Signs of a toxic workplace
There’s always an enemy. And if there isn’t, they’ll make one for you.
First it was the new Director of Operations, who had fired everyone in the department when he took over. My boss started that one, as she was convinced the new DO was coming after HER job next. The whole company rallied against him. There were clandestine discussions and meetings with HR.
Next it was the ever changing heads of Development. I came to my boss with a complaint about an unproductive process change and a suggestion, and was told I had to “fight this battle” against the head of Tech, who was senior to me. During every 1:1 with my boss, I was asked if I had “conquered” the problem yet. I hadn’t wanted to create a battle and it shouldn’t have been my battle to fight, but my job became dependent on me literally taking up arms against my coworkers.
If more of your time is spent fighting workplace wars than doing something that helps the bottom line, there’s a problem.
Constant turnover
It starts with new leadership. The act that triggered my boss to make the new Operations Director “the enemy” was itself a sign of toxicity. It’s not uncommon for a new leader to come in and “make the department their own” by replacing existing staff with their own preferences, though it is a rather toxic trait. But when it happens once or twice in the space of a few years, one can chalk it up to company growing pains.
During the five years I was with my former company, Marketing leadership changed three times, Operations leadership changed twice, and the Tech leadership was replaced no less than five (!) times. And with each of these turnovers, half or more of the staff were eliminated to bring in a whole new set of workers, or offshore development groups, to fit the new leader’s vision.
News flash for leaders — if your plan is a good one, and you know how to communicate it, lead and inspire, then you can make your vision a reality with existing staff 95% of the time.
If your company is constantly replacing its leadership, there is a leadership problem at the very top. And if the problem constantly trickles down to loss of the work force, that problem is highly toxic.
Red flags disguised as acknowledgments
While at my last job, I applied for a position in a different department. In the last interview for my department change, my soon to be new boss asked me if I was sure I would be all right working for someone with less experience than I have. I pointed out that her experience in the specific industry far outweighed my own and I felt we could be a great team as a result of this balance between my experience with the role and hers with the industry. I felt good about her acknowledgment of my skills. Foolish me. She didn’t really care if I had a problem with it — this was her acknowledging, underhandedly, that SHE had a problem with it. Still, I didn’t catch on even when she started telling me that other department heads had issues with my mentioning my previous experience when asked for reasoning behind some of my decisions. In retrospect, I don’t think these other people ever said anything at all. It was her issue all along.
In the end, I was told by inside sources that I was laid off because my boss felt I was one-upping her with all the success I was creating for our product.
If something feels off about supposed compliments and acknowledgments you receive, there probably is. And it’s probably time to look for a way out.
Secrets and lies….and dramas
When an internal employee from another department wanted to apply for an open position on my team, I was thrilled. She went through the process of submitting her candidacy through our HR department, who transferred her interest to me, as the hiring manager. After interviewing her, I knew she was perfect. After my team interviewed her, they knew she was perfect.
Then I started receiving vague push back from HR. Am I certain she has the right skillset? Am I sure she wants to do the job itself and isn’t just applying because there is no further growth available in her own department and she doesn’t want to leave the company? I carefully thought through these concerns and decided I still wanted to hire her for the position.
So then they convinced another internal employee to apply and told me I had to give him first consideration. His boss wasn’t ready to lose him, and in fact told me that HR had forced the guy to apply, even though he himself didn’t actually want to make the change. Already, you can see the games and dramas being woven here. But it gets worse.
Finally, HR came clean that for some reason the company no longer wanted my candidate to work there and told me I was not allowed to offer her the position. They instructed me that I had to tell her she didn’t have the required skills.
This was completely untrue and she knew it. She had already been getting the uncomfortable feeling that she was unwanted by the company due to her own interactions with HR. She confronted them, asking them to come clean about precisely why the company did not want her working there any longer. HR then came after me, accusing me of telling her the company doesn’t like her — I hadn’t said anything of the sort. In fact, the candidate told me she was getting the impression the company didn’t like her, to which I lied and said I was sure that wasn’t the case.
This is itself one of the signs — you become part of the net of lies because you’re constantly struggling to protect yourself. This ties back to symptom #1 — there’s always an enemy, which pretty much guarantees that at some point for someone that enemy is going to be you. In a toxic work environment, everyone is constantly on high alert and paranoid because you never know who is going to be pitted against you for what, so everyone is untrusting and constantly trying to undermine everyone else so as to gain stronger footing themselves. Your worth is always relational to the worth of everyone else in the company rather considered on its own merit.
This drama my HR department created with this internal candidate for the open position in my department could have been easily prevented had they simply told me from the beginning that the company would not entertain her continued employment. But instead, we had to play a game of secrets, lies, and drama.
If you find dramas playing out at your workplace, and especially if even the HR department is involved, it’s time to rethink your commitment to that workplace.
They say one thing but do another
I can’t tell you how many times my boss said this or that was definitely not going to happen — and then it did. It got to the point where if she said something was not going to happen, I knew that absolutely meant that thing was exactly what was about to happen.
I was told that the development manager creating an unbearable work environment for my team was going to be reprimanded — instead, he was promoted.
I was told that the offshore teams we worked with would be required to more closely adapt their hours to ours, so that we could have synchronous communication with them. Instead, they changed our hours to accommodate theirs, so that my team was working 12 hour days to be available during both local and offshore hours.
Twice it was announced that there would be no management changes weeks before an entire layer of management was let go.
If your company continuously announces one thing and then does the opposite, there is a problem.
They set you up for failure
When it came time to set our goals and KPIs for the year, our boss gave us extremely high numbers we were expected to reach for new sign ups and revenue. And we were told to come up with project plans to back it up. My team had some excellent ideas and were excited to work toward the goals, very lofty though they were.
When we presented our plan, we were told we could do none of it, because the entire system needed to be rebuilt and that was going to take a minimum of 8 months during which we could do nothing new, just support the rebuild.
Of course, we argued that our goals should therefore reflect that reality. We were chastised for wanting to take “the easy road” and told that the company wanted us to have extremely challenging goals, and it didn’t matter if they were unattainable. The company motto became “fail fast and often.” I wish I was kidding. I think they miss the point of that phrase.
If there are unrealistic expectations on you, and the goal of your company is to fail, run.
