How to Fix a Toxic Workplace Culture
I once took over a unit that I had been told had problems.
Before deciding what those problems were, or what I was going to do about them, I sat down individually with everyone in the unit and asked how things were going. I was surprised by how candid complete strangers were with a new boss. Looking back, that should have been my first indication of just how bad things had become.
I asked questions. I listened. I wanted to understand what was happening from their perspective.
The accounts were remarkably consistent. The unit had developed a severely toxic and dysfunctional culture.
One employee told me she cried on Sundays because she knew she had to return to work on Monday. Another kept a massage rod at her desk for the days when the stress settled into her shoulders and upper back.
This was not normal workplace frustration. The culture had become unhealthy, and people were paying a very real price for it.
The unit had cliques. Negativity had become normal. Relationships had deteriorated. People talked about one another instead of to one another. Problems were amplified. Successes were minimized. Dysfunction had gradually become part of the culture.
The punishment for mistakes had become public shaming. What do you think resulted from that? Employees hid their mistakes.
The good news is that toxic cultures can be changed.
The bad news is that there is no program, team-building exercise, slogan, policy revision, or one-time meeting that will rescue one. It begins with leadership.
What Is Workplace Culture?
Workplace culture is how we treat each other. In all directions.
It is our norms, behaviors, attitudes, values, traditions, and expectations that develop within an organization. It is how people behave when nobody has to tell them how to behave. It is what gets celebrated. It is what gets criticized. It is what people tolerate.
It is how people respond when someone succeeds, struggles, makes a mistake, proposes an idea, or challenges the status quo.
Culture eventually answers an important question for every employee:
What is it like to work here?
Healthy cultures develop norms that encourage professionalism, contribution, cooperation, growth, accountability, and pride.
Toxic cultures develop very different norms. Negativity becomes accepted. Gossip becomes entertainment. Tribes develop. Employees root against one another. Poor behavior goes unchallenged. Cynicism becomes fashionable. High performers disengage or leave, while negative employees increasingly control the conversation. And performance suffers.
The leadership either participates in these behaviors or turns a blind eye to them, and both responses allow the toxic culture to take deeper root.
Eventually, dysfunction can begin sustaining itself.
How Does a Culture Become Toxic?
Very few organizations intentionally create a toxic culture. It happens gradually.
A problem is ignored. A difficult employee is allowed to mistreat others. A supervisor refuses to address conflict. A clique becomes influential. Standards become inconsistent. Gossip goes unchecked. Employees stop believing that performance matters. Good people begin withdrawing. Negativity becomes louder than positivity.
And time does the rest.
Toxic culture is often the accumulation of bad behavior, tolerated behavior, weak norms, inconsistent leadership, and time. It happens when leaders avoid uncomfortable conversations or are overly concerned with what their people think of them.
In remedying the situation, the first thought is often to identify and go after everyone engaging in toxic behavior. This will not work, as almost all are engaging in some type of toxic behavior, whether it is because of their nature or they are doing it for self-preservation.
When a strong leader takes control and begins improving the environment, many employees, even some who had engaged in toxic behavior simply as a means of self-preservation, will begin to disengage from those behaviors.
Start by Listening. Start by Learning
Before changing the culture, leaders need to understand it. That begins by sitting down with people individually and listening.
Ask how things are going. Ask what is working, what is not, what frustrates them, what they believe has been allowed to deteriorate, and what they would change if they could. Gather as much information as possible before deciding what the problems are or how to address them.
During this process, you will hear dozens, maybe hundreds, of individual complaints and suggestions. Look for clusters.
You may begin hearing about an abusive supervisor, a passive-aggressive colleague, or a high performer who believes exceptional performance exempts him from the occasional grunt work everyone else is expected to do. You may hear complaints about a good-old-boys club, where access to desirable assignments, opportunities, influence, or promotion seems to depend more on relationships than merit. Or you may uncover a mean-girls culture, where gossip, exclusion, whispered criticism, and social maneuvering have become part of the daily workplace environment.
