5 Indicators You’re Leading a Toxic Culture and What To Do About It
By Jayson Krause, Managing Director of Level 52 & Author of The Science Behind Success
Over the years, the team at Level 52 has worked with leaders in several large and small companies. During this time, we have identified 5 things that consistently lead to a negative, unproductive, and hard-to-work-in culture.
5 Indicators You’re Leading a Toxic Culture
1. You have meaningless values
Values!? What do you mean? I think those words are on our website… I can’t remember for sure…
It’s never a question of whether your values mean anything. It’s how senior leadership makes them into something. If your values include collaboration and risk-taking, are they celebrated, rewarded, and socialized? If not, expect them to mean nothing. If the company values on your wall and website aren't well communicated and embodied by those who sponsor them, they can easily be mocked and weaponized, contributing to a toxic culture.
2. You allow an incongruence between what you say you want and what you reward
Something we consistently see in toxic cultures is when leaders tell employees that values are important but then recognize, reward, and celebrate the earth scorchers and bridge-burners who succeed at the expense of others. It’s a classic ‘looksy-loo’ that creates passionless clock-punchers who play to win for themselves. You create that by what you make important through recognition, repetition, and compensation.
3. You promote based on longevity and individual contribution
A nasty culture breaker is when organizations don’t truly search for real leadership qualities. They blindly employ a method that cultivates and empowers entitlement by promoting the person who’s stuck around the longest. It’s a lazy, easy-street approach that teaches people that relational qualities take a back seat to anything else. A productive and effective individual contributor will not necessarily make a good leader. When you simply promote others because they’ve been there the longest and have been an aggressive and highly productive lone-wolf, it erodes the psychological safety and belonging that grows others and keeps people on board.
4. You hire fast to stay committed to the pace
Unfortunately, I’ve seen successful companies on a fast-growth trajectory bring on relatively competent, warm bodies as fast as possible. This will surely lead to a messy outcome. What qualities do you want others to embody inside the company? How do you want them to interact with others? The quality of what people do is always influenced by how they work together with the other people inside the business. Slow the hiring process, get others involved, and determine the qualities that are the best fit for your culture.
5. You don’t provide feedback
The problem in many organizations is a lack of feedback. Feedback is seen as taking too long and being a waste of time since ‘people don’t change anyhow.’ So forget feedback, right? As a result, you let people perform poorly until it gets so bad you blindside them through termination. You feel uncomfortable, and so you let them walk into the next room with spinach in their teeth.
Avoidable professional tragedies occur because leaders do NOT course correct early and often. They let the people who make the workplace challenging run wild until eventually another leader inherits the problems. Not giving feedback and letting things go also kills morale. NOT giving feedback is one of the most selfish things a leader can do.
Great leaders understand the different levels of culture in their organization. They are responsible for all of the little inputs that influence expression in the company. Become the engineer of your culture, and be a custodian for what matters most. Remember, what you recognize, reward, and celebrate will succeed in your organization far beyond the words on the wall. To truly commit to developing a strong culture, start by developing a strategy to address these 5 things; it’s simple, just not easy.
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