Colin D. Ellis's Blog, page 10

The three levels of toxic culture

Toxic culture is almost never a surprise. Somebody - usually more than one person - has seen the signs, reported or spoken about them to a person in authority and a decision has been made as to how to address the issues. However, in many cases the early warning signs of toxic culture are simply ignored.

This is level 0, where the culture is consistently combatant. At this level poor behaviour (from one or more individuals) has become the acceptable norm. Excuses are often made here; ‘that’s how they are’, ‘we work in a high pressure environment’ or else you hear statements such as ‘you just have to suck it up and get on with it’.

At this level, employees do what they can to get through it in the hope that things settle down. Often they do, however, if the behaviour is sustained for a long period of time, then the culture moves to the next level. It is still possible to avoid a toxic culture at this level by addressing the individuals who are undermining the safety of others.

Level one is where the culture becomes corrosive. At this level bullying, harassment, unethical behaviour or persistent self-interest is present. If bullying exists it’s not always visible to others. Often it is perpetrated through one-to-one communications causing untold suffering to those on the receiving end. In the cases of unethical behaviour deliberate effort is undertaken to conceal illegal activity.

The culture has turned toxic at this point. To recover quickly (9-12 months minimum) then individuals need to be investigated, performance-managed or removed from their positions in order to safeguard the culture for others. Failure to do so will  lead to the culture moving to the final level.

Level two is where the culture is harmful to those that work within it. The threat to humans or the reputation of the organisation is real. The media will have taken an interest in the culture and expose the leadership who have presided over it. Spokespeople are often wheeled out to say that ‘the organisation is taking the allegations seriously’ or else people ‘take a leave of absence to think about their actions’. However, the opportunity for meaningful action to safeguard the reputation of the organisation has now passed.

In the worst cases, employees have suicidal thoughts.

The only way to fully recover at this level is to remove the leadership team. This is a demonstration to employees of how seriously the board of directors takes the working conditions and they recognise that without decisive change results will be affected for years to come. In extreme instances the very existence of the organisation is threatened.

With the right leadership in place and the right activity to rebuild the culture an organisation can recover within 1-2 years, but only if positive action is maintained.

As I said at the start, toxic culture is never a surprise, and only through concerted effort to educate managers on how to continually build and evolve a culture and through leaders dealing decisively with the signs of toxicity, can organisations everywhere avoid it.

To find out more about how to spot and address the signs of toxic culture, grab a copy of Detox Your Culture here or wherever you buy your books.

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The one thing

There’s one thing at the top of your list that needs to be done right now.

A complex task; a courageous conversation; something outside your comfort zone.

What’s stopping you from doing it right now?

Always do your most important and pressing work first.

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Knowing when to let go

I was sitting in the front of a self-driving taxi in Los Angeles last week, slightly nervous and completely removed from the steering wheel, yet somehow feeling more in control than I had all week.

One thing I’m continually learning about autonomy is that it's not about gripping the wheel tighter. It's about knowing when to let go.

As the algorithm-powered, multi-camera vehicle navigated the chaos of LA traffic with calm, almost surgical precision, I found myself thinking about all the managers I've worked for and with who insisted on driving every decision, micromanaging every turn, convinced that leadership means having your hands on everything.

They had it backwards.

The most successful leaders I know and work with understand something fundamental: true autonomy isn't about controlling everything, it's about creating the conditions where great work can happen without having to steer every moment of it.

When I rationalised it, the taxi wasn't diminishing my agency. It was amplifying it. While the car handled the cognitive load of navigation and traffic assessment, I was free to think bigger thoughts (once the nervousness has subsided of course!) 

Where am I really going? What drives my best decisions? How can I better support my own journey? When should I let go? 

I pose these questions to leaders too. Organisations that foster trust, create space for their teams to operate at levels they never thought possible.

I've seen too many organisations where leaders exhaust themselves trying to drive every initiative personally. They burn out their best people by refusing to delegate meaningful decisions. They create cultures of dependency instead of cultures of autonomy and capability.

In the best cultures I work with, leaders don't resist being passengers when appropriate. They recognise that sometimes the smartest way to drive your organisation forward is to let go of the wheel, trust the people and the process, and focus their energy on steering toward what truly matters.

So you know when to let go? 

*And yes, I would definitely take a driverless taxi again!

