Healing toxic workplaces
When a toxic boss—whether it’s a CEO or a department head—leaves, it’s not enough to bring the organization back to health. Often, it snaps back to the same dysfunctional habits. Why?
Psychotherapist and spiritual director Chuck DeGroat reminds us that toxic leaders set an emotional tone throughout their group. Over time, the people they lead—even those who have high integrity—can find themselves accepting, saying, and doing things they never thought they would and becoming people they never thought they would be.
That’s because it’s not just the leader who’s toxic, DeGroat writes. It’s the system the leader created and sustained through the structural vulnerabilities of our own humanity. We’re social creatures who desire to be accepted and wanted, mirror and take on the emotions of the people around us, and feel a deep instinct to belong.
When a toxic leader is removed, the toxic system remains intact. In fact, DeGroat suggests, the toxic system may become even more dysfunctional because the members haven’t processed what they have experienced. Toxicity is such a part of the air they breathe, they no longer sense it. It’s just the way things are, the way they need to be.
What is more, psychiatrist Curt Thompson suggests that members of a toxic system may feel a need to double-down on their dysfunctional patterns out of a sense of shame. Admitting their complicity, addressing the harm, and changing to new, more functional ways of working and being may be more painful than living in the mess.
As a result, DeGroat emphasizes that simply forcing a change in leadership isn’t enough to heal a toxic group dynamic. As coach Jerry Colonna writes, we’re often unconsciously complicit in the things we say we don’t want. We need to contend with our shadows.
To change, individual members need to do their own internal work to notice how the toxicity around them has changed them, adapt new ways of thinking, being, and relating, and repair the harm they may have caused individually or collectively.
So if you’re part of a toxic system—or tasked with changing one—organizational health involves more than the quick fix of a leadership change. It requires much deeper healing and repair.
Coaching can help. Interested? Connect with me or book your free Discovery Session here.
