Toxic Workplaces: Tell the truth, become the problem.

09/10/2026

Toxic Workplaces: Tell the truth, become the problem.

What we learn from toxic workplaces, and what we teach the next team. 

There’s a particular sort of meeting most people recognise – some way more than others! It often features an improbable deadline, a wobbly project, or somebody’s behaviour becoming such an established feature of working life that the team now plans around it. 

The issue has come up over many a coffee, and possibly subjected to a reasonably thorough public inquiry in a WhatsApp group/Slack channel etc.. By the time the meeting starts, almost everything has been said somewhere other than in the room – you know, the actual place where a decision could be made!

Then somebody says something controversial, like: “I don’t think we can deliver this by Friday.” Or, slightly more ambitiously, “I think we might be avoiding the real issue here?” Cue the non-verbals! (Sudden interest in notebooks, touching hair, folding arms – you know the drill) That ‘someone’ who was practically falling over themselves to agree twenty minutes earlier develops spontaneous amnesia, and so the conversation changes subject, often not even subtly. 

The topic is now whether this was the right moment to say it, whether the tone was helpful and whether the person raising the concern could perhaps be a little more constructive. The deadline remains improbable, except now it has the advantage of being nobody’s immediate concern.

How did telling the truth make you the problem? 

You raised something that mattered, possibly something everyone else had already acknowledged in private, and somehow wound up in defence of your entire personality instead!  There is a particular loneliness in discovering that the colleagues who were so reassuring have become unavailable for comment.

A familiar explanation (one that there are a million articles on – and often followed by a “buy this on Amazon” call to action) is that the workplace is toxic, you told the truth and everyone else was too frightened or defensive to hear it. 

Sometimes speaking up does carry a genuine cost. People can be isolated, undermined or penalised for raising legitimate concerns, and understanding the circumstances does not excuse the treatment. Nor does it place an obligation on the person being harmed to stay and improve everyone else’s character.

There is also a question worth asking if we want anything to change.  One that pretty much underpins the work we do and how we’re able to effect real change in teams. 

How did this group of people learn to behave like this? 

It would be convenient if every unhealthy team came with an identifiable villain and a small underground lair (white cat optional), yet more often, we need to examine a collection of ordinary reactions, repeated often enough that people have learnt what’s sensible to say, what’s risky and what is, frankly, a waste of breath.

People notice what happens around them more than we tend to think they do – depending on their personality, neurotype, and lived experience, some of them will even notice to a forensic level. They notice whose mistakes are treated as learning opportunities and whose become evidence of  ‘A Disappointing Attitude’. They’ll be all too aware of whether a concern gets explored or immediately explained away, and whether or not challenging a decision affects their standing in the team or organisation.  They might keep quiet because they fear the response, and they might also have made several perfectly reasonable attempts already and concluded that their energy is better spent elsewhere.

Imagine a meeting where most people privately disagree with a proposal and nobody says so. Each person looks around, sees apparent acceptance and wonders whether they are the only one with reservations. The minutes record agreement, the plan proceeds and the objections reappear afterwards in smaller, considerably more animated meetings. Teams can become remarkably practised at this. Eventually, the conversations after the meetings start to feel like the real ones, while the main official meetings essentially turn into a piece of administrative and bureaucratic theatre.

You wanted to lead a team. You inherited a complaints department. 

From the leader’s position, this can look very different indeed. You may be wondering why capable people will not take ownership, or why every difficult conversation ends up with you or why decisions keep landing back on your desk for approval when you have been quite clear that people are empowered to make them. You become the interpreter between colleagues, the person who smooths things over and the final destination for tensions that nobody seems able to resolve directly. You wanted to lead a team and now it feels like anything but. Probably more akin to managing a complaints department. 

Underneath the frustration, there may be a less comfortable concern: what does this say about my leadership? Perhaps you have invited challenge and genuinely meant it. Perhaps you suspect your own reactions are part of what is happening. Maybe you’re worried that opening the conversation up will release months of resentment you’re then expected to contain, while the organisation would still quite like its normal work completed by Tuesday week. It’s totally understandable to hesitate when you’re unsure whether an intervention will help or just exacerbate a difficult situation and worse still, make it more public.

People are communicating. Just not where it counts. 

That’s why “we need better communication” rarely gives us enough to work with. People may be communicating constantly, just selectively. Asking them to speak more openly will achieve very little if they expect honesty to damage a relationship, embarrass someone powerful or disappear into a conversation that produces no action. Before deciding what the team needs to practise, we need to understand what happens between these particular people and what has made their current behaviour feel necessary.

There’s  another possibility we need to leave room to explore too: the person speaking up may not have the whole picture. A concern can be valuable without every conclusion being right. Someone can raise an important issue in a way that makes it harder to hear. A team has to be able to examine the information, challenge the interpretation and address the delivery without using any one of those things as an excuse to avoid the others. “Your tone was unhelpful” does not, on its own, make a Friday deadline suddenly achievable.

What has your team learnt to keep quiet about? 

