How To Trust Your Gut When Work Feels Toxic

“Mean Girls is corporate America, and [corporate America] is also Scandal, and sometimes Game of Thrones, depending where you are. You have people who want power. You have people who are insecure. You have people who are incredibly good at what they do, but then they’re threatening to everybody else just by the very nature of existing, and then you have a popularity contest. You combine all of those and you have a fantastic teen movie.””

That’s my podcast guest, the late Benish Shah, who joined me to talk about navigating toxic situations at work.

I once worked on a small, all female team that functioned like a high school girls’ clique. At meetings, some of the team would sit on each other‘s laps and play with each other‘s hair and talk about their plans for the weekend, all while cutting me out, extremely purposefully. It was a masterclass in awful behavior and I will never forget how bad it made me feel. And yet, that was a shitty situation but not a toxic one; my boss treated me well and I had a lot of independence and respect for my work. No: The toxic situations were the jobs where I was publicly shamed, sexually harassed, or made a pawn in turf wars.

Have you ever worked in a place that’s toxic? Not annoying or challenging or even full of difficult people….but toxic. It can be insidious. Your gut tells you something isn’t right… but you also don’t trust yourself to make the call .. or speak up… and maybe you just swallow the horrible situation until you just can’t anymore. Or even worse, until you get pushed out or layered over.

Being in a toxic situation drives anxiety because of the uncertainty that toxic situations often create. Toxic cultures willingly keep workers dysregulated to use fear and anxiety as “motivators.” Like its cousin gaslighting, one of the challenges about toxicity is that you forget to notice it after a while and in fact, you grow accustomed to feeling bad.

That’s why I loved Benish Shah’s advice column so much… it was called  “Is It Toxic?” and people could write in with their scenarios and Benish would judge for them. Toxic managers are serious and they cost organizations real money. My inbox is full of requests for help in managing a toxic boss. But Benish Shah has a different take on what toxicity really is. It's organizational behavior, though we treat it like individual behavior.

“It's the behavior that you tolerate, or that you don't tolerate, that you promote or that you shut down.” Before she died Benish worked to create cultures where “managers could be better at managing and leading. They could be more compassionate, and stop allowing behaviors of shaming people and targeting people and of using their personal lives against them.” Check out our interview.

I’ve digested some salient points below… print them out and show them to anyone who needs some education :)

Morra: “How do you define a toxic workplace?

Benish: Toxicity is an environment that purposefully holds you back and creates a lack of psychological safety when you're at work. It’s a pattern of behavior rather than a one-off instance.

Morra: Is there a litmus test for toxicity? Because of my personality (conflict averse, very easy to blame myself and a people pleaser), I’m not a good judge! I’m like, 'I'm pretty sure this is toxic, but I think it's also my fault.' Are there guideposts - almost like a self-assessment to ask yourself if you think it's toxic, but aren't sure?

Benish: There’s not always a smoking gun. Track small things that happen to you. Those are the things that make you feel like something is really wrong-- all the alarm bells go off in your head-- because you're never going to find the big thing. By the time you find the big thing, you're already quitting or they're firing you. So you want to see the red flags before so you can decide your exit on your own terms.

Try to figure out what’s motivating the behavior. The motivation might be clear to you. Maybe this person wants my job or doesn't like that I was hired or is racist or sexist. That’s easy: it's a toxic environment that I'm in. If the motivation is unclear, more digging needs to happen. I've had a boss who was really, really hard on me, but she was trying to save my job because somebody else wanted me out. It's the chart, the behaviors, and the motivators, and that'll give you an idea of is it toxic or is it just not a good fit for you? We're emotional beings. We know when we feel supported and when we don't.”

Morra: How do I know if it’s safe to disclose something personal or vulnerable?

Benish: When you're in an environment where you're not supported, expressing any kind of vulnerability that is personal is going to put you at risk. People will tell their bosses about their mental health diagnoses and their boss will use it against them. The boss might say, ‘You're just reacting that way because you have anxiety or you're just responding to this way because you have PTSD. It sounds like you're triggered.’ Versus understanding that somebody who has any type of mental health diagnosis, if they're telling you then there's a decent chance that they're managing it, they're aware enough that they know when they're being triggered or when they're being anxious versus having your boss use that against you.

When people say, come as your full self, you have to understand that when you come as your full self, the person in front of you is still a human being and if they're not kind good people, they will use it against you in some manner.

I wish that was not the world we lived in. But it's an important thing to remember because when we're employed by someone else, we have to think about, ‘Hey, is this information that I'm going to give to you going to hurt me or help me?’ And it's an unfortunate analysis, but it's important  that we do.

When you're any type of minority in an environment, it is always going to be less safe for you to make those disclosures. We know what micro aggressions are, but the thing is, when people are uncomfortable with you, they will use whatever you give them to make their point about you. Vulnerability for women of color and women in the workplace is a trap. That is it. When someone says, ‘be vulnerable,’ it doesn't work for us because we're already considered emotional.”

Benish spoke truth to power, and advocated for truly inclusive workplaces. She was a champion, especially, for women of color. There is a tremendous intersection between creating inclusive cultures and tamping down toxicity. Amy Edmondson says, “To be genuinely inclusive, the work environment must be psychologically safe for everyone—including people in historically marginalized or underrepresented groups. Organizations and teams that work on improving psychological safety for everyone will tend to become more inclusive as a result.”

Listen to our interview here.

Morra

PS: I loved joining Jason Jaggard on his Meta Performance show. We talk about how our anxiety drives us, how it affects those around us and can create blind spots in management, and why perfectionism is a trap. Listen here.