Tolstoy’s classic novel Anna Karenina famously begins, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Many people think you could say something similar for unhappy companies.
It’s true every toxic workplace has its own unique fingerprint of unpleasant personalities, dubious ethics, and inane regulations. No two narcissistic bosses or rules-obsessed HR departments are exactly the same in their awfulness. But according to some of the smartest commentators in business, underneath this surface-level diversity lurks a surprising amount of sameness.
Every toxic company culture isn’t toxic in it’s own way. Every type of terrible company culture can be traced to just a handful of fundamental errors, they argue.
A “toxic” culture isn’t just one you don’t like.
Some of the confusion around what exactly makes for a toxic culture, according to VC and blogger Hunter Walk, is that a lot of us use the term “toxic” in a loose way to mean simply a culture that doesn’t appeal to us personally.
“Coinbase, which has been quite aggressive in defining what’s expected of you, isn’t my cup of tea, but I can still appreciate the clarity they are providing for potential employees. Similarly, the ‘holacracy’ style that has been explored by some startups sounds like a nightmare. But that mere personal attraction or repulsion doesn’t make them good or bad,” he wrote on his blog recently.
I’d personally rather chop off a few toes than work in the kind of place that demands people wear suits and sit in cubicles for 12 hours a day, but that doesn’t make the entirety of investment banking toxic. It just means I’m not cut out for Goldman Sachs (no news there).
So if a toxic culture isn’t something idiosyncratic and individual that you can determine by gut feel, how do you define when a company has a truly noxious or ineffective culture?
Adam Grant’s four deadly sins of toxic workplace culture
On his Worklife podcast recently, Wharton professor and best-selling author Adam