The clues are often there well before anyone labels it toxic. They look like these: 

• People tell you what they really think once the meeting has ended. 
• Certain names prompt a resigned “you know what they’re like”. 
• New starters ask sensible questions that experienced colleagues stopped asking years ago. 
• People seek permission for decisions they supposedly own, or wait for the most senior person to speak before discovering their own view. 

None of these is a diagnosis. Each is a reason to get curious about what the team has learnt.

Your reaction is teaching people something 

If you have influence, your response is part of that learning. When someone brings you bad news, notice what happens instinctively before your considered leadership response arrives. Do you ask a question, defend the plan or explain how much pressure you are already under? When a colleague challenges your idea, do they get a fair hearing or a detailed, impromptu presentation on why you were right all along? You may feel that you are providing useful context, yet they probably leave having received quite different instructions for next time.

This does not mean leaders must respond flawlessly to every difficult conversation. You’re allowed to be surprised, frustrated or wrong. What matters is whether you can recognise the effect of your reaction and return to it: “I was defensive earlier. I moved too quickly into explaining the decision. I want to hear the concern properly.” A response like that is leadership gold, and gives people something concrete to work with. It also removes the  exhausting requirement for everyone to pretend they didn’t actually notice.

Support is more useful while they’re still in the room 

The rest of the team has a part to play too. If someone raises a concern you share, saying so while they are still in the room is more useful than sending a supportive private message afterwards. You don’t have to endorse every word or join a confrontation. “I have the same concern about capacity” may be enough to turn one person’s apparent negativity into a question the team can examine together. 

Private sympathy is welcome – public support changes the conversation.

For a leader already carrying too much – and there are a lot! – this is where the possibility of relief sits. Colleagues begin speaking directly to one another, checking assumptions and taking responsibility for what happens next. You have less interpreting and smoothing over to do. Problems can reach you while there is still room to respond, rather than once they have become urgent enough to require an entire evening and a high dose of goodwill.

What happens after the honest conversation? 

A candid conversation is a useful start, and the follow-through is where its credibility is earned. If someone raises a problem, what will happen, who will act and when will the team return to it? If the answer is that a decision will remain unchanged, can the reasons be explained honestly? People need evidence that speaking makes a useful difference, even when it does not get them the outcome they wanted. Otherwise, a very open afternoon can become one more reason to doubt the next invitation.

At Lead Happy Teams, we start by understanding what is really happening between the people involved: the relationships, assumptions, habits and pressures beneath the visible problem. That understanding shapes the work before people come together, the conversations they need to have and what they will do afterwards. The aim is for something to change in the meetings, decisions and difficult moments that follow, when everyone is busy again and the familiar habits are readily available.

What happens after we’ve called it toxic? 

There is a reason I think the conversation needs to go further than identifying a toxic workplace and advising people to leave. Leaving may be absolutely the right decision. Getting yourself out of a situation that is harming you is enough to be getting on with, and nobody needs to add “repair organisational culture” to their list while they are trying to recover from it. The question that interests me comes afterwards, when we find ourselves with some influence over somebody else’s experience.

Because sooner or later, we become part of the environment another person is learning from. We are the colleague they watch when someone raises a concern, the manager they bring a mistake to, or the person who either backs them in the meeting or sends a lovely message once all danger has passed. What happened to us can inform those choices. We know how much it matters when somebody stays curious, takes us seriously or says, “Actually, I think they have a point.”

You may never see how far it travels 

It can feel absurdly small. You support a colleague on a Tuesday afternoon and the world remains, on inspection, much as it was. Nobody issues a certificate. The next meeting may still be dreadful. One decent response is unlikely to undo years of learning, and there are conditions no individual can change alone. Even so, the people in that room have now seen another way of handling that moment. Repeat it, support it and follow through on it, and you give that different experience a chance to become something they can rely on.

They may then do the same for somebody else. A colleague can take that experience into their first management role, another team or another organisation. You are unlikely to hear about it. There is no reliable reporting dashboard for the moment someone thinks, “I had a manager once who handled this well. I could try that.” These things can travel beyond our view.

That is the possibility I want us to leave room for. A horrible experience can understandably make us doubt whether behaving differently achieves anything. Yet if people learn to protect themselves through the way they are treated, they can also learn that speaking honestly, admitting a mistake or supporting a colleague is possible. We each have some influence over what the next person learns, particularly when we hold more power than they do.

You don’t  have to be grateful for what happened, or return to the room where it happened and put everything right. When you have the chance, give someone an experience worth carrying into the next room. Changing the world includes changing the small part of it somebody encounters through you.

Tip of the week: what did your response teach them?

Think about the last time somebody told you something you didn’t particularly want to hear. 

Consider what you said, what your face contributed and what you did afterwards. 

From their side of the conversation, would it seem worthwhile to try again? 

If you are unsure, you could ask them: 

“Thinking about how I responded, is there anything that would make you hesitate to raise something similar with me?”

Then give yourself the small, occasionally demanding task of listening to the answer. What happens next is an opportunity to earn trust.

 

If you want to go a bit deeper without committing to a conversation, take five minutes to do a quick check on the health of your team.  It’s free and you’ll get personalised results you can act on straight away.

 

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