A recent Monster survey revealed that 80 percent of American workers now describe their work environments as toxic workplaces, up from 67 percent just a year ago. Even more alarming, 93 percent say their employers aren’t supporting their mental health needs, and more than half would consider quitting over workplace toxicity.
These numbers are staggering. But before we blame “toxic employees” or point fingers at broken systems “out there,” I want to invite you to start closer to home.
What role does your leadership style play in creating—or preventing—toxicity?
This isn’t about shame or blame. It’s about recognizing that many of us learned to lead in hierarchical environments that inadvertently teach us patterns that create the conditions for toxicity to thrive. The good news is that once we recognize these patterns, we can choose differently.
The Mirror Test: Recognizing Your Own Patterns
Take a moment to honestly assess your own leadership behaviors. Do any of these sound familiar?
Do you create scarcity by hoarding information or decision-making authority? When you’re the sole gatekeeper of important information or the only one who can make key decisions, you inadvertently create competition among your team members for access to you and your approval.
Do you inadvertently pit people against each other? Whether it’s through performance rankings, limited promotion opportunities, or subtle favoritism, hierarchical structures often force people to compete for scarce resources and recognition.
Do you respond to mistakes with blame rather than learning? When errors lead to finger-pointing instead of curiosity about what went wrong and how to prevent it, people learn to hide mistakes, shift blame, and protect themselves rather than being transparent.
Do you say you want collaboration but still make all final decisions? This creates a dynamic where team members learn their input doesn’t really matter, leading to disengagement or performative participation rather than genuine collaboration.
Are you accessible only to certain people, creating an “inner circle?” When some team members have your ear while others don’t, you’re creating the conditions for office politics and resentment.
Here’s what’s important to understand: these patterns aren’t character flaws. They’re the result of hierarchical conditioning. It’s just the way most of us were taught to lead, but this approach creates the breeding ground for toxic behaviors.
What Toxicity Actually Looks Like (And Where It Comes From)
Let’s connect the dots between leadership patterns and the toxic behaviors everyone complains about:
Office politics emerge when power is centralized. When one person controls access to resources, information, and opportunities, people naturally compete for that person’s favor. This isn’t weakness or manipulation but rather a rational response to a system where success depends on pleasing the person in power.
Backstabbing and undermining happen when there’s scarcity. Limited advancement opportunities, restricted recognition, and competition for resources create zero-sum thinking. If your success means my failure, we’re not colleagues; we’re competitors, and in competition, people sometimes play dirty.
Fear of speaking up exists when psychological safety is conditional. When people learn that challenging ideas, admitting mistakes, or raising concerns depends on the leader’s mood or could threaten their standing, they stay silent. This silence allows problems to fester and prevents innovation or even curiosity.
Burnout from overwork occurs when people lack autonomy. When team members can’t control their own schedules, set boundaries, or make decisions about how to approach their work, they become trapped in unsustainable patterns. The lack of agency is as exhausting as the work itself.
Cliques and favoritism form when access to power is gatekept. When certain people have preferential access to the leader, information, or opportunities, it creates an “in-group” and an “out-group.” This breeds resentment, distrust, and exactly the kind of toxic dynamics people want to escape.
The insight here is crucial: toxic behaviors are often rational responses to toxic structures. Yes, some individuals bring their own dysfunction to work, but most workplace toxicity is a symptom of how power, information, and authority are organized, or rather, concentrated.
The Collaborative Leadership Alternative
So what can you actually do differently? How do you lead in ways that prevent toxicity rather than enable it?
The shift starts with moving from hierarchical, command-based leadership to collaborative leadership. This isn’t about being nice or avoiding difficult conversations. It’s about fundamentally restructuring how power, information, and decision-making flow through your team.
Create Transparency Instead of Scarcity
Share information widely. Don’t hoard knowledge as a source of power. Make information accessible to everyone who needs it. This eliminates one of the primary drivers of office politics.
