Rethinking the toxic workplace

***Post publication note *** I’ve edited parts of this piece since publishing as I’ve clarified something about my own relationship to institutions. I can see distortion quickly, and while I’ve been able to participate in workplaces where stated values weren’t reflected in leadership behaviour, doing so required a level of stoicism when conditions didn’t improve. Over time, as the buffering elements that made that participation workable disappeared, it stopped making sense to keep playing along with the expected game, and leaving became the more viable option.

I recognise this isn’t how everyone experiences these environments. Some people don’t notice these distortions as readily, some aren’t significantly affected by them, and others have stronger incentives to continue despite them. I’ve found that while I can handle highly charged situations and sustained conflict, the ongoing misalignment itself becomes harder to justify remaining within.

Most people still need to work for an institution for a variety of reasons tied to their security, especially if they’re not yet making a living off Substack subscriptions. Leaving institutional work isn’t always a realistic or relevant option. The point of this piece is not to dismiss that reality, but to describe how these systems actually function so people can make more informed decisions about how they participate in them. How people respond to that reality tends to come down to what they can see, what they can tolerate, and their constraints.

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A large part of my LinkedIn feed over the last 5 years is toxic workplace and systems posts. This includes bullying, toxic leaders and workplaces, and my contribution of scapegoating. The same ideas are recycled between influencers and commenters, and the commentary treats these patterns as if they’re new, unexpected, awful (understandably), and something that should be stopped or fixed. Of course, I was on the toxic workplace bandwagon and contributed to this discourse over the years with plenty of posts condemning systems and leaders for being toxic.

The increased frequency of these posts, and the LinkedIn influencer-experts who speak about workplace inclusion, safety, psychological safety, wellness, attunement and leadership as things that will improve workplaces, and who champion changing culture into psychologically safe ones, point to a shared assumption that workplaces can be designed to be toxic-free and be made to function in a particular way if the right interventions are applied.

This entire discourse assumes workplaces are meant to function according to their stated values and have somehow gone off track, which is the wrong assumption to make. Workplaces function as designed. When a person realises this can feel like betrayal, because it means confronting the possibility that the institution they trusted was never governed by the rules it claimed to uphold. What people experience as toxicity is often the result of encountering that design while still believing the myth.

An entire field of complexity science has developed to describe how systems behave. In organisational life, its language has been smuggled into workplace thinking, where complexity is often framed as something to manage and improve. That language now shapes fields such as leadership, organisational psychology, and wellbeing, all of which promise better functioning workplaces.

These fields are positioned as helping people navigate the world of work while helping organisations improve. Many people turn to these frameworks in good faith, trying to make sense of experiences that feel confusing and deeply unsettling. In practice, they also function as mechanisms of assimilation. They help people adapt to existing conditions, make sense of their experience, and continue operating within environments that aren’t structured around the assumptions those same frameworks promote. Even the wellbeing science feeding many of these interventions remains unsettled on the basic question of how wellbeing itself should be defined.

This framework emerged from repeated observation of the same distortions across very different late-stage systems (ie. academia, large corporations, hospital systems, government departments), rather than reading up on political theory. I’ve always been suspicious of tidy explanations for complex environments when my observations keep showing otherwise. The patterns become visible when you spend enough time inside environments where stated values and actual behaviour diverge and where people try to make sense of contradictions that official narratives can’t explain. I’ve encountered fragments of similar thinking in the work of various writers, including on Substack, but this model is grounded in pattern recognition rather than scholarship. Its value lies in whether it explains what people are actually experiencing.

Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash

The stories we tell ourselves about work

These myths only make sense if you assume the workplace is meant to function according to its stated values. These distortions survive because most people make sense of workplaces through a small set of familiar myths, each one offering a comforting explanation for why things seem wrong. Most people hold onto these narratives for understandable reasons. Letting them go can mean facing the painful possibility that the institution they trusted was never operating by the rules they believed in.

First is the idealised workplace narrative, the corporate Garden of Eden. Work is supposed to be psychologically safe, inclusive, fair, accountable. Good people speak openly, competence is valued, and reasonable behaviour is rewarded. In this fantasy, politics barely exists. If the culture is healthy enough, merit rises to the top and the workplace behaves exactly as the leadership brochure promised.

Then comes the toxicity narrative, which treats every unpleasant workplace as a fallen version of that paradise. Toxic leaders, broken cultures, poor communication, unsafe environments, absent accountability are all signs that something pure has been corrupted. Politics is treated as contamination as though power plays are a foreign substance that somehow leaked into an otherwise pure workplace and spoiled the atmosphere.

The intervention narrative is the optimism industry built on top of that diagnosis. If only we had more attuned leaders, stronger feedback loops, more inclusion, more training, more frameworks, and one more workshop involving coloured markers and breakout groups, the workplace could finally be restored to health. Politics, in this version, is a removable defect, a design flaw awaiting the right consultant to engineer it away.