Some of it may involve longstanding conflicts, poor communication, cliques, inconsistent standards, or negative employees who have been allowed to dominate the workplace.
These conversations will offer a treasure trove of actionable information. In fact, 75% of what you need to do may come from these conversations.
Assess the Leadership
Some of what you hear in these conversations may point directly back to leadership. In fact, it is almost a guarantee. The leadership contributed to the toxic environment by participating in it, failing to take action, or both.
There needs to be an honest assessment of leadership. Supervisors may have ignored obvious problems, communicated poorly, applied standards inconsistently, tolerated favoritism, failed to recognize good work, or simply allowed unhealthy behaviors to continue for too long.
Strong Leadership Must Set the New Direction
Once the new leader has a handle on what has been going on, it may be tempting to sit everyone down and tell them what they need to change.
This would be a mistake. The leader should go first.
During the conversations, the leader may have uncovered a consistent complaint about a certain unfair policy, the cafeteria, or unsanitary bathrooms. These areas are a great place to start.
The leader should demonstrate commitment to bring significant improvement. Week two could be eliminating or improving that unfair policy. Week three could involve replacing the disgusting employee refrigerator or issuing a memo informing everyone that the bathrooms would now be cleaned twice a week instead of once.
Clean up neglected areas. Paint the walls. Improve the break room. Replace worn or outdated furnishings. Put better pictures on the walls. Fix equipment that everyone has complained about for months. Improve communication. Recognize good work. Address problems that should have been addressed long ago.
Again, demonstrate commitment to bring significant improvement.
Spread it out so they understand this will be a consistent effort, not a one-time morale booster. When employees begin to see that every few days brings another visible, positive change, they are far more likely to believe the effort is genuine, and far more receptive when the leader eventually asks them to become part of it.
Now It Is Time to Reset Expectations
After employees have had time to see that the leader is serious about improving the workplace, the next step is to bring everyone together. By this point, the message should already be clear: change is not something leadership is merely demanding from others. Leadership has been changing things too.
That matters.
When employees have watched problems get fixed, conditions improve, and long-standing frustrations finally receive attention, they are more likely to believe that the effort is genuine. The atmosphere begins to shift. Skepticism starts to give way to cautious optimism.
Now the leader can have a very different conversation.
Bring the team together and explain what has been learned, where the organization needs to improve, and what the new expectations will be moving forward. Address the behaviors that can no longer continue. Clarify standards. Talk about professionalism, accountability, teamwork, communication, and how people are expected to treat one another.
The message should be simple: Leadership has begun doing its part. Now everyone has a responsibility to do theirs.
Be prepared; not everyone will be on board. That is not necessarily a bad thing. As the effort moves forward, the distinction between those willing to contribute positively and those who are not will become clearer. In effect, the herd begins to separate.
The goal should still be to bring everyone to a higher level, including the holdouts. But if persistent negativity evolves into resistance, disruption, or obstruction, it can no longer be ignored and must be addressed.
Getting to a Positive Culture Requires Clear Communication and Messaging
The goal for the culture must be clearly defined. The leader must be specific and unequivocal:
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- We are going to help each other.
- We are going to encourage each other.
- We are going to celebrate each other’s success.
- We are going to hold ourselves to high standards.
- We are going to treat people professionally.
- We are not going to tolerate a good-old-boys club where opportunities are only available for an inner sanctum or group.
- We are not going to tolerate mean-girl behavior, gossip, or people taking pleasure in someone else’s failure.
- We can disagree. We can challenge ideas. We can hold people accountable. But we are not going to tear one another down.
Culture Requires Repetition.
Leaders must reinforce the desired culture repeatedly until there is no ambiguity about what the organization stands for. A plaque on a wall with a wonderful quote doesn’t create a strong culture; great leaders do, but the goals must be frequently reinforced.
