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Toxic Culture

Reading these lines from What If This Were Enough made me smile thinking about all the times that I have felt the way I expressed myself to my boss or a peer came out a bit too caustic for corporate tastes and that I needed to sweeten the talk:

It’s the boss who wants you to be more polite in your email messages, and not point out the obvious sloppy work and bizarre groupthink and passive-aggressiveness and corner-cutting madness that unfold every day without comment.

Partner teams I have had the misfortune to work with over the years in many organizations, refused to deliver on the most basic requirements of their job without the issue being escalated as high as it could be. But calling them out for such behavior was always considered improper and not demonstrative of "leadership". It was never clear to me how anyone could expect bad behavior to change without any incentive. 

Over time, I came to think that this debilitating level of organizational dysfunction is exactly what everyone in the power structure needed to preserve. The actual work did not support the endless layers of middle-management or the bloated teams with each assigned "ownership" of a microscopic piece of the puzzle. A relative simple problem had to be spilt ten or more ways to turn into a complex, unsolvable mess requiring ten times the headcount to deal with. That automatically grew the remit of each sub-problem owner. Fiefdoms sprung around each of them and as history shows a lifetime of skirmishes follow organizing people this way.

This kind of chaotic federation without any central command and control fosters job security for the most irrelevant and dispensable (which correlates strongly to most overpaid) people in the company. So no wonder such a strong push for politeness and civility - its not cool to bite the hand that feeds you (in the collective sense). It took me a while to figure out why egregiously bad behavior  had no absolutely consequence and was routinely rewarded in companies with toxic cultures. It is exactly what it takes to keep such culture alive and well, which in turn provides the basis for the existence of roles that add no value but pay a lot of money. Behavior that introduces novel friction in the system is the best leadership trait - the person demonstrating it has just carved out a new fief with all the benefits that accrue from it.



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