In brief
- When bad behavior keeps happening, most companies blame the person, or the boss who didn’t stop it.
- But a behavior that keeps going is being allowed to keep going. That tells you something about the environment.
- Remove the person without changing the environment, and the behavior usually comes back with someone new.
Here’s a story I’ve seen play out more than once, in different companies and different industries.
There’s an employee who’s difficult to work with. Sharp with coworkers, dismissive in meetings, the kind of person people quietly route around. Everyone knows. Their manager knows too, but the manager is hands-off. Doesn’t like conflict, doesn’t want to be the bad guy, figures it’ll work itself out.
Eventually someone senior notices, usually after a good person quits. The diagnosis comes fast: the employee is toxic, and the manager is too soft. Maybe one of them leaves. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief.
A year later, there’s a new difficult person on a different team. And a different manager who isn’t stopping it either.
The usual response is to blame the person, and I wrote about why that misses in What We Get Wrong About Toxic Culture. Here I want to look at something more specific: what the company tells you about itself when it lets a behavior keep going.
What allowing it tells you
A behavior that keeps happening is being allowed to keep happening. That’s not an accusation. It’s information.
When a manager lets something slide, they aren’t only making a personal choice. They’re showing you what the company has given them to work with. If there’s no shared standard for how people treat each other, the manager falls back on their own. A hands-off manager lets things go. A strict one cracks down. Same company, same behavior, two completely different outcomes, depending on who you report to.
That pattern has a name in my work. It’s what I call a Level 2 company: the standard for what’s acceptable belongs to whoever happens to be in the room, not to the company. In my experience, most companies are here. Nobody chose it. It’s what happens when a company never says who it is.
And if the only time anyone acts is when something sounds like a legal problem, that’s Level 1. The law is the only standard, and everything below that line is left to the people involved.
The tell
The quickest way to see what your environment allows is to listen to the reason people give when nothing changes.
- “He’s been here forever.”
- “She brings in the numbers.”
- “That’s just how they are.”
- “It’s not technically against policy.”
Each of those is a tell. None of them is about the behavior itself. They’re about why the company has decided, without ever saying so, that the behavior is acceptable. The first three point to Level 2. The last one points to Level 1.
When I hear those reasons, I don’t need to meet the person to know what it’s like to work there. I write more about what happens when a strong performer is the one behaving badly in There’s No Such Thing as a Non-Toxic Culture.
What changes when you look at the room
When you stop asking only “who did this?” and start asking “what let this keep happening?” you get a different kind of answer.
You find out whether managers have a shared picture of what good behavior looks like here. You find out whether people know what they’re allowed to raise and who will act on it. You find out whether the standard depends on who’s watching.
Those are things a company can fix. Replacing people one at a time isn’t.
The verdict
Toxic behavior is real, and people are responsible for how they act. But when a behavior keeps going, the person isn’t the whole story. The environment is telling you what it allows.
That’s good news, in a way. You can’t control what habits each new hire brings with them. You can decide what your company stands for, and what it will and won’t let slide. That decision is what moves a company from a standard that depends on who’s in the room to one that belongs to the company. I lay out all three levels in What Is the Toxic Culture Pyramid™?
If you’re seeing a gap between what your company says and what people actually experience, Say vs. Do is a good next read.
Questions worth asking
- Think of the last person who was let go for how they treated people. How long did the behavior go on first?
- Who knew, and what reason did they give for not acting sooner?
- Would that same behavior have been handled the same way on a different team?
Read next: What Is the Toxic Culture Pyramid™?
Frequently asked questions
Is toxic behavior at work always caused by one bad employee?
Rarely. A person is responsible for their behavior, but when it keeps going, something in the environment is allowing it. That’s the part that brings the behavior back after the person leaves.
Is a hands-off manager the cause of a toxic culture?
A hands-off manager can let behavior slide, but they’re usually falling back on their own standard because the company hasn’t given them a shared one. Replace the manager without fixing that, and the problem tends to return.
What is a tell in company culture?
It’s the reason people give when a behavior is allowed to continue, like “that’s just how he is” or “it’s not against policy.” The reason shows you which standard the company is really running on.
How do you stop toxic behavior from coming back?
Give the company a standard of its own. Name who the company is, describe the behaviors that go with it and hold everyone to that standard, no matter who they report to.
