Toxic cultures signal system failure and not bad people

When Sifted published its exposé on London-based agentic AI start-up 11x it read like a cautionary tale for our new work era. The young company had all the hallmarks of modern success: bold vision, rapid funding rounds and investors including Silicon Valley giants Andreessen Horowitz and Benchmark. But behind the glossy headlines a different story was unfolding. Staff described an environment of exhaustion and volatility. Overnight shifts became routine, tempers flared and, in a strange twist of symbolism, a punching bag appeared in the office.

What was sold as entrepreneurial intensity had morphed into something corrosive – a workplace that confused endurance for excellence. It’s a pattern that’s far from isolated. McKinsey research finds that 56% of US employees say their leaders are mildly or highly toxic, while three-quarters describe their boss as the most stressful part of their workday. The same study revealed a striking contrast: human-centric organisations — those built on trust, fairness, and psychological safety — are not just kinder, but more commercially successful. They’re 2.4 times less likely to show signs of financial distress, 1.5 times more likely to retain employees and enjoy an 18% increase in EBITDA within a year.

It’s a reminder that toxicity isn’t about bad bosses or rogue personalities. It’s a system signal, a warning light flashing red across leadership, design and incentive structures. And in an era where hybrid work, digital surveillance and AI-driven decisions shape daily life it’s becoming the most overlooked barrier to future fitness.

What toxic behaviour really looks like today

Toxic behaviour has always existed in workplaces but the forms it takes and the systems that enable it are evolving. It’s no longer just shouting in the boardroom or bullying over email. Today it can appear as exclusion from digital channels, persistent micromanagement disguised as “alignment” or the creeping normalisation of urgency culture where everything is critical and no one can breathe.

Lord Mark Price, founder of WorkL and former managing director at John Lewis, defines it simply as “any repeated action or attitude that undermines respect, trust or fairness within a team”.

“It isn’t always overt aggression,” he tells The People Space. “It can manifest as exclusion, withholding information or a culture of fear where people feel they can’t speak openly. Toxicity arises when behaviour, tolerated or unchecked, erodes the safety that’s essential for people to perform and thrive.”

That erosion of safety is often subtle. It happens not when leaders shout but when they stop listening. When meetings fall silent. When employees no longer bother sharing ideas because they’ve learned nothing will change. The shift from engagement to quiet retreat is how toxicity embeds itself: quietly, persistently, systemically.

Dr Jeanne Hardacre, founder of BeTheCultureChange and author of The Culture Trap, sees toxicity not as a moral failure but as a collective blind spot.

“I help people at work identify it for themselves by being curious about this question: how do good people, working hard with the best of intentions, create an awful – often harmful – experience for each other?” she says. “What people describe as toxicity is a set of symptoms. The main cause of these symptoms is fear, due to people’s human needs not being met. Fear leads people to see others as a threat, as adversaries or competitors, a source of suspicion or as problems to be fixed.”

This distinction, between individual fault and system failure, is central to understanding the new face of toxic behaviour. It’s the difference between removing a ‘bad apple’ and repairing the barrel.

The overlooked signs of toxicity

In many organisations toxicity creeps in through silence and inconsistency, the small and overlooked signals that something deeper is wrong. “Overlooked signs include a high turnover in specific teams without obvious cause, silence in meetings, people stop raising ideas because they don’t believe they’ll be heard, inconsistent application of policies, fairness becomes subjective and excessive focus on short-term output at the expense of wellbeing,” explains Price.

Michael Jenkins, author of Toxic Humans: Combatting Poisonous Leadership in Boards and Organisations, agrees. He sees toxicity operating on two levels – the visible and the hidden.

“On the surface you’ll see high rates of absenteeism, high attrition and a pervasive lack of respect for people’s personal time,” he explains. “Deeper down there’s a lack of care, resulting in compassion- and empathy-free zones, a lack of trust leading to a lack of psychological safety; lip service paid to diversity, equity and inclusion; stasis in terms of innovation and creativity; mental ill-health on the part of employees and perhaps most significantly and worryingly, the organisation’s true “Purpose” heading towards (potentially terminal) decline.”

