Knowing When to Exit a Toxic Environment

A toxic workplace culture can occur quickly, especially during major projects that intensify stress or during periods of change such as a companywide reorganization or layoffs.

Sometimes you can’t put your finger on what’s going sideways until you’re already deep into toxic territory.

Perhaps what started out as typical corporate alpha behavior — dominating a meeting, talking over others, cutting people off — snowballs into outright bullying, pushing around, and disrespectful tone.

What’s worse, the person doing the bullying often singles out one or two people for their wrath and micromanagement. That can bring an entire team or a project to a grinding halt and create new hurdles, roadblocks, and bottlenecks that are wholly unnecessary and making things worse and harder for the entire team.

Fear of angering the aggressor or a desire to avoid their lashing out often prompts people to stop asking questions, seeking clarity, speaking up about knowledge they have, or flagging mistakes they see.

Trust is shattered. Institutional knowledge is lost. An already difficult situation becomes even harder than it needs to be.

People begin to cower, and whisper amongst each other about the divisions in the team and the awful culture. Eventually, people will decide they’ve had enough and will start to leave.

Workplace culture expert Annie McKee wrote an article called “Keep Your Company’s Toxic Culture from Infecting Your Team” for the Harvard Business Review, and she identifies a few red flags that indicate your team’s or company’s culture is becoming toxic:

1. Pressure to cover — People start to feel like they have to hide, downplay, or not speak up about their knowledge, questions they have, or clarification or direction they need to complete their work successfully.

2. Hyper-competitiveness — Teammates start to feel like they have to constantly one-up each other, or fight for approval or good graces.

3. Pressure to overwork — Nothing is ever good enough and the more you give, the more is demanded of you. Unreasonable deadlines or massive amounts of work are doled out, and expectations for completing the work are unrealistic. This can often include demands to work late at night and on weekends, violating the work/life balance.

When it becomes clear that this is not just a one-off phenomenon and is becoming a permanent toxic culture, McKee says it’s important to self-reflect on how much you’re willing to put up with. Take a personal inventory and be real with yourself about how you may have contributed to the toxic culture, and make changes if and where you can.

If your team or company has an underlying healthy culture, any issue that led it into toxic territory can be easily remedied with mature, open, and honest conversations about what happened and how to fix it. However, she acknowledges: Let’s face it: you’re probably not going to be able to single-handedly change the culture of your entire organization.

McKee shares a few tips for coping in a toxic workplace:

1. Start with yourself — As every flight attendant is trained to do, prioritize taking care of yourself and your own professional, mental, and emotional well being by putting on your own oxygen mask first before helping others. This may mean establishing healthier boundaries with colleagues who act immature, unprofessional, and bullying in meetings by asking (politely) if you can finish speaking when they cut you off, or (respectfully) acknowledging when harsh tone is directed at you.

2. Repair relationships — Try to address conflict directly with the person or people you feel it with most acutely. Seek to have a private one-on-one conversation to clear the air, acknowledge your own role or shortcomings, and move forward with mutual respect.

3. Form a coalition — Try to get broad agreement and buy-in on creating positive changes so you can continue to have a more positive culture going forward.

In some cases, the toxicity is too great and the damage is too deep to overcome. It’s unfortunate, but it happens.

Continuing to work in an environment that accepts toxic and bullying behavior is emotionally draining and unprofessional.

Sometimes the best thing is to part ways and exit as gracefully as you can.

Prototype, Test, Fail & Iterate

Too often, business leaders agonize about major decisions. It becomes daunting. You don’t know where or how to begin. What if you get it wrong? Analysis paralysis sets in.

To make better decisions with confidence and conviction, take a cue from the concepts of design thinking: prototype, test, fail & iterate.

Start with a hypothesis or idea, and build a simple prototype that’s quick and dirty. That might mean a hand-drawn mockup of a new website page or logo, or a paper cutout of a product.

Let that early prototype shape your thinking so you can conduct an early test of your idea. That could be a user survey embedded in your next digital newsletter, or a coupon code for a discount to entice new users to buy your product.

