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Nearly two-thirds of us have found ourselves in a toxic workplace at some point in our careers, according to a survey by recruitment company Seek.
Its 2023 survey delved into workplace culture, with 63% saying they’d experienced a toxic workplace culture. What constitutes a toxic workplace culture can be subjective, but indicators include tolerance of bullying even if reported, cliques/gossips/rumours, situations where staff are pitted against each other and where employees feel they must walk on eggshells.
It included some pragmatic responses for those finding themselves in such a culture, the first being speak up, if you can. But most people can’t or there is great risk involved in them speaking up, ie, they could lose their jobs or be ostracised, not just by bosses but by colleagues too.
One might assume this is where the legal profession could be most helpful. However, as I was pondering this, I happened to be speaking to two female lawyers whose individual experiences in law firms could only be described as toxic.
Female lawyer number one is in her 20s and being bullied by the most senior male partner of the firm – that is, if one considers being personally targeted as inadequate in some way in front of others on an ongoing basis, as bullying. When I asked her if she could approach one of the female partners, she replied that the one female partner in the firm she felt comfortable approaching had witnessed the bullying but chose not to step in.
While it should not be the responsibility of the women to keep the men in check – we’re not in colonial times any more – it speaks volumes about why the legal sector still struggles to retaining female talent to ensure the lack of diversity in the upper ranks doesn’t look so embarrassingly archaic. The implication being if you want to go all the way to the top, you may just have to look the other way.
The second talented female lawyer, also in her 20s, left her law firm after witnessing the antics of the senior male partners at an “off-site”. I’ve had my share of wild office parties and should be fairly unshockable, but the frat-house behaviour in this case was almost perverse.
I was most interested in what the other, more conservative senior partners were doing at the event. Of course, they were looking the other way or just going along with it, smiling politely. What a lack of integrity. It has put my young friend off that sector for life, despite her five years of studying law at university.
But back to the Seek study, which shows that toxic workplaces typically feature a culture of avoidance and even secrecy.
“This results in people keeping their grievances and concerns to themselves or sharing them on the underground grapevine,” says Seek psychologist Sabrina Read.
When my colleagues and I are asked to study workplace culture, we look for the degree people navigate around problematic situations and behaviours. When our work delves into the culture of a team, especially the most senior team, what we are most interested in is not those doing the suspect behaviour but those who look away.
It is an expression of the bystander effect. Research around the latter suggests that the more bystanders there are, the less likely it will be that anyone acts. Self-interest takes over, and self-interest is mainly driven by fear, ie, fear of their own reputational damage, fear of becoming the bully’s target, fear of getting it wrong, fear of rejection from others and so forth.
In the USA, bullying is so prevalent there is even a Workplace Bullying Institute to support the 79.3 million people (equivalent to the population of 12 states) affected. They describe bullying as “repeated mistreatment, abusive conduct that is threatening, intimidating, humiliating, work sabotage or verbal abuse (which sounds like what young female lawyer number one is experiencing).
While it may be unsurprising to some that 67% of the bullies are male, one interesting statistic is that the victims of the 33% of female bullies tend to be female. This matches our own anecdotal observations. We have known three senior female executives in different organisations who were each accused of bullying by a gaggle of office females. In all three cases, after extensive investigations, the accusations were dropped.
Certainly, there might have been a lapse in leadership in the case of all three of the accused, but bullying, it was not. Regardless, three careers were ruined with two talented Kiwi females leaving the country. Even in bad behaviour, women are held to a different standard by others and often this includes other females.
This area of workplace toxicity, bullying and gender is on our to-do list for further in-depth study. In the mean time, I am pondering this quote by Plato: The measure of a man is what he does with power.
Sandy Burgham is a principal at Play Contemporary Leadership CoLab, a consultancy practice specialising in leadership development and organisational culture. She writes for listener.co.nz about her observations of modern corporate life.