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You can’t fake purpose

Nearly two in five Gen Z and Millennial employees have rejected a job or assignment because of purpose misalignment. If an organisation doesn't act in the way that it says it will, 35% of Gen Z and Millennials will walk away without another job to go to. 

Research also shows that Millennial and Gen Z workers value purpose almost as much as they do pay, and for many, it's a key determinant as to whether they join an organisation or not.

Yet for many organisations, purpose is just something to be included on an annual report or added to the ‘Our culture’ webpage without fully understanding ‘why?’ let alone ‘how?’!

You can't fake purpose. Organisations that do 'check-box culture' - where they spend time producing purpose statements without understanding why they are important - are usually the worst culprits. They don't understand or anticipate the negative media reaction when they have a purpose that they actively choose to ignore.

Purpose for any organisation is incredibly important and not something that can be shortcut, handed to consultants, or constructed by cutting pictures out of magazines at an overtly expensive senior management retreat. 

When purpose is embedded into day-to-day operations, then a company is four times more likely to hit and/or exceed its financial targets and almost five times more likely to keep its existing customers and attract new ones.

The goal isn't to have the best purpose statement on your website. The goal is to create something meaningful, that employees feel connected to and that is lived in plain sight every single day.

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How bad strategy impacts culture

When strategy goes wrong, it can not only adversely affect the culture and the people that work within it, but also the reputation of the company, sometimes for years to come.

Take Wells Fargo as an example. Their strategy was simple: cross-selling. The more products they could sell to each customer, the better. Not the worst sales strategy, to be fair.

Except employees were instructed to sign existing customers up to as many as 20 products, often without their consent. The pressure was so intense that employees were crying, experiencing severe panic attacks, and vomiting in the office became commonplace. One person even ingested hand sanitiser to try to cope with the pressure.

The strategy led not only to record fines and tarnished reputations, but the culture continues to struggle to recover to this day. A report three years after the scandal found that frontline workers still had no confidence the company would improve things.

A good strategy provides a detailed plan of action for any organisation to achieve a set of short- to medium-term goals. But if you have people who don't want to fill in the forms, justify their projects, turn up for meetings on time, or engage in constructive debate with other humans, then you need to address the culture first.

The two are not mutually exclusive. Without a strategy, it's really hard to define how work gets done as there are no clear objectives or goals to aim for. But without a defined culture where expectations around behaviour and collaboration are set, strategy is not worth the electronic paper that it's written on.

Success starts with strategy, but it gets delivered through culture.

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Culture in the Courtroom: Are you next?

The toxic culture at Ubisoft was just one of the 49 case studies that I referenced in my latex book, Detox Your Culture. Last week three former executives were in the courtroom to start answering the allegations made against them.

Former senior leaders Serge Hascoët and Tommy François are charged with widespread harassment, abuse and discrimination. Whilst former director Guillaume Patrux has been charged with harassment and bullying.

Since 2019, I have been saying that a reckoning will eventually be coming for those that either perpetrate or preside over toxic conditions for employees. I take absolutely no gratification from seeing that the process has started. Lives have been irreparably changed for the worse for people who were just going to work.

Yet it is a signal to managers everywhere that poor behaviour will not be tolerated and the reputational (and financial) consequences for those organisations that don’t deal with these individuals will be irreparable.

These leaders are not the first and they won’t be the last and others around the world need to not only take heed of this but to start getting their houses in order pretty quickly or else they will find themselves in the same position.

Here in the UK, new rights for workers take effect in the second half of 2025 and one survey of over 500 UK businesses found that 58% of employers admitted to ‘having little knowledge of the impending legislative changes’. 

Key changes include:

Day-one dismissal protection

Flexible working by default

Enhanced harassment prevention

Guaranteed hours rights

Strengthened sick pay

Pay equity and transparency

The bill also establishes the ‘Fair Work Agency’ which will have sweeping powers to investigate and prosecute individuals and organisations that don't uphold good working conditions.

The key reason that I wrote Detox Your Culture was to help everyone to better understand how to create a positive, safe, working environment and to provide a blueprint for leaders to forever avoid finding themselves in the courtroom.

It's not too late to start this process, but by 2026 it might well be.

Last year I wrote that toxic culture need not be an inevitability. However, the very leaders who continue to apply old fashioned behaviours and thinking to their own organisations are also bringing their own children up to demand better from their employers, so a clash of ideologies is almost certain.

