Drowning, Not Waving

Bad Moon Rising

When you are in a bad situation, there are two things that are true.

Firstly, you think the situation is not as bad as it actually is.

Secondly, you think you are coping with it way better than you really are.

It’s a sort of self-protection mechanism. If we truly recognised the gravity of the situation and how badly we were coping with it, we might descend into despair and give up. It’s the psychological equivalent of whistling in the dark, it keeps out spirits up and helps us keep moving forward.

It could be a transient situation where the universe if just chucking shit at you from several directions at once but it can also be a bad environment. In the first case, if you endure, it will pass. It’s acute but there’s a resolution. It’s part of the ups and downs of life, a feature of the human condition.

In the second case, it can endure for months or years, a chronic impairment to your health and your life. It could be a bad family environment, a dysfunctional relationship, something misaligned in your personal life. However, it can also be related to work, a bad or toxic work environment, being stuck in a role that doesn’t suit you, feeling trapped in a work persona or a combination of these and other factors.

I written before about how my career was in two parts, a playground and then a prison. This was the situation when I was in the prison part! It wasn’t just that the work environment was toxic, that abuse was normalised, that I felt I needed to conceal my real self, all of which was pretty wearing. It was that I kept thinking that the situation would improve, that my team would be able to move out of this environment to a better place. I thought it was an acute situation that would pass but it turned out to be a chronic one that lasted years.

It wasn’t entirely misplace optimism on my part. More than once, other parts of the business expressed an interest in taking us on, managers from outside our division wanted us to join them and lobbied hard for it. We were pretty unloved in our division, continually told we were useless, a waste of time and irrelevant, so you’d think they’d be glad to offload us. However, each time we became a bargaining chip and they didn’t get what they wanted, so they blocked it and kept us.

As each false dawn passed, I knew I was getting a little more crushed but I thought I was coping OK. The paradox was that I really enjoyed the work and the people I worked with, I just hated the people I worked for and the environment they made us work in. So there were highs and achievements, albeit mostly recognised externally.

Eventually, the whole edifice was deliberately pulled down by my Psycho boss (which is a whole other story!) and I left the business but even then I didn’t realise these truths. It took several years for me to see quite how bad things had been, the extent of the toxicity and the abuse. It took even longer for me to realise that I hadn’t coped nearly as well as I had thought and that it had been extremely damaging to me and my team.

Long-term exposure to a bad or toxic environment is highly corrosive, it has a cumulative impact and can be very debilitating. Since I left that organisation, that level of toxicity has become much more common, many of the bad practices have been normalised. Many more people are being exposed to these environments and damaged by them and yet we barely talk about it.

Whilst we pretend everything is OK, mental health problems in the workforce are reaching crisis levels, burnout is a growing problem and increasing numbers of people are ‘opting out’, whether that’s Gen Z not entering the workforce or Gen X retiring early because they can’t stand the pressure anymore.

So, actually, these maxims need to be restated, to be generalised.

The situation is much worse than we think it is

And people aren’t coping anything like as well as we think.

It’s about time we did something about it, isn’t it?

Walk like a man

A response to this is to tell people they need to be more resilient. They are sent on ‘Resilience Training’ to learn techniques to increase their ability to cope with the situation. This is like handing out wellington boots so people can stand in the shit rather than cleaning the shit up.

I thought I was being resilient because I kept going, kept getting stuff done, kept showing up. That’s what we often think of as resilience, having a stiff upper lip, toughing it out or, that most toxic of phrases, ‘manning up’. It’s a survival strategy that works in the short term - but at great personal cost.

Brene Brown talks about ‘armouring up’, raising defences and shields to protect us from the outside world. The problem is that this armour also isolates us from it. In my case, I withdrew into myself. I shut down my emotions so I didn’t feel the pain but, as I realised later, at the expense of the joy. I numbed myself so that I didn’t feel the blows anymore. I disconnected myself from the world so I felt safe. In the end, I had so much armour on me that I could barely move. The real me was almost invisible.

This is a common response. You’ll recognise it in colleagues, perhaps in yourself. It’s why levels of engagement at work are so pitifully low. It’s also NOT resilience.

(As an aside, people who have been brutalised by toxic environments often claim that it ‘didn’t do me any harm’, that it was ‘character building’ and it ‘made me who I am today’. They are often trapped in repeating the strategies they developed at the time, such as being highly argumentative, aggressive and cynical. They also repeat the cycle of violence by perpetuating these environments, inflicting the same psychological damage on those who come after them.)

Resilience is the ability to acknowledge, accept and process events in a psychologically healthy way. It is not denial, it is not simply enduring, it is not a faux-stoicism. As Bruce Daisley points to in his book ‘Fortitude’, it’s not about individual actions, it is about community, connection and mutual support. It’s not an individual quality, it is an emergent property of a group.

Help Yourself

That’s not to say that there aren’t things you can do to improve your situation, even in toxic environments.

The advice often given to people is that when you find yourself in a toxic environment, you should get yourself out. Given the damage that it does to you, I would not disagree with that advice but I recognise that it’s not always a viable option for people. We have many commitments in our life and they may demand that we stay put, at least in the short term. Getting another job is a big change for some, and a risk in itself as we may be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.

So we sometimes find ourselves having to remain in a less-than-optimal environment, that may range from poor to toxic. It makes sense, then, to take action to improve our day-to-day experience and to cope with the situation in a more psychological healthy way.

The first step is to recognise that you have agency, you have power and you can make positive choices. This may be simple to say, even obvious, but it can be hard to put into practice. When we are in a bad place, we are lacking in energy, initiative and resourcefulness. Organisations inculcate learned helplessness, that feeling that there’s no point doing anything because it won’t make any difference, that you are powerless to change anything. How do you shake of this inertia and get into action?

One way is to get angry, to get to the point where you just HAVE to do something. This is what we call the ‘inner rebellion’, the moment when you say ‘up with this I will not put!’.

The other is to find others who feel the same and form a crew. Just knowing there are others who share your frustrations and find themselves in the same situation is a great help. Having people to talk to, to share your problems with, will really help you feel better about the situation and improve your ability to cope. It’s about creating community to grow that fortitude that Bruce speaks about.

It’s likely both these things will happen, either one can come first or they can happen together but they are self-reinforcing, a virtuous circle that will help to lift you out of the hole you find yourself in.

Get The Party Started

I’m going to be developing these thoughts into some practical ideas for action that people who feel stuck in soul-sucking corporate gigs, so watch this space.

Before then, I will be repeating my wildly successful Decrapify Work Webinar (well, I was pleased with how they went!) this month.

In this webinar I talk about:

• Playgrounds and Prisons and how my experience inspired me to start Decrapify Work

• The Forces of Crapification that have led us to today's dire situation

• My model for how you can Decrapify Work

• How the Pirates of the Golden Age were social innovators that can inspire us today

• Some examples of organisations that enable people to thrive

• What a Decrapified Workplace might look like

We'll finish with questions and an open discussion.

If you are in Europe, Africa and the Americas, I’m running it on Wednesday 19th April at 6pm UK time (BST)
(which is 7pm in Europe, 1pm East Coast US, 10am West Coast US)

If you are in Asia, Australia or NZ, I’m running it on Thursday 20th April, at at 8 am UK time (BST)
(which is 3pm in Hong Kong, 4pm in Singapore, 6pm in Australia and 8pm in New Zealand )

You can sign up for them on this form

I’m also creating LinkedIN events for both, so that’s another way you’ll be able to register for them.

Hope to see you there!