There’s the intrusion narrative, beloved by those convinced politics arrived from outside in muddy boots. In this version, workplaces were once meritocratic, rational, and performance-driven, until equity agendas, DEIB language, identity claims, and social causes stormed in and ruined the purity of the enterprise. Politics is framed as an alien intrusion as though the workplace had always been an orderly meritocracy.

Finally comes the power pathology narrative, where politics is blamed on the usual suspects: narcissists, favourites, empire-builders, protected actors, bad incentives, and the wrong personalities in charge. The workplace itself is presumed fundamentally sound. The problem, apparently, is that it has been temporarily hijacked by the wrong cast of characters.

These narratives compete, overlap, and borrow from one another, but they all depend on the same comforting premise that workplaces are supposed to operate according to the ideal, and that politics appears only when something has gone wrong.

What they can’t entertain is the possibility that nothing has gone wrong at all.

Toxic… or just incompatible?

Toxic workplace has become the catch-all diagnosis for the moment a person discovers that the rules they thought governed an organisation are not the rules actually in play.

The experience on the inside seems so real. The place appears hostile and political, and colleagues seem manipulative, cliquish, evasive, self-protective — fluent in behaviour that wasn’t described in the onboarding handbook. The natural conclusion is that something has gone wrong for the workplace to be so dysfunctional and morally compromised.

The explanation is often less dramatic, though no less painful. Sometimes what is being experienced is the shock of discovering that the system is operating according to rules the person never knew they were expected to accept. They may no longer be compatible with the environment they are in, or may never have been, because they were working from assumptions the workplace itself does not actually honour.

That mismatch is profoundly disorienting because it feels like betrayal, and often it is. People assume they’re witnessing a deviation from normal workplace functioning when they might be encountering the workplace functioning exactly as it’s structured to function.

The word toxic then appears as a way of naming the shock of political misfit. For many people, it is the only language available for an experience that’s both violating and difficult to explain. This doesn’t make the experience imaginary but it can make the diagnosis wrong. Sometimes the workplace hasn’t gone bad at all and is revealing that its real operating logic is incompatible with what you can ethically or psychologically remain inside. For some people, that leads to exit. For others, it leads to a more deliberate way of staying.

Why politics exists (and isn’t going anywhere)

By workplace politics, I don’t mean party politics, though some people insist on bringing that in too. I mean the ordinary daily business of influence, favour, positioning, and survival inside hierarchies where everyone pretends merit matters. Most people don’t enter workplaces intending to become political actors. They adapt gradually to the pressures, incentives, and unspoken rules that govern institutional life.

As workplaces grow, they become layered bureaucracies, with more managers arriving to manage other managers. Risk becomes sacred and the real boss as the institution becomes less interested in accuracy and accountability than in being protected. The larger the organisation, the more energy goes into shielding it from embarrassment and liability. Entire professional classes emerge whose main function is managing exposure while remaining far removed from the actual work.

Promotion follows the same logic as advancement goes to people who reflect the values the workplace wants mirrored back to itself, not necessarily to those who do the strongest work. People often rise by appearing politically reliable and institutionally credible, sometimes regardless of whether their actual contribution is especially strong.

Information stops circulating as neutral fact and becomes currency in its own right. It matters less whether something is true than whether it’s useful, and anointed authorities decide which truths are safe to acknowledge.

Overall, workplace politics is the ordinary machinery of influence that takes over once preserving the organisation matters more than serving its stated purpose.

Politics isn’t the problem. It’s the operating system.

In late-stage workplaces, immunosurveillance becomes a constant background activity, with everyone participating whether they realise it or not. People pick up on small shifts, repeat remarks they happened to overhear, compare impressions in corridors, and work out who or what is beginning to register as a threat. By the time anything reaches a formal process, the classification has usually already happened, and the situation isn’t being treated as a neutral problem to assess.

Most signals pass through unnoticed, but the ones that disturb internal order attract attention quickly. Sometimes that’s genuine misconduct. Just as often it’s a competent person pointing to something the organisation would rather keep buried. These are often people acting in good faith, unaware that naming what they see has already altered how they will be perceived. From that point, responses across the workplace begin to align in ways that resemble an immune response to a foreign body.

Once a signal is flagged, re-classification begins and the status of the person carrying it starts to change. A high performer might be praised and trusted for years, but once they get too confident and begin to ask questions they’re not authorised to ask, their competence acquires a different meaning.

The process is predictable and often resembles a prolonged humiliation ritual. For the person inside it, this can be profoundly destabilising. Not only is their credibility inside the system being dismantled, but often their sense of reality about what is happening to them as well. The issue itself slips into the background while attention shifts to the person who raised it, and how to best remove the threat.

This is the autoimmune response in organisational life, where something concerning has been detected but the response turns against the carrier rather than the fault itself. The system can no longer distinguish between threat and diagnosis, and the messenger becomes the target while the underlying problem remains.