Sit back and study the early results. What worked? What didn’t? How could you improve and make it better?

I recently worked with a team of IT developers who were creating a new app, and they have loads of expertise in writing code and creating new functions but they don’t have much experience in the business world of companies they were building the app for — field service businesses, construction companies, HVAC and plumbing/electrical companies, real estate and property managers.

As the development team walked me through an early beta version of the app in a safe sandbox environment, we talked through use cases and lots of “what if I wanted to…” scenarios. They took that feedback and went back to the drawing board to overhaul the functionality and rethink how they approach the architecture and coding.

The new beta version was vastly superior, and has better functionality that will broaden its appeal for other potential users. After testing it some more in the sandbox, they’re doing additional iterations to make the user interface more friendly.

Applying design thinking to their hybrid waterfall/agile approach to development is pushing them to think more like an end user as they find better ways to build an excellent product.

The Year Everything Changed

Many of us are still struggling to process and react to all the changes 2020 has wrought.

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic and extended shutdown or pivot to remote work for millions of businesses.

Overseeing remote school while also trying to focus on our own jobs.

Ongoing disruptions of everyday life as grocery stores still run out of toilet paper, our favorite restaurants go under and vacation plans get scuttled.

Social distancing and isolation from the family, friends and other loved ones whose support we need now more than ever before.

Protests for social justice that turned violent and scared some of the very people they were meant to support.

A painfully divisive election that led to heated exchanges and hurtful words for many people on both sides of political spectrum.

2020 will be remembered as year of massive change for many of us, and the enduring effects of some of those changes won’t be fully understood for a long time to come.

Many of us also experienced moments of joy and hope amid the hardship. A new job. A new baby. A kid who learned to ride a bike. Finishing college. Winning an election. Learning a new skill or hobby. Making time to read a book or just sit and breathe.

These moments of light are so important, and help us cope through the darker times.

They may also open our eyes to old habits, behaviors and relationships that no longer serve us, and we may realize that now is a good time to make positive change.

As 2020 comes to an end, it’s a good time to take stock and rethink what you want out of life. The answer may surprise you.

Want to Reach Peak Performance? Pause and Rest.

Endurance athletes can attest to that time earlier in their career when they trained long and hard, but repeatedly fell short of goals.

Eventually they found an unlikely answer: they needed to rest and let their bodies recover. 

The same is true at work.

Time away from work makes us sharper, more insightful, more innovative and creative as we try to solve complex problems. Pound away day and night for too long, and you lose that mental edge. Your thinking gets soft. You start to autopilot.

So give yourself permission to take a break.

When there's nothing urgent happening at work, take a few hours in the evening or on the weekend to NOT check your e-mail and social feeds. Establish an understanding among colleagues, and then trust that someone will call if something urgent happens or needs an immediate response.

Katya Andresen, SVP at Capital One and the former CEO of Cricket Media, recently noted in a blog post about the importance of pausing that even Kenyan distance runner Tegla Loroupe, who trained 120 miles per week (190 kilometers) and was the first African woman to win the New York City Marathon, took Sundays off.

There’s a great lesson in there. Here’s to hoping you can take some time off this holiday season to rest and refresh before we jump into 2019.

Why Leaders Should be the Last to Speak in Meetings

Nothing shuts down candid, insightful thoughts from your best employees than a boss who hijacks a meeting and spouts off his opinions and then asks: "What do you guys think?"

Good luck getting their honest opinions, especially if any of them happen to run counter to the vision the boss just laid out.

Mature leaders have mastered the skill of holding their thoughts until everyone else has had a chance to go first.

As people are talking, they ask questions to clarify and gain deeper insights as to why the person thinks that way, but they don't agree or disagree or show their hand.

Not only does this elicit richer and deeper insights, but it also enhances one's ability to make more informed decisions.

Snarky? Or Just Dashing Off a Short Note?

Sometimes it stings a little when you read an email or text from a colleague and it's jarringly short and pointed.

Wrong tone. Redo.

Too long. Cut in half.

Pls rewrite, make more formal.

