If you haven't had the experience of suffering through an incompetent, insecure, or plain old bully of a boss, consider yourself lucky! According to a Gallup study, companies fill management positions with ineffective leaders more than 80% of the time. The odds are high that most of us have a very personal, very emotional "horrible boss" story.
Gallup has studied performance at hundreds of companies and measured the engagement of 27 million employees and more than 2.5 million work units over the past two decades. More than half of American employees have left their jobs because of a bad manager.
Bad bosses (a.k.a. "ineffective leaders") don't just suck the joy right out of work, they damage company culture, and decrease employee engagement, creativity, innovation, and productivity as well as undermine collaboration and team performance. The way leaders handle organizational challenges set the tone for the level of psychological safety employees feel to raise concerns, ask questions or challenge the status quo. Employees are pretty clear on what they want and need to thrive at work.
Spoiler Alert: it's not complicated and it's not new.
A 2022 Pew Research Center survey discovered that the lack of opportunities for advancement and feeling disrespected at work are among the top reasons Americans quit their jobs last year. Studies show that a toxic work environment is 20 times more important than compensation in predicting turnover. Leaders are responsible for creating a healthy work culture and the psychological safety employees need to thrive.
Seems simple, right? Basic tenets of professionalism, common courtesy and good ol' fashioned manners, right? Unfortunately, these behaviors are not so common. And leaders who are unable to demonstrate these behaviors are the major contributors to a toxic work culture.
If you still aren't convinced, consider another analysis published in the MIT Sloan Management Review finding that a toxic organizational culture is the biggest factor - by far - pushing employees out the door during the Great Resignation. The study found that the leading elements contributing to toxic cultures include failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; workers feeling disrespected; and unethical behavior.
A toxic culture is 10 times more important than compensation in predicting turnover.
Imagine sitting in a team meeting and your boss invites your team to ask for help if you need it. You know the line, "We're here to support you; don't hesitate to let us know if you need anything." So, you raise your hand and admit that you're struggling to complete a project because you don't have the necessary information. (After all, you were just invited to ask for help.) Instead of working to help you, your boss demeans you or ignores you.
Or maybe you are experiencing communication issues that significantly impact your productivity and job performance. You reach out to leaders to share your experience. (Because if simple changes to information-sharing processes could improve everyone's productivity and thus improve the overall performance of the organization, they would want to know, right?) No. Rather than invite you in for a conversation to learn more about how to make it easier for you to do a better job, you and your experience are summarily dismissed.
Support? No.
Consideration? Nope.
Dignity? Hardly.
Respect? Not even a little bit.
Being disrespected is far more damaging that many people realize. We internalize and feel being rejected, marginalized and unsupported much more intensely than any comments of praise. And when we are disrespected in front of peers, have a micromanaging boss or feel excluded from decisions that impact job performance, we experience the added pain of threat to social status. The body's responses to social threats are biochemically the same as its responses to physical threats.
Why do perceived negative comments stick with us so much longer than positive ones? The answer is neurochemistry. Negative feelings like rejection, fear, minimization, and criticism engage the fear/threat center and the amygdala orders up a blast of cortisol which creates an immediate "shut down" of our prefrontal cortex— our "executive brain" that enables strategic thinking, decision making, connectivity with others, creativity, and most of all, trust.This effect can last longer than 24 hours which magnifies the experience and imprints it into memory. The longer we stress over something, the greater the impact.
When we feel dismissed and unsupported, problems become barriers. But, when we feel valued and respected, we are able to embrace problems as challenges we are motivated to solve.
Positive conversations generate a chemical reaction, too. The positive feelings we experience when we feel like we’re contributing members of a team, that what we do is important, and that we can trust people around us produce the neurotransmitter oxytocin - the chemical that elevates our ability to communicate, collaborate, and connect with others. Unlike cortisol, oxytocin activates neural activity in the prefrontal cortex.
What's worse than poor communication? NO communication! Studies show that ignoring employees' work, needs, or questions is almost as bad as shredding their work right before their eyes! Leaders who fail to address problems or obstacles within the organization, ignore requests for help, or neglect to provide feedback or direction send very powerful messages to the team members:
You're not important.
Your work is not important.
Your needs are not important.
You're not worth my time.
It's hard to imagine actually saying those things out loud. Sadly, poor leaders communicate those negative messages all the time in very common everyday behaviors. And from an organizational standpoint, the highly motivated, passionate people are the ones who will leave first because they are motivated by contribution and achievement, and they are confident in their own abilities enough to know they will be valued elsewhere.
The Bottom Line
One thing that has become very clear from the workplace studies over the last decade and specifically the last few years: The real reasons for turnover usually point squarely at leadership.
Bad bosses aren't bad people; they just often lack the emotional intelligence and intellectual humility to create the conditions for employees to thrive at work. If left unchecked, poor leadership results in the top talent taking their skills, passion, and contributions elsewhere.
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