The reverse pattern appears too in the form of immunosuppression, where signals that would expose something too costly to acknowledge are dampened or ignored. Problems are downplayed because acknowledging them would trigger scrutiny the organisation isn’t structured to handle. The fault persists because suppressing the signal is treated as less risky than activating a response.

That’s why workplace politics appears so irrational from the inside. People think they’re watching reasoned decisions when they’re often watching an immune response select its target in service of self-preservation.

The political ecosystem no one admits exists

Workplaces generate an entire ecosystem of outside actors who are often treated as though they’re all doing versions of the same repair work when they’re not. Some are beautifying the story, some are helping people inside the system manage the moral distress of remaining within it, some are helping people survive it and move on, and some are pushing out paperwork once the damage has already been done.

The system requires supports to keep people functioning within it, and to remove those who no longer fit once they’ve been identified as the problem.

Perception managers, alignment practitioners, and enforcers support the system in different ways. Reality restorers help people step out of it with clarity.

Reality restorers help people who have already been targeted recognise what’s happening and consider their options, including leaving. The system will remove them either way. The difference is that they can leave with clarity and some dignity, rather than being worn down or pushed out on the system’s terms.

These distinctions are often lost. My work is often grouped together with consultants, leadership experts, culture advisers, and workplace repair specialists as if we’re all operating in the same lane when we’re not. Confusion occurs because every role around a dysfunctional workplace is mistaken for some version of fixing it. Many people in these roles are acting in good faith, trying to reduce confusion, improve conditions, or help people make sense of experiences that are often difficult to navigate.

Perception managers stabilise the story. They are often the most visible voices (LinkedIn Top Voice) on leadership, culture, and workplace behaviour, providing language that makes dysfunction tolerable enough for people to remain within the system without having to confront the full contradiction all at once. They translate what people are experiencing into something that is manageable and coherent, even when the underlying conditions haven’t changed. This is why their work is so well received at senior levels.

Alignment practitioners reduce friction. They can see the gap between what an organisation says and what it does, and they help leaders narrow that gap enough to make the place feel less morally compromising. In practice, this is demonstrated by strengthening direct communication, improving the quality of feedback, and enabling leaders to back their people where hesitation or self-protection would usually prevail. They create conditions where people inside constrained systems can act with more integrity in specific moments. Their work improves the experience and tolerability of the system, even when its underlying dynamics remain unchanged.

Reality restorers clarify what actually happened. They’re a bit different in that their work begins where the others’ end. These practitioners don’t care about an organisation’s self-image enough to try to improve it, nor are they there to help leadership realign. They work with the people who’ve been targeted as the problem, often competent people who said something unauthorised and got caught in the autoimmune response. Their role is to help them see the system they’re actually in, rather than the distorted version they were told they were in, so they can make decisions based on real conditions rather than institutional narratives.

Enforcers are the investigators, assessors, workplace psychologists, and formal reviewers who arrive once the immune response is already underway. By then it’s already been decided who or what the problem is. Their role is to translate that into procedure, documentation, findings, and consequences, all wrapped in the reassuring language of neutrality. In doing so, they produce a version of events the organisation can stand behind. The focus stays on resolving the case rather than examining the conditions that produced it. They’re formalising decisions that have already been made rather than determining them.

Now what?

This is usually the moment when someone proposes better leadership, transparency, stronger policy enforcement, or perhaps a fresh workshop on crucial conversations as though one more laminated framework might finally do the trick.

It reflects how deeply many people still want to believe these systems can become what they claim to be, and how hard it is to let go of the redemption narrative once you’ve invested in it.

If the workplace is doing exactly what it is built to do, then the question is no longer how to repair it but how long you intend to keep arguing with its nature. Many people spend years trying to persuade an organisation to become something it has already shown no interest in being.

That recognition is rarely immediate or clean. For many people it comes only after years of trying to make sense of contradictions that never resolved, while assuming the fault must somehow be their own.

The real shift comes when the fantasy of reform gives way to recognition. Once you understand that the workplace is preserving itself, not failing by accident, your choices change. You stop treating every contradiction as a problem to solve and start deciding whether this is a game whose rules you are willing to live under. This is the essence of agency.

That’s what most workplace discourse avoids saying out loud. Not every environment is meant to be fixed and not every misfit is a call to activism. Sometimes the clearest sign of intelligence is recognising when to leave, or how you need to adjust to stay.

There is no such thing as a toxic system. There’s a system you’ve outgrown, or one you understand more clearly than before, and the mismatch is now having a toxic effect on you.

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Hacking Narcissism is for people trying to make sense of and effectively navigate a morally distorting and chaotic age. When moral development is disincentivised, people lose reliable reference points for discernment and struggle to distinguish between what’s real, what’s performative, and what’s covertly shaping their perception.

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