These aren’t isolated incidents. Jenkins describes a cycle where “toxic behaviours are never called out and condemned but rather condoned and normalised.” The result is what he terms systemic toxic collusion, where organisations quietly adapt to dysfunction rather than confront it.

For Merry-Carole Powers, author of The Great Human Rebrand: How to Step Out of the Labels That Divide Us and Into the Humanity That Unites Us, the most dangerous form of toxicity is the one we can’t see – the loss of connection that happens when workplaces become divided by hierarchy, identity or power.

“Every bad apple is rotting for a reason,” she says. “A noticeable and speedy decline in performance is often a sign of burnout or quiet quitting. Increased cynicism or irritability is often a sign of quiet cracking, someone who is buckling under the pressure but not necessarily proactively planning to leave.” Even vague overly sunny exit interviews are warning signs, she adds. People don’t speak up when they’ve lost hope that anything will change.

It’s a quiet kind of decay, one that spreads not through confrontation but through withdrawal.

Systemic causes: when toxicity becomes culture

At its root workplace toxicity is rarely about one person’s behaviour. It’s what happens when harmful norms are rewarded or ignored, creating a culture where fear becomes functional. Jenkins calls this the toxic triangle: destructive leaders, susceptible followers and a conducive environment. Each feeds the other until dysfunction becomes the operating system.

“Rules and policies fail the ‘human-centred’ test,” Jenkins explains. Leaders behave inconsistently, policies reward the wrong things and everyone learns that silence is safer than truth.

Hardacre describes a similar dynamic through her Culture Trap framework. She identifies four common self-protective responses – Blame, Distract, Solve, Placate (BDSP) – that people adopt when they feel unsafe or unheard.

“These behaviours have become normalised and systemic in workplaces,” she says. “Even ‘good apples’ have learnt BDSP as the conventional, accepted way of operating, and therefore inadvertently perpetuate the harm.”

Behavioural scientist Nik Kinley, co-author of The Power Trap, adds a further layer to this picture: the role of power itself.

“Toxic behaviour can be a one-off inadvertent action that causes harm, which is just an accident. When it's repeated multiple times it's a toxic pattern of behaviour.,” he explains. “The overlooked signs are often the things people stop doing: asking questions, coming up with new ideas or challenging things that they think are wrong. This can be incredibly destructive for a business, and yet you can never know that it's happening. Toxicity kills information flow.”

Kinley’s research shows how power reshapes leaders’ brains and judgement, distancing them from others and amplifying overconfidence. “Power can distance us from the people we lead, making it harder for us to appreciate their perspectives. It boosts our confidence and ego and can make us more prone to overconfidence. It can make us more likely to be led by what we already know and less likely to heed the advice of others. It can disinhibit us and make us more driven by what's inside us than by what's happening around us and more likely to act on what we truly think and feel. It can make us more selfish so we are more likely to prioritise personal goals over group, team or company ones. And it can make us more likely to take risks.”

And the longer someone holds power the more those distortions deepen. He argues that protecting against these effects requires systemic solutions: designing checks and balances that keep leaders connected to reality. “There is no magic intervention that will work in all cases and every scenario is likely to require a matrix of interwoven interventions rather than single-shot solutions,” he notes. However, he has found six key things to be particularly effective: increasing leadership accountability through control and reward mechanisms; improving board effectiveness through training; enforced ethics models; strong followers; maximum spans of control for leaders; and decentralised and diverse team structures.

Why toxicity is the enemy of future-fit work

It’s easy to view toxic culture as a moral or ethical issue. In reality it’s a performance one. Organisations built on fear, inconsistency and exclusion simply can’t adapt to fast-changing work models, hybrid teams or AI-driven transformation.