And then the leaders have to live it.
Leaders Must Model the Culture They Want
A leader cannot demand positivity while constantly complaining. A leader cannot preach teamwork and then play favorites. A leader cannot demand professionalism while humiliating employees. A leader cannot condemn gossip while participating in it.
Employees pay far more attention to what leaders do than to what they put on PowerPoint slides. The leader must become the most visible example of the culture being built.
That includes how the leader communicates, responds to mistakes, recognizes performance, handles disagreement, treats difficult employees, and behaves during stressful periods.
This might be the most important concept on this page: the message and the example have to match.
Establish the Highest Standards and Expectations
One of the quickest ways to begin changing a dysfunctional culture is to raise expectations.
I have told employees: The highest of standards. The highest of expectations. There is nothing negative about that message. High expectations communicate belief.
They say this organization can operate at a higher level and that the people within it can meet that standard.
Set clear expectations for:
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- performance
- professionalism
- productivity
- teamwork
- communication
- treatment of coworkers
- leadership
- attendance
- accountability
- service
Then enforce those expectations consistently. A healthy culture cannot coexist indefinitely with chronically low standards.
Create Accountability for Performance and Behavior
Accountability must be part of the cultural reset. That includes accountability for productivity, but people need to know what is expected of them and whether they are meeting those expectations.
However, performance should never be allowed to substitute for desired behavior. A person can be tremendously productive and still do enormous damage to an organization.
Positive Contribution − Negative Contribution = Net Contribution
Every employee contributes positively and negatively to some degree. The question is what remains when the two are combined.
If an employee’s negative contributions exceed their positive contributions, they are a net negative to the organization. In simple terms, they are pulling the organization down.
Someone may produce the most sales, enter the most data, make the most arrests, write the most reports, issue the most tickets, or close the most cases, yet still severely damage the organization in other ways.
A high performer who constantly attacks coworkers, spreads negativity, undermines supervisors, creates conflict, and poisons the environment may produce impressive statistics yet remain a net negative to the organization.
When someone’s negative contribution consistently outweighs the positive, leaders cannot hide behind productivity numbers or excuse destructive behavior because the person “gets results.”
Culture is part of performance.
Change the Conversation!
Toxic conversations are a hallmark of toxic workplaces. They are usually led by the usual suspects who enjoy pointing out everything that is wrong. Sometimes it goes further; sometimes they hone in on specific colleagues and leaders, and often it can get personal. They repeat rumors and revel in tearing others down.
Eventually, negativity becomes the primary language of the workplace.
Part of the new culture must be leaders who understand the importance of changing the conversation. Leaders must be intentional about changing toxic conversations.
That does not mean ignoring legitimate problems or demanding artificial positivity. Problems still need to be discussed and addressed.
But positive things need oxygen too. Talk about the employee who did exceptional work. Talk about the unit that solved a difficult problem. Recognize improvement. Celebrate a successful project. Share positive feedback. Discuss where the organization is going. Highlight people helping one another. Talk about accomplishments.
Toxic voices thrive when they are allowed to dominate the conversation.
Leaders have to create something louder.
Reconnect People With Purpose
Dysfunctional workplaces often become so consumed with internal conflict that employees lose sight of why the organization exists.
Strong leaders bring purpose back into the conversation. Why does this work matter? Who benefits when we do it well? What happens when we fail? How does each employee contribute?
A sense of purpose will not magically fix every interpersonal problem, but it can begin redirecting attention outward toward mission, service, accomplishment, and impact rather than endlessly inward toward grievances and personalities.
People need more than tasks. They need to understand contribution.
Contribution
A workplace culture truly reaches the next level when we convince our people of the value of their contributions.
In this context, Contribution means employees understand that great workplace cultures are not created solely by leadership. Everyone in the organization has an obligation to contribute to the environment around them.
