A poor culture can destroy your organization and the well-being of everyone that works within it.
Here are 7 signs you might be dealing with a toxic culture.
1. A collective low self-esteem
If people often jump into a heightened or anxious state, operating with defensiveness or aggression, this could be a sign you have a collective low self esteem.
Examples:
- Inappropriate behaviour occurs, but it’s never acknowledged. People pretend it didn’t happen
- People pre-emptively feeling attacked in benign situations
- People unable to handle criticism
- Lack of accountability at any or all levels of the organization
2. Keeping a false harmony
Examples:
- People don’t feel safe enough to bring up something that bothered them
- Conflict is declared as solved, but silently resides behind the scenes because the solutions are superficial
- When people challenge the status quo and false harmony, they are ignored or shunned
3. People can’t report bad news to their boss
How this manifests:
- People don’t feel safe to report bad news, so leadership is operating with incomplete information, resulting in poor decisions being made
- Small problems aren’t reported, so they go unaddressed, slowly compounding into massive ones
- Leadership proposes a bad idea, and it goes unchallenged because no one feels safe enough to speak up
4. Passive aggressiveness
People using passive aggressive comments, judgement, and shame to underhandly influence someone. Examples:
- Condescending or underhanded comments
- “Late again Kursten?”
- “Well, we wouldn’t have been in this situation if Michelle had executed as planned…”
5. Everyone for themselves
- With a lack of safety, everyone is towing the line, following orders, so they aren’t berated for stepping out of line
- People don’t feel safe enough to take creative or ambitious risks on behalf of the company because they are narrowly focused on survival
- Projects are performing poorly because everyone is only concerned with their own well-being, working in silos, unable to stick their necks out for a teammate
- No one stepping up to the plate to take accountability for poor decisions or negative outcomes
6. When times get tough, people stick their head in the sand
When someone is sick or leaves the company, do people step up?
- A healthy response looks like: “How can I help out?”
- An unhealthy response includes silence. Or worse, excuses: “Oh I can’t do that because of this, this, and that…”
7. Awful decision-making dynamics
- Decisions are postponed or never made because it’s easier and less threatening to just not decide. Results in delays and stuff not getting done
- No one takes ownership of the direction of the project/department/company
How many of these do you notice in your workplace?
You may have noticed a common theme with these signifiers: psychological safety. A good litmus test for culture is getting a pulse on how safe people feel in general.
- How safe do people feel to challenge leadership? Bring forward new ideas? Interrupt the status quo? To bring up conflict? To be vulnerable?
If you think you’re experiencing any of these problems, but you’re not sure if they’re worth investigating further, we’d be happy to have a chat with you and help you decide.
Attempting to fix these problems can feel overwhelming and insurmountable. We can help. It could at the very least give you validation that you’re not crazy!