Leaders everywhere would do well to remember that their legacy will be shaped not by the knowledge that they had, the profits they delivered or the work that they did, but how they treated the people that worked for them. Worse still, it could also be shaped for the charges they faced for a failure to provide a duty of care.

There will be many more cases of culture in the courtroom, just make sure that it isn’t your organisation.

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The 3 factors that shape workplace culture

How we work - our culture - is perpetual. It changes all of the time and is shaped by 3 distinct factors. Once leaders and employees understand these fators they are better able to respond and build a programme of events that ensure that the culture continually evolves to be relevant to the way people want to live and work today.

If you are interested in the printed resource that I talk about in this video you can get this from www.colindellis.com/resources

It is also available as a podcast, simply search for ‘Colin on Culture’ on your app of choice.

Video describing the 3 factors that shape workplace culture

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What it means to be humble

I met a couple of friends for drinks recently and we got talking about the human skills and behaviours required of leaders in 2025 and beyond (I know, it sounds like a riot, I bet you wish you could have been there!)

Once we’d come up with a list, we talked about how hard it is for people to truly understand what the behaviours mean in practice. Take the behaviour of being humble whose literal definition is having or showing a modest or low estimate of one's own importance.

No member of staff wants a leader in a senior position to boast, go missing for long periods of time or take credit for the work of others; but what else does it mean in practice?

We generated a list and then went around the table and each answered the question ‘What’s the least humble you’ve ever been?’ Mine happened about 8 years ago, not long after I started working for myself.

I spoke at an event and received an award for my speaking. Within 10 minutes of that happening I took a photo of myself with the award and then posted it on LinkedIn - now long deleted! - of how humble I’d been to receive the award. 

Nothing screams ‘NOT HUMBLE’ like posting about how humble you are to be promoting yourself! (Or even to be writing and posting about it again 8 years later as a demonstration of how humble you weren’t 😂)

That wasn’t the worst one. My friend took credit for managing a £50m project in a job interview, when he was only the lead Business Analyst. Which then led to an argument about the difference between a lack of humility and outright lying!

Yet - as you can see - it can be hard to understand what behaviours such as humility actually mean in practice, especially when according to research we’re not that self-aware. According to research in the Harvard Business Review, even though most people interviewed believed they were self-aware, only about 10-15% actually were!

In today’s working world we expect our senior leaders to be highly emotionally intelligent. This requires self-awareness and true leadership is then achieved when the behaviours are understood and practiced and are not just lists of traits on a job description or Powerpoint presentation.

Being a leader 24x7 is extremely difficult to do, yet the behaviour change required can be achieved in five steps. It not only requires a willingness to work hard, but also a full understanding of how to be the behaviour you’d like others to see in you.

For the record - and your information - here is the list that we came up with for humility. What is your understanding of what it means to be humble? What would you add? And what’s your humility faux pas?!

* And no, my friends didn’t want any credit for this post for fear that there’d be a backlash if people disagreed with their ideas!

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Overworking your over-achievers

Every organisation has five types of employees (which I wrote about here) with the ‘Stars’ making up 5% of the workforce.

These people are rare, but stand out from the rest. Sometimes it’s their knowledge, sometimes it’s their work ethic, sometimes it’s their humanity, often it’s all three, that’s what makes them stars.

So organisations do the opposite of what they should. Rather than nurture them, give them access to knowledge and people that can further their development or help them to improve technically at what they do, they overwork them instead.

I can understand, to a point. They are self-motivated, they challenge appropriately, they seek to understand what they’ve been asked to do and almost always deliver. So why wouldn’t we give them more things to do?

Why? Because they are human just like everyone else and will eventually either a) break or b) leave. At this point the organisation has a huge hole that it can’t fill because it’s neglected to bring other (willing) employees up to their level.

So rather than overworking your overachievers, identify what it is that makes them Stars and initiate programs to help to bring your Drivers and Coasters (and the managers that inspire and motivate them) up to their level instead.

Not only will this ensure that your Stars will be able to maintain both their pace of work and commitment to the organisation, but you’ll also create a pipeline of people ready to do likewise and guarantee results for years to come.

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Elevating others

Elevating the work and behaviour of others doesn’t diminish your own work, in fact it does quite the opposite; it’s a positive demonstration of the kind of human being you are. One that is prepared to publicly demonstrate your humility and admiration for a job well done, regardless of what it is or by whom.

Not only will others appreciate your humanity and goodwill, they will deliberately take an interest in your work and elevate it too.

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