How Leaders Can Identify and Resolve Toxicity in the Workplace

The workplace is one of the environments that changed the most during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the rise of remote work, employees have more options than ever. This has fueled what many are calling the Great Resignation, and organizations across all sectors must adapt to compete for top talent amid historic job mobility and a growing labor shortage. Organizations that fail to evolve will almost certainly be left behind.

Thriving in the wake of the pandemic begins with creating a healthy and inclusive organizational culture. An organization’s culture is ingrained like DNA in its brand as an employer, and the culture affects every aspect of how employees operate internally and externally.

In a Jan. 12, 2022, article for the MIT Sloan Management Review, Donald Sull, Charles Sull and Ben Zweig point to research suggesting that toxic culture is “by far the strongest predictor of industry-adjusted attrition and is 10 times more important than compensation in predicting turnover.” With millennial and Gen Z workers more focused on quality of life than those who came before them, reducing toxicity is essential to succeeding in 2022 and beyond.

Defining Culture

Today, what an organization stands for matters more than it ever has. Start defining your own organization’s culture by describing the organization’s public-facing persona. You must also assess the organization’s structure and its leadership roles. Is what the organization does meaningful? Do the people you serve and current and prospective employees see what the organization does as being meaningful?

Attracting and retaining top talent requires outwardly establishing brand values, character and a purpose that are appealing to workers. Communicating the best aspects of the organization’s culture is also essential to drawing and holding on to top talent.

Working is no longer perceived as a means to an end. Rather, it is a lifestyle. Employees care about their employer’s social cachet and how that portrays them by association.

Even though workers now principally live for today, they still keep a keen eye on the future. The age of the dead-end job is over. Today’s workers want to feel valued now, and they want a roadmap that lays out what they are working toward. Organizations that provide the roadmap have an edge against any competitor.

Culture Has Many Components

I have been fortunate to coach hundreds of leaders and executives around the world on culture and other aspects of leadership. When working on cultural foundations, I always begin by describing five types of culture—capability, commitment, connectedness, individual performance and team performance—that combine to form an organization’s overall culture.

• Capability culture is the can-do attitude that empowers employees to believe they can achieve success as individuals and meaningfully impact organizational success because they have the tools to do so.
• Commitment culture manifests as a will-do mindset. Employees mobilize in support of the organization’s mission and goals because the mission and goals excite them and make them willing to take risks and pull out all the stops.
• Connectedness culture can be seen in employees’ acceptance of must-do tasks. When clearly defined roles marry individual and organizational goals, taking on responsibilities for executing strategy in pursuit of a clear vision makes sense.
• Individual performance culture is strong when each employee feels empowered to share feedback for the sake of the organization and its mission.
• Team performance culture is strong when employees do not feel just personally fulfilled, but feel they are working collaboratively within an organizational structure that enables them to provide feedback and make a meaningful impact through the work they do.

That is all to say that today’s employees desire to both grow as professionals and be empowered to help the organizations for which they work achieve larger goals. Fulfilling those desires represents the greatest opportunity employers have right now. If employers can do this, they will attract and retain top talent.

Six Steps to Transforming Culture

Combating toxic culture requires more than trying to design solutions to fix isolated problems. There is no reset button for poor culture. What you need are strategies to build from the ground up a new culture that is specifically tailored to allow your organization to reach its goals.

Here are six steps to transforming your organization’s culture, along with the questions you must answer while taking the steps:

• Understand that culture and operational success begin with leadership. How are you, as a leader, contributing to the creation of cultures of capability, commitment, connectedness, individual performance and team performance in your own organization?
• Make the vulnerability decision. As a leader, how are you fostering vulnerability? How are you creating an environment in which employees are encouraged to be vulnerable and push themselves beyond their comfort zones?
• Create your compelling future. Are you willing to leave your own comfort zone and create a blueprint for your organization’s ambitious future?
• Adopt a new mindset to achieve new results. Can you effectively communicate your compelling vision for the future to everyone in your organization? Can you mobilize employees to form a unified front and work toward achieving your unique goals? That is, can you build a culture specifically tailored to enabling the accomplishment of your goals?
• Ignite talent engines. Success is about talent. It will always be about talent. Is your mission and messaging attracting and retaining top talent?
• Measure, measure and measure again. Then course-correct. Start with articulating a mission, a vision, a purpose and set of values. Translate these into strategy. Build processes, systems and structures to support the mission, vision, purpose and values. Essentially, create a culture and an environment in which your desired results will incubate.

Today’s workforce is unlike any we have ever experienced. Employees’ demands and priorities are varying and unpredictable. But we can create cultures that fulfill the needs and desires of today’s employees while still lifting up our organizations to achieve the goals we set.

In the constantly evolving world of work, as in medicine, issuing prescriptions before arriving at a diagnosis is malpractice. Figuring out what is wrong with an organization’s culture begins with examining leadership and identifying how what the leaders do, say and reward trickles down to everyone in an organization. Success always starts at the top, but succeeding will never be possible when what cascades from above inhibits the ability of the many within the organization to make valuable contributions.

The surest way to succeed in 2022 and beyond is to build a culture that facilitates employees’ contributions. Such a culture is a place where employees can be happy and stimulated to come to work each day because they are working toward both personal achievements and something bigger than themselves. Provide an environment in which employees can live happily and make a real difference in the world, and you cannot possibly lose.