Price is clear about the link. “Toxic cultures breed fear and disengagement. When people don’t trust their leaders they withhold ideas, avoid risk and resist change. Adaptation , whether to AI, hybrid working or new models, requires trust and dialogue. Toxicity does the opposite; it fragments teams and creates resistance to transformation because people associate change with further loss of control or fairness.”

Jenkins adds that the longer toxicity persists, the harder transformation becomes.

“It derails change initiatives and compromises an organisation’s ability to be resilient,” he says, while Hardacre notes that through fear “innovation, creativity, human connection, adaptation and change become quashed.”

The future of work, in other words, is only as healthy as the culture that shapes it.

From diagnosis to redesign

Addressing toxicity means moving beyond awareness campaigns or leadership workshops. It requires treating it as a systemic design problem, one that demands diagnosis, accountability and deliberate redesign.

Price’s advice is simple but uncompromising.

“Use anonymous surveys, feedback tools and data to surface the truth about how people feel. Establish behavioural standards and hold everyone, including senior leaders, accountable. Equip line managers with training to build trust and lead inclusively, they are the daily custodians of culture.”

Jenkins believes HR has a unique role as custodian of organisational networks, using data and insight to spot trouble before it escalates.

“With advances in our understanding of how organisational networks work – thanks to AI – HR is well-placed to be able to diagnose potential issues (of an interpersonal dynamics nature) before they reach boiling point – as well as being able to spot those brilliant and talented individuals who are sometimes hidden in plain sight. This can be done through aggregation of all kinds of data,” he notes.

Hardacre’s approach is more human-scale. Her HUMAN model – Honest, Uncomfortable, Messy, Amazing, New ways of using power – encourages leaders to start small, experiment locally and focus on everyday practice.

“Stop waiting for a grand plan or large-scale transformation programme of change led by ‘them up there”, whoever they are,” she says. “You’ll be waiting a long time; “they” might potentially be part of the problem! Instead, start mini experimenting in your own daily practice, and then embolden and encourage your colleagues to do so, too.”

The human-centred antidote

The opposite of toxicity isn’t ‘niceness’. It’s design built on fairness, trust and belonging, the foundations that enable innovation, resilience and responsible AI adoption.

Price argues that happiness itself should be reframed as a strategic right.

“If we say happiness at work is a right, not a privilege, then leaders must treat it as central to strategy,” he said. “Fairness, recognition, empowerment and purpose are the antidotes to systemic toxicity.”

WorkL’s global Workplace Happiness Charter, launched this year, aims to formalise that principle by defining what happiness at work actually means and making it measurable. It’s a call for organisations to recognise that psychological safety is not soft, but structural.

Powers agrees that rehumanisation begins with recognising individuality. “Labels come with built in assumptions and expectations that breed bias and divisiveness. They are widening the divide and weakening our connection to the one thing that matters: each other. The best way to reconnect and rehumanise? Look below the label. Beneath the surface identity that a label points to lives deeper individuality.”

She suggests building development programmes around people’s innate talents, earned abilities and passions. “When we focus on these, we recognise a much deeper degree of who people are. Which generates a greater sense of belonging. And when we build development programmes at this level, we foster unique personal strengths, which sets both people and companies up to better succeed.”

According to Hardacre “humble honesty” is key. “Start by acknowledging how you are potentially (and unintentionally) contributing to the unhealthy power dynamics. Many HR approaches perpetuate culture problems because they are designed primarily to protect organisational reputation rather than to meet human needs. Once you recognise and start being honest about the part you play this provides a role model to inspire others to humbly take their share of responsibility, too. And it’s the first step to shaping a more healthy, human-centred approach.”

And Jenkins adds a final warning: delay has consequences. “Move as fast as you can to address the source of toxicity. The longer you procrastinate, the worse things will get and the more your leadership brand gets weakened. The more your brand wanes, the more trust (in you as a leader) ebbs away – until it is almost too late to make a change for the better.”