment.
Most importantly, build trust with others and ensure they trust you.
For Leaders:
Create an environment that encourages others to speak up
Work with your team to find the balance between following rules and having enough space for risk-taking
Close gaps when there's too much ambiguity
Give team members opportunities to grow instead of always assigning work to top performers while focusing solely on delivery
Build a culture of trust within your team and with other teams
Address incompetent team members: help them, coach them, or manage them out – don't just accept poor performance
If you feel incompetent yourself, consider changing roles instead of "burning the ship with everyone on board"
Remember, building a healthy workplace (and high-performing teams) is like having a garden – it takes time, care, and occasionally removing toxic weeds. Just try not to use actual weed killer on your colleagues' desk plants, no matter how tempting it might be.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and reflects personal opinions and experiences. Names, situations, and examples have been altered to protect privacy. Any resemblance to actual persons or situations is purely coincidental.
I use claude.ai to help me fixing my grammar mistakes and fine tune my style. I sometimes use it to summarize concepts but never used it to generate content.