Contribution can take many forms. It may mean helping a colleague, planning a social event, bringing positive energy into the workplace, bringing in food or snacks, submitting ideas to improve mission performance or the work environment, volunteering to help with something outside normal responsibilities, or simply looking for ways to make the organization better.
When contributions come from every corner of the organization, something positive happens almost every week, and in highly engaged workplaces, far more often than that.
It is imperative that leaders create an expectation of contribution and help employees understand that they are not merely participants in the workplace culture. They are responsible for helping build it.
Improve the Workplace Environment
Strong leadership is built on more than individual skills, good intentions, or a collection of management techniques. Beneath nearly everything great leaders do are three foundational elements that shape where an organization is going, what it feels like to work there, and how its people ultimately perform. We call them the Three Pillars of Leadership: Vision, Environment, and Culture.
Vision is seeing an organization not for what it is, but for what it can be, and developing a roadmap to get you there. Culture is what we are talking about here. And environment is what you provide for your people before the first one arrives.
Environment is the day-to-day experience of working in an organization. It includes the physical facilities and resources, but also how leaders communicate, how people are treated, how conflict is handled, how mistakes are addressed, and the countless leadership decisions that shape what it feels like to come to work each day.
A great workplace environment is shaped by seven key elements.
Leadership
There is a great line in Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin: “Leadership is the single greatest factor in any team’s performance.” It may be one of the best overall statements ever written about leadership.
The success or failure of every unit, division, and organization is heavily dependent on the quality of its leadership. It may be too much to say organizations should treat leadership like a religion, but they should treat it as a relentless organizational priority.
Treatment of Personnel
Great organizations understand that their success is entirely dependent upon their people.
How are employees treated by their supervisors and by one another? Respect should not depend on rank, title, assignment, tenure, friendship, or personality.
People should be able to expect professional treatment. (See also Reward, Recognition, and Appreciation in Law Enforcement.)
Communication
Our people want to know the direction of the ship. They want to know what is going on in other units and what new initiatives are coming.
What information reaches employees? How quickly? Are decisions explained? Are rumors allowed to fill information vacuums? Do employees have meaningful opportunities to communicate upward?
Communication is the most important skill we bring to our professional lives.
Poor communication creates ideal conditions for distrust and speculation.
Facilities and Equipment
The physical workplace matters more than people think.
Cleanliness, functioning equipment, maintained vehicles, adequate technology, professional workspaces, and basic attention to facilities communicate whether the organization cares about standards and its people.
Even if you work for a low-resource organization, take care of what you have.
Amenities
Small improvements can have an outsized impact on daily experience.
Use of the company jet or sky box might not be within reach for government organizations, but that doesn’t mean we cannot treat our people to some nice things. For example, a well-appointed fitness center can go a long way. Break areas, coffee, food options, comfortable meeting spaces, wellness resources, or other thoughtful amenities may seem minor individually, but collectively they communicate attention to employees.
Policies
At my first police department, we were not permitted to schedule a vacation day next to a personal day. There was no apparent reason for the rule, yet it created frustration and grumbling year after year. Eventually, we convinced a chief to change it. It was a small decision, but the goodwill it created was significant.
Policies shape daily work. Unnecessary bureaucracy, outdated rules, inconsistent enforcement, or policies that create needless frustration deserve examination.
If a rule no longer serves a legitimate purpose, ask why it still exists.
Compensation
Leaders may not always control compensation, but it remains part of the workplace environment.
Pay, benefits, opportunities, and perceived fairness all influence how employees experience the organization.
Where leaders have influence, they should use it.
Where they do not, they should at least communicate honestly.
Not every one of these seven areas can be transformed overnight, but leaders should identify the areas they can control and begin improving them. Visible progress creates credibility.
Employees begin to see that the promised cultural reset is more than talk.
Build Pride
One of the goals of rescuing a toxic culture should be replacing cynicism with pride.