Is that snark? Or are they simply pressed for time and sending a to-the-point note? Usually the latter.

So much context around tone and meaning gets lost in email and text, and that can lead to misunderstandings or worse.

We should assume the best, especially when the note is from someone you generally have a great relationship with.

They may be dashing off a note in the few seconds before they walk into a meeting, or during a lull on another phone call.

Their attempt at brevity and directness is meant as a kindness to you so they seem responsive and respectful of giving you feedback that can keep a project on track.

If you notice tone creeping up more frequently, there may be an underlying issue that needs to be addressed.

When that's the case, pick up a phone or better yet -- meet in person, ideally over a meal.

It's hard to be hostile when you're spending an hour together breaking bread.

Remember That Time KFC Ran Out of Chicken...

KFC's apology ad.

KFC, one of the largest chicken restaurants in the world, had the unthinkable happen at certain restaurants in the UK recently: they ran out of chicken.

The company had to temporarily close hundreds of stores, angering customers and lighting up social media with complaints.

What could have become a PR nightmare was instead seized for the enormous opportunity it was.

The company responded beautifully with an apology ad that simply said "We're sorry." 

It also featured an altered image of KFC's signature red-and-white striped chicken bucket with the letters scrambled to say "FCK." 

Props on the bold move, KFC.

We would expect nothing less from the company whose Twitter account only follows 11 people: the five former Spice Girls and six random guys named Herb.

Be Ruthless With Your Time, And You'll Have More Of It

We are so harried and pressed for time that we become blind to how much of it we squander.

Here are a few tips for being ruthless with how you schedule and manage your time, which can give your hours back each week:

• Plan your week. Map out important meetings (and drive time to/from them), key phone calls or conversations you need to have, major project deadlines and due dates, deliverables and other time-sensitive things. This overview will help you prioritize how you spend your time. Be willing to reschedule that quasi-social coffee or lunch to a later date.

• Write down a to-do list. This goes hand-in-hand with mapping your week. List projects and tasks in order of importance, with due dates/times, and then cross them off as you finish them. The sense of accomplishment will energize you for the next item.

• Stop emailing so much. Email is great for quick notes or a single longer detailed note. But it can become a major time suck when you're swapping five or six exchanges when you could have simply picked up the phone and had a 10-minute conversation to cover more detail. A greet rule of thumb is the 1-or-5 rule. If your message can be covered in just 1 paragraph, or needs 5 or more paragraphs, email is great. Anything in between might be better suited for a phone call.

• One and done. Aim to complete tasks the first time you tackle them. If this isn't possible, break the task into smaller chunks and try to finish each piece the first time you touch it. Same goes for email. Don't flag a bunch of email and then have a mountain to re-read and reply to later. It gets overwhelming and things get lost in the shuffle. Wait to read emails in batches when you have time to peck out a quick response.

• Walk away. Our focus and mental alacrity fades when we stare at a computer screen too long. Some productivity experts recommend an ideal schedule is 52 minutes of focused work, followed by a 17-minute break. That's just enough time to take a brief walk outside, get a coffee and return to your desk revived and invigorated.

The Value of "Unthinking"

Sometimes we get wrapped up in our own thoughts too much. We can become overly reliant on our education, training and professional expertise that we restrict some of our full mental inspiration and creativity in tackling complex problems.

The paradox is that too much thinking can be bad for us. We go down the rabbit holes of our thoughts and lose our bearings.

Some psychologists, executive coaches and athletic coaches advocate for conscious "unthinking." 

Yale once did a study with rats in a T-shaped maze by placing food in a random sequence in such a way that the food was on the left 60% of the time and on the right 40% of the time. The rats quickly learned that the left had food more often, and went straight there ALL of the time, thus achieving a 60% success rate. When given the same test, young children did the same thing and got similar results.

Then Yale had undergraduates play the same game. They did worse than the rats and the children.

The undergrads were trying to calculate an underlying pattern or formula for predicting where the food would be, and that overthinking led them to underperform.

To make better decisions in this complex world, sometimes it's best to ignore some of the data and follow your gut.