The Legacy of a Toxic Workplace on Your Next Job or Leadership Role: What to Know and What To Do About It. Part 1
This is the first in a series of articles on this topic.
In preparation for writing these articles I reviewed coaching client narratives spanning 20+ years and conducted interviews over the last year and a half of those who are currently or had started new professional roles within the last 3-5 years, subsequent to leaving a toxic workplace.
Congratulations! You’ve left a toxic workplace for a new job…now what?
Why ‘now what’ you ask? Wasn’t the answer to your suffering in finding a new and better environment to exercise your skills? A workplace that treats people like human beings? Where bullying or abuse, be it from employees or management isn’t tolerated?
Yes absolutely, but that’s only Step 1 in repairing the damage such environments cause. And I use the term ‘damage’ consciously, not hyperbolically. Toxic workplaces, bullying and abusive behaviors frequently result in trauma. Not necessarily big ‘T’ trauma’ like shock trauma events but little ‘t’ trauma, formed by a constellation of incidences and cumulative micro experiences resulting in harm that can be just as impactful, but not fully appreciated, until after leaving that space. Once the stress of chronic perseverance for survival that toxic workplaces induce subsides, your dysregulated central nervous system now has a chance to calm down. But, this will take time and you’ll feel it physically. It’s why NOT immediately starting that new job following your resignation from a toxic workplace is advisable.
Trauma: A quick tutorial
Trauma is a brain thing…it's a wound caused by an event(s) the brain registers as a threat to your survival and safety, be it physical or psychological. The brain’s registration of threat is involuntary and hard-wired, resulting in a dysregulation of your central nervous system enabling fight/flight/freeze responses. You don’t ‘decide’ to be dysregulated and not all trauma leads to Post Traumatic Stress (PTS). Meeting a challenge, aka stress, is registered by the brain as a threat which is exquisitely built to address and rise to challenges-for a limited period of time, not as a lifestyle. The brain is also hard wired to down regulate, meaning the calming of your activated central nervous system. However, this process can take several weeks, depending on the severity of your experience(s). When events have been too overwhelming or frequent, PTS can occur but is not preordained.
Here’s an inconvenient truth: trauma, regardless of its origins, is not automatically repaired once the cause has discontinued. Unresolved trauma repeats, affecting relationships, behavior and communication in multiple sectors of one’s life.
Toxic workplaces involve repeated exposure and incidences which makes them inherently harmful. The legacy of that harm can follow and influence you right into your next professional experience (and other non-work relationships) unless you recognize the symptoms and work with them.
Legacy from toxic workplaces
In the 20+ years I’ve been coaching people who have experienced shock trauma, role related trauma and relational trauma within the workplace, I’ve observed common denominators when they subsequently went on to new professional roles and positions. Below and in future articles in this series, I’ll review common outcomes and symptoms with suggestions for what to do about it, both from the perspective of experiencing them yourself or as a someone in a leadership position observing them in a new hire or on your team.
Breach of trust
By far, the most predominant, intense wound from toxic workplaces that I’ve observed, and from which all other symptoms seem to emerge, is the perceived breach of trust and sense of betrayal from the lack of fundamental ‘duty of care’ by leadership, who either directly participated in causing harm through abusive management practices or allowed it to occur from dysfunction, negligence as a failure to act, or avoidance. A key piece to this is the degree of perceived preventability; that the harm caused was avoidable, unnecessary, or deliberate. Which is experienced by the individual as: their safety and well-being don’t matter and is secondary to other priorities or the self interest of those in positions of authority.
Interestingly, this outcome aligns with Thanatological literature on grief and bereavement following unexpected loss that reports: of the top risk factors predicting negative bereavement outcomes, the higher the perceived preventability of the death, the higher the risk for poor bereavement outcomes.
A break in trust is about betrayal, a type of non-death loss that results in grief, anger, vulnerability, and shame. That last piece, shame, might seem irrational, but the impulse for self-blame is predicated on the unrealistic assumption: “You/I should have known better; should have seen it coming; how could I be so stupid or gullible,” and that we have the capability to identify all threat (particularly from those we’re in regular or close contact with) before harm occurs and therefore be able to prevent or avoid it. It’s perhaps less threatening to see this outcome as a personal failure deserving of shame, to preserve the myth of infallible preventability against vulnerability, rather than accepting the original assumption as fundamentally inaccurate. Harm happens, regardless of intelligence or savvy.
These outcomes mirrored the experiences of other clients coping with the devastation of relationship-based infidelity, for which there are many parallels. Consider the phenomenon over recent years of identifying ‘workplace spouses’, a term that characterizes the depth of work-related partnerships. These clients struggled with nagging questions of whether they could or should trust their philandering partner juxtaposed with the heartbreak of terminating the relationship. This is similar to the agony of deciding to resign or stay at a much loved job within an environment that has proven unsafe.
The end result of productivity-work, manifests through collaboration and cooperation, even when working from home. Organizational eco-systems are primarily about and judged by the experience of workplace relationships and the degree of social capital. The higher the degree of social capital the higher the degree of psychological safety and an inoculation from harm.
For many of my clients and those interviewed, trust issues remained ‘sticky’ and problematic to healing the harm done by a toxic workplace. Even years later and having experienced satisfaction in subsequent employment, the legacy of that breach continued to influence them, even when they had a positive relationship with their current direct report prior to working for them. Sit with that for a minute. Consequences from a breach of trust in a previous toxic workplace became permanent for some, resulting in a persistent viewpoint that those in management positions are fundamentally untrustworthy and capable of harm because of the imbalance in power. At the core, discomfort with an imbalance of power is about vulnerability.
This is critical for people in managerial positions to understand and incorporate into their leadership behavior. Trust and psychological safety are paramount and elemental to human well-being. Period. Safety, physical and psychological, is biologically driven, neuro-biologically monitored and somatically experienced when violated. Broken trust is difficult to repair and an employee emerging from a toxic workplace will retain, for as long as they feel at risk, an uneasy hypervigilance.
Part 2 will discuss specific legacy behaviors and symptoms from a toxic workplace that can influence and impact subsequent employment or leadership roles. How to manage these outcomes will also be included in future parts of this series.