The leadership team should spend time brainstorming the question, “How can we create pride in our organization?”
Become the best in your industry. Set high standards. Improve professionalism. Take care of the workplace. Recognize excellent work. Develop people. Build a strong identity. Make excellence a part of your culture.
Pride cannot simply be demanded. It has to be earned. And as the organization begins operating at a higher level, people should be reminded of the progress they are making.
The message becomes: Look at what we are becoming. (See also Pride: A Key Component of a Strong Workplace Culture.)
Hire With Culture in Mind
You can spend years improving culture and damage it with a few poor hiring decisions.
Spend a lot of time on the hiring process. If one interview is not enough to determine whether someone fits the organization, conduct two. If two are not enough, conduct three.
The objective cannot simply be to fill a vacancy. You are bringing another person into an ecosystem. Yes, skills matter. Experience and competency matter as well.
But so do attitude, character, interpersonal skills, professionalism, emotional maturity, and the energy a person brings into a room.
Every new hire has the potential to strengthen the culture or disrupt it. Take the decision seriously.
Have the Best Onboarding Program on the Planet
If interviews determine who enters the organization, onboarding teaches them how to belong to it.
That process should be extraordinary.
Your onboarding program should be an indoctrination into your organization’s mission, culture, and expectations. It should answer the questions:
- Who are we?
- What do we stand for?
- What are our standards?
- What is our history?
- What traditions matter?
- How do we treat each other?
- What does excellent performance look like?
- What will leadership expect from you?
- What should you expect from leadership?
- What kind of teammate do we expect you to be?
The onboarding program should be an incredible experience. Of course, it should accomplish the traditional goals of onboarding, but it should also get new employees excited about working for the organization. Everyone involved in the process should understand the goals of onboarding and their role in achieving them.
In one of my later positions, we made it a goal to improve the onboarding process every time we brought in a new employee. Eventually, we decided that on the Wednesday of a new employee’s first week, we would hold a breakfast to celebrate their arrival. It was nothing extravagant, mostly bagels, fruit, breakfast sandwiches, and a few other items, but it quickly became part of the experience.
The first person we did this for was a young lady named Brittany. The breakfast went over so well that we decided to keep doing it. It became known as the Brittany Breakfast, and it is still called that to this day whenever a new employee starts.
That is how traditions begin. Something small, intentional, and positive can become part of the organization’s identity and help send an immediate message to a new employee: We are glad you are here. These traditions also shape culture.
Executive Help
The onboarding program should include time with different levels of management, including the chief executive or at least executive-level personnel. They should, at a minimum, hold a meet-and-greet that also serves as an orientation and discussion. A great opportunity for executives to get to know their people and share our mantra: the highest of expectations, the highest of standards.
Develop People Continually
A healthy organization invests in its people.
Create meaningful professional development: train employees, develop supervisors, mentor future leaders. Give people opportunities to teach, attend conferences, take on projects, participate in committees, and develop new skills.
Growth creates momentum. It also changes conversations.
A workplace that discusses development, new ideas, improvement, accomplishment, and opportunity has far less space for the endless recycling of dysfunction.
Recognize and Celebrate Positive Contribution
What leaders recognize communicates what they value.
Notice employees helping one another. Notice improvement. Notice initiative. Notice professionalism. Notice excellent work. Celebrate victories, large and small.
Recognition helps change the cultural center of gravity. Instead of negative behavior receiving all the attention, contributions begin to receive attention.
The people who are helping build the organization should become more visible than those trying to tear it down. (See also Reward, Recognition, and Appreciation in Law Enforcement.)
Some People Will Change
This point is important: Do not assume that everyone behaving negatively is inherently toxic. We touched upon this earlier, but it is important to understand that people adapt to their environment, even good people. Put a generally good employee into a negative environment long enough, and that person may become negative too.
This is why toxic behavior cannot be tolerated. It will spread like a cancer.
