Hi Reader,
When I was a little girl, I often heard the elders in my family say, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
If we know this wisdom, why do we often wait for things to get bad before taking action?
Just on face when it comes to heath, after years working with public health agencies and healthcare organizations, I’ve seen the stats firsthand: investments in prevention and early detection are overwhelmingly better approaches than waiting until symptoms appear or an illness is is advanced stages.
Prevention and early detection not only save money: they also create the conditions for people to thrive.
This wisdom of prevention and early detection hasn’t yet made its way to the modern workplace as a generally accepted practice.
Over the last 4 years, there has been an uptick in the number of crisis calls I’ve received from organizational leaders seeking urgent support because they missed -or maybe ignored-the early warning signs and symptoms of a toxic workplace culture.
Symptoms such as:
- Lack of demographic diversity
- Non-inclusiveness
- Identity-based biases and microaggressions
- Psychological insecurity
- Broken professional development pipeline
- Nepotism
- Conflict
- Poor management and leadership
- Lack of emotional intelligence
- Imbalanced workloads
- Miscommunication
- Burnout
They didn’t prevent and now they need a cure.
There are always early warning signs, too: resignations, and negative and constructive employee feedback, insights from exit interviews, are common ones. But often, this feedback is dismissed as coming from "The Disgruntled Employees™️," as if there couldn’t be any basis for it. This is a limiting belief has harmed more clients than I can count.
Because there has often not been a prevention stance to preempt these problematic culture issues, and there has often not been an early detection and intervention process when those warning signs presented themselves, organizations end up with the expensive costs of toxic culture when the symptoms have evolved into more advanced issues. Ones that some clients experienced before hiring me included:
- Lawsuits
- Employee turnover
- Bad press, including investigative journalism cover stories
- Former employee “tell-alls” on shadow Instagram accounts and Glassdoor
- Destabilized stock prices, funding streams, and consumer confidence
- Remaining staff experiencing fear of what’s to come as a result of the unhealed toxic culture
When organizations wait until a crisis to intentionally work on becoming an equitable, healthy, and inclusive workplace, it becomes a much heavier, much more costly lift.
And it means that the work has to happen on two tracks concurrently:
- A future-focused track where you’re planning for the ideal culture you desire
- A repair-focused track (that is often missed, yet required) to acknowledge AND make right all the harm that has gone unaddressed
Point-in-case: a colleague recently shared a federal agency’s Request For Proposals (RFP) which details the search for a consultant to help transform their workplace culture.
The impetus for this cultural transformation wasn’t aspirational, nor did it come from a prevention stance. The agency didn’t set out with the goal of building a workplace culture where people are thriving.
This wasn’t a project launching from an early detection or intervention stance, either. They hadn’t moved into quick action after seeing early warning signs.
No, here’s what happened:
For years, leadership ignored the toxic behaviors and harm inflicted upon marginalized staff.
A few cases of harm and bad behavior created an opportunity for early intervention and course correction. The opportunity was missed and no action was taken.
A few cases turned to too many, and things got really bad.
Egregious cases of sexual harassment were reported, yet went unresolved, with no accountability or sanctions for the perpetrators.
Countless cases of bullying and discrimination were documented, too, without remedy.
Employee morale and psychological safety were destroyed.
These incidents were so brazen and despicable that agency leadership had to testify before U.S. senators.
The agency was forced to hire an agency to conduct an independent audit to assess the cultural toxicity, leadership failures, and to, create a pathway to accountability. This was to launch the long road to culture reform and repair and lay the foundation for the Cultural Transformation Consultant the agency now has to hire.
After working with hundreds of organizations and leaders on culture transformation over the past 16 years, I can tell you that no leader has ever referred to their organization’s culture as “toxic,” even as we reviewed employee feedback or heard staff directly described the toxic culture elements they experienced at that organization.
My sense is that there is a shame we all hold with that label of “toxic culture”, and none of us want to be associated with it.
However, disassociation doesn’t stop the toxic culture traits from being any less real or any less in need of being addressed.
When I get contracted to help my clients in their culture transformations and cultural detoxes, it’s because there wasn’t a prevention strategy. It’s because the early warning signs weren’t heeded.
This is why repair is such a critical part of my company’s consulting approach.
Based on what I have seen in my years of coaching and consulting, I can tell you that prevention is a powerful approach that serves both the people and the institution.
It’s actually language—“repair”— that studs many of the pages in that RFP.
The truth is, the way we have learned to manage and structure the modern workplace is incompatible with the way human beings need to be seen and supported to thrive and do our very best.
Leaning into a prevention and repair approach is how we can begin to transform our company cultures and structures so that people are well and so our organizations run in an equitable, inclusive, healthy, and just ways
RESOURCES & SUPPORT
💡If you missed it, the 12 elements of great workplace culture give you a roadmap of areas you could focus on to build a prevention-based workplace culture strategy. Find a video and resource I shared by clicking here.
💡If you’d like to explore how we can support you through consultation and strategy, you can submit an idea for how we can work together here.
💡To learn about our other services to help you lead better, click here.
Warmly,