Make decision-making processes visible. Even when you need to make a decision, explain how you’re making it and why. When people understand the criteria and process, they’re less likely to feel arbitrarily excluded or to create conspiracy theories about what’s “really” happening.
Explain the “why” behind choices. Context reduces anxiety and speculation. When people understand the reasoning behind decisions, they can align their own work accordingly and feel part of a coherent whole rather than pawns being moved around a board.
Distribute Authority Instead of Hoarding It
Define clear domains where others have full decision-making power. One of the most powerful things you can do as a leader is explicitly hand over authority for specific areas. When someone knows they genuinely own a domain, they can act with confidence and agency.
Use the advice process for bigger decisions. For decisions that affect others or require specialized expertise, shift from seeking approval to seeking advice. The person making the decision actively solicits input from those who will be affected and those with relevant expertise, then makes an informed choice. This maintains autonomy while ensuring wisdom is shared.
Trust people to own their work. Micromanagement signals distrust and robs people of agency. When you define clear outcomes and boundaries but give people freedom in how they get there, you create space for ownership, creativity, and engagement.
Build Psychological Safety Through Structure, Not Personality
Establish agreements about how mistakes are handled. Make it explicit that mistakes are learning opportunities, not grounds for punishment. Create processes for post-mortems that focus on systems and patterns rather than individual blame.
Create explicit norms around feedback and conflict. Don’t leave it to chance or personality. Agree as a team on how you’ll give feedback, how you’ll surface disagreements, and how you’ll work through conflict. Make these norms visible and refer back to them.
Make respect and inclusion non-negotiable. Psychological safety can’t be conditional on your mood, energy level, or who you personally like. Build structures and agreements that ensure everyone is treated with dignity and has access to what they need to succeed.
Shift From Command to Collaboration
Replace “Here’s what you need to do” with “What do you think we should do?” This simple linguistic shift signals that you see others as thinking partners, not just executors of your plans.
Move from approval-seeking to advice-seeking. Rather than requiring your sign-off on everything, establish which decisions people can make after gathering relevant input. This speeds up work and builds genuine ownership.
Foster peer-to-peer accountability instead of top-down control. When team members hold each other accountable based on shared agreements and clear roles, it distributes the burden of accountability and reduces the unhealthy dependency on you as the sole source of standards and consequences.
Why This Matters
Let’s return to that Monster survey for a moment. The data shows that people are willing to quit their jobs, take pay cuts, give up vacation days, or work weekends to escape workplace toxicity. That’s how much it matters to them.
They can’t, however, escape what’s baked into the structure. Ping-pong tables and mental health days won’t fix toxicity if the underlying leadership patterns and power structures remain unchanged.
Leaders who do this inner work, who recognize their own hierarchical conditioning and consciously choose collaborative patterns, create workplaces where people actually want to be. Where Sunday scaries don’t exist because Monday doesn’t feel like walking into a minefield. Where people bring their best thinking because it actually matters. Where conflicts happen but don’t become toxic because there are clear, respectful ways to work through them.
This isn’t just good for people. It’s good for outcomes. Engaged, empowered people are more creative, more productive, and more committed. They solve problems proactively rather than waiting to be told what to do. They take ownership of results rather than just executing tasks. They build each other up rather than tearing each other down.
An Invitation
Here are some questions to sit with as you reflect on your own leadership:
- Where am I holding onto authority that I could distribute?
- What information am I keeping close that could be shared more widely?
- How do I respond when someone makes a mistake? What does that teach them?
- Do I create scarcity of my time, of opportunities, and/or of recognition that forces people to compete?
- Am I modeling collaborative behaviors, or am I still operating from command-and-control patterns I learned elsewhere?
If you’re recognizing patterns you want to change and you’d like support in developing your collaborative leadership skills, I invite you to book a coaching discovery session. We’ll explore where you are, where you want to go, and how coaching can support your leadership development.If you want to dive deeper into what collaborative leadership looks like in practice, my new book Organizing for Impact explores these themes through the Self, Team, and Organization lenses. You can find it at Balboa Press, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.
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