Workplace Culture Evolution: Toxic Work Cultures, Gaslighting and More
In today's hyper-competitive business landscape, workplace culture has emerged as the critical differentiator between organizations that thrive and those that merely survive. Let's dissect the key elements of cultural transformation and why it matters more than ever.
The Toxic Workplace Reality Check
Toxic workplace culture extends far beyond occasional office politics. It manifests through systemic dysfunction, where gaslighting and manipulation become normalized operating procedures. Think less "difficult boss" and more "calculated erosion of professional confidence." When managers consistently deny doing what is right then criticize team members for non-compliance, we're not witnessing simple miscommunication – we're seeing tactical psychological manipulation at work.
The Junior Employee Vulnerability Factor
Here's an uncomfortable truth: junior employees bear the brunt of toxic cultures, creating a problematic talent development pipeline. Why? They're navigating a perfect storm of vulnerabilities:
- Limited workplace navigation experience
- Strong validation needs
- Minimal support networks
- Heightened susceptibility to power dynamics
This combination creates a breeding ground for burnout and career stagnation – exactly what forward-thinking organizations must prevent.
The Leadership Imperative: Why Cultural Change Starts at the Top
Remember the garden analogy: organizational culture grows what leadership plants and tends. When toxic behaviors (weeds) go unchecked, they flourish. C-suite leaders aren't just cultural influencers – they're cultural architects. Their actions, not their words, set the template for organizational behavior.
Practical Steps for Leadership Evolution
For C-suite leaders and managers committed to cultural transformation:
1. Model Transparent Communication
- Share decision rationales openly
- Demonstrate accountability
- Create clear feedback channels
2. Implement Structural Safeguards
- Establish robust anti-harassment policies
- Create anonymous reporting systems
- Provide comprehensive mental health support
3. Develop Leadership Capabilities
- Invest in emotional intelligence
- Build conflict resolution expertise
- Foster inclusive decision-making
The Customer-People Connection: A Strategic Necessity
Here's the business case that gets the CEO’s attention: customer experience will never exceed employee experience. I first learnt of this concept during my time in OCBC when I was part of the pioneer customer experience team. It has inspired my work ever since. The math is straightforward:
- Engaged employees = Delighted customers
- Toxic culture = Compromised customer service
- Healthy culture = Sustainable competitive advantage
Think about it: How can we expect employees operating in toxic environments to deliver exceptional customer experiences? They can't – and that's the bottom-line impact of cultural negligence.
Building Integrated Experience Systems
Modern organizations need frameworks that align employee and customer experiences:
1. Cultural Assessment Metrics
- Track employee experience indicators
- Map customer journey touchpoints
- Measure psychological safety
- Monitor engagement patterns
2. Communication Architecture
- Define clear information flows
- Set response expectations
- Create constructive feedback loops
- Enable cross-functional collaboration
3. Diverse Perspective Integration
- Establish mentorship programs
- Create inclusive dialogue forums with actionable and measurable steps
- Enable cross-cultural learning
- Foster innovation through diversity
The ROI of Cultural Excellence
The investment case is compelling:
- Reduced turnover costs
- Enhanced productivity
- Improved innovation through psychological safety
- Stronger employer brand- Higher customer satisfaction
- Sustainable competitive advantage
Moving Forward: The Integration Imperative
In today's experience economy, treating employee and customer experience as separate domains is a strategic mistake. The most successful organizations recognize these elements as an integrated system requiring holistic management.
Remember: Culture isn't just what you promote – it's what you permit. What's growing in your organizational garden?
The question isn't whether to prioritize culture transformation – it's how quickly you can make it happen before your competitor does.
What's your next move in creating a workplace that drives both employee and customer success?
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Advisor for C-Suites to work with you and your teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
Solving The People, Platform and Process Conundrum
When it comes to transformation of any sort, especially digital ones, many business and marketing leaders tend to focus mainly on the packaging, pricing, platform and sometimes people side of things.
Based on my decades of experience working in global corporates, including professional services and consultancies, I have come to observe that the dependency on the 3Ps (People, Platforms, Process) is inherent everywhere I help with transformation, including marketing and organization-wide transformation to upskill, digitalize and restructure the function to be fit for the intended vision of the organization.
However, I have also observed that many don’t fully understand the true potential and are not maximizing the true potential of the marketing function, often treating them as a communication, creative, events or worse, a corporate gifts department.
Due to this lack of understanding and appreciation of how marketing can and should work, they often try to force new technologies, new platforms or restructure the function in such a way that it leaves no room for progress, upward mobility or innovation in the way they think, plan and execute.
This in turn affects their ability to help you actualize your business value proposition to your customers as they can only do a redesigning of your product or service offerings with a nicer tagline and/or visual year after year or come up with gimmicky promotions to entice the customers.
This then affects your overall growth and profitability as you are not addressing the true needs of your customer and in turn, you look to cut the marketing budget and worse, headcount as you see them as a cost centre and not much else. Being short on resources on all fronts, your marketing team begins to churn or go back to doing the same things in trying to cope with all the business demand and the vicious cycle repeats itself.
However, often times we should be looking at transformation in totality to include process as well to check if 1) your existing process is supportive or conducive for the transformation you need to make and 2) what changes or enhancements do you need to make or 3) what new processes you need to create to incorporate the transformation needed.