Some employees who had become cynical may change dramatically. They may simply have been responding to the culture around them. Give those people the opportunity to come with you.
Some People Will Not Change
As things begin to improve, you will get wind of some employee(s) not happy with the changes. They continue to feed the dysfunction despite everything else around them changing.
This should not be a surprise at all. Ideally, you should have had some ideas for actions you would take when you reached this part. Again, our goal is always to help our people succeed, even those in this group. However, if their behaviors continue to feed what you are trying to change, the issue becomes the individual. You must address the behavior.
Know Your Organization’s Rules, Regulations, Policies, Contracts and Disciplinary Procedures
Commit to developing a solid understanding of your organization’s rules, regulations, policies, contracts, and disciplinary procedures. Failure to do so can create an entire world of problems, including legal ones.
Document appropriately. Sit down with the employee. Be specific. Do not attack the person. Address the behavior. Explain what has occurred, why it is unacceptable, how it affects other people and the organization, and what needs to change.
Avoid vague accusations such as: “You have a bad attitude.” Give concrete examples instead.
The employee should leave the conversation knowing exactly what behavior must stop and what successful behavior looks like.
And whenever possible, end with something important: We want you to succeed.
The goal should not initially be to get rid of someone. The goal should be to give the person every reasonable opportunity to become a productive member of the new culture. But there must also be a line.
Performance Does Not Excuse Toxicity
Some organizations tolerate destructive behavior because the person producing it is considered an all-star.
That is a mistake.
No employee should be permitted to damage the workplace for everyone else simply because they produce impressive numbers. Over time, the damage they create can far outweigh the results they deliver.
Remember our formula: Positive Contribution − Negative Contribution = Net Contribution.
When the negative contribution consistently exceeds the positive, the employee is no longer a high performer. The numbers may simply be masking the damage.
At that point, the behavior must change. If it does not, the organization may need to consider separation. Any such decision should be made carefully and in consultation with experienced human resources professionals and, when appropriate, qualified legal counsel.
Culture matters too much to allow one individual to continually poison it.
Protect the People Who Are Trying to Build the New Culture
During a turnaround, leaders often focus heavily on the negative employees. Do not forget the positive ones. When we spend 80% of our time with 20% of our people, we neglect those who help bring us to a better place.
Protect the employees who are buying in: support them, recognize them, give them opportunities, ask for their ideas. Let them become informal ambassadors for the culture. Healthy culture spreads socially just as toxicity does.
The objective is to reach a point where the positive culture becomes self-reinforcing. Earlier, we talked about contribution, the idea that employees felt an obligation to contribute to the culture of the organization. When that happens, they begin correcting one another. They defend standards. They welcome new people into the culture. They celebrate each other without being told. They become proud of what they have built.
That is when you know the turnaround is becoming real.
Move From Dysfunction to Pride
Rescuing a toxic unit is not about creating a workplace where nobody complains, nobody disagrees, and everyone walks around smiling. That would not be healthy either.
Healthy organizations still have disagreements, conflicts, and mistakes.
The difference is how those things are handled. The progression should look something like this: Dysfunction → Correction → Performance → Pride
It is redirection: redirecting the dysfunctional situation back to a place of pride and performance.
Culture Change Begins With Leadership
President Clinton’s campaign strategist, James Carville, famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
We can borrow that sentiment when discussing how to rescue a workplace culture from toxicity and dysfunction: It’s the leadership, stupid.
There is no escaping the fact that the antidote to a diseased organization is great leadership. The chief executive must recognize that exceptional leadership is needed and not just at the highest levels but at every level of the organization.
No matter how wonderful the chief executive might be, if the frontline supervisors are abusive to their people, things will not improve. The executive team must frequently preach great leadership to everyone in formal leadership roles and hold them accountable to that goal.
Culture change does not begin with slogans, programs, or policies. It begins when leaders at every level decide that creating a great workplace is part of their job.