Take for example, you wish to introduce automated A/B testing within your MarTech capabilities to improve on efficiency and speed to market. There are a few things you need to consider from a process perspective.
This includes:
What is the current process your team has to go through to create content and offers to enable the A/B testing even if it’s a manual one?
Will that process change with an automated tool or will there be an additional layer of process needed to enable the testing? This can be approval of the A/B testing logic set-up in addition to the content and offer mechanics for example.
Are there regulatory restrictions to adhere to from a customer fairness perspective? How about the customer targeting set-up logic needed? Can you use your existing set-up framework and customer targeting attributes or do you need a new one?
Is there any security risk in terms of data transference leakage or concerns by incorporating the new A/B testing tool onto your existing MarTech stack?
The above is just a rough example of the process and platform side of things to consider when it comes to even a simple implementation of a seemingly harmless tool. Just barely scratching the surface and not even getting into the deep end of transformation.
This is why I founded Mad About Marketing Consulting, to bridge the gap between business and marketing, having helmed transformative roles for several global MNCs, including EY, JLL, Kantar, State Street and most recently, Citibank. I work with your business and marketing teams, creative, brand, media and even business management agencies to bring across that insider perspective of how marketing can and should work as a business enabler. This is to ensure nothing falls through the cracks as you go about your organization wide transformation.
Simply said, no one understands marketing pain points and potential as well as a marketer who has been at the forefront of change, built teams from scratch and nurtured inherited and mature teams.
Check out my credentials here.
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally for C-Suites to work with you and your teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
Corporate Succession Planning: When the King of the Jungle Vacates and Monkeys Run Amok
I liken the corporate environment for certain organizations to a jungle sometimes in terms of the power plays that come into the picture when the king of the jungle vacates its position for whatever reason.
This happens often in organizations that are undergoing transitions or that lack a good succession plan to prepare for senior movements. This, I have come to observe is regardless of organizational size and years in existence. The situation worsens for sure if both are true for the organization - lack of a good succession plan when you are undergoing a transition.
When it comes to succession planning, just having bums to fill seats is not good enough. It needs to be the right bum for the right seat so you avoid a square peg in a round hole situation. You also need to ensure these transitional leaders are actually capable of leading and not just PowerPoint slide reviewers or campaign and content approvers since both roles can be replaced by Gen AI strictly speaking.
By leading it means, they need to be capable of planning, developing a strategy and capable of engaging their new teams as part of the planning process. In short, treat them like people that matter and not treat them as just arms and legs to do the work that you don’t wish to do or are incapable of doing yourself.
This is also where the power plays start coming into the picture like monkeys having a field day calling the shots and insisting that every animal should only eat fruits and nuts like them and swing around by their tails from tree to tree because that is how they know to eat, live and act. There is a reason why monkeys are not the king of the jungle just as there is a difference between a leader versus a manager by appointment.
Although it’s normal to have layers of reporting lines if you have a huge team of more than 15 people or where you need to split the team into sub functions and appoint team leads or function leads, I personally believe every leader should still remain connected with even the most junior member of their team. This is especially during times of transition and if you are a newly minted lead. Until you are fully confident and sure of your functional leads or team leads’ capabilities as well as alignment on the way forward as a team, you should ensure the rest of the team is not left behind in terms of important communications, planning sessions and not being relinquished to silent executors or you will end up with a bunch of quiet quitters.
The power plays become more evident especially when you have team leads or functional leads who are actually in a square peg, round hole situation and act out their insecurities with a few obvious actions, including:
pushing down work and delegating all the hard to do stuff to their one-downs, who might not even be able to do the work without guidance or clear direction of how this fits into the intended plan or bigger picture. I.e. they are told to just do blindly.
fighting for the limelight by focusing on presenting the nice and showy stuff instead of doing actual work that matters to customers. I.e. power point becomes their best friend and their one-downs spent most of their time doing slide after slide showcasing how well they have done, so they can in turn present that to their bosses.
taking credit for others’ work or worse, not giving credit to their one-downs for fear that they themselves will be made redundant.
thinking and acting selfishly by not working with other colleagues on projects that they know would be relevant to what they are doing currently and by working together, it would enhance the output. Instead, they choose to shut them off having access to the project so they can be seen as the sole owner for that project though it would create win-win outcomes for their customers.
Organizations therefore should always take succession planning and leadership development seriously, regardless of whether they are in transition mode or not. Succession planning should not be a game of thrones, musical chairs or a case of appointing people you are familiar with or like even if they don’t actually have the capability to be that bum on the seat without breaking the chair.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
Why Is It Hard for CMOs to Transform Their Teams
Any sort of transformation is disruptive to business-as-usual (BAU) and any disruption to BAU also means that productivity is hampered. Amidst trying to meet business and marketing goals, targets and objectives, CMOs and their teams often find it hard to simply adhere to BAU and transform concurrently, and you cannot blame them.
CEOs and COOs simply have to first understand that the transformation journey is not a simple one where you can see the end of the tunnel right from the beginning of where you start. It’s more like a long winding road with hoops, turns and circles, depending on the complexity of the problems you are trying to unpack, the processes you need to overhaul to the skillset and mindsets of the people you need to enhance and change.
It throws a spanner into the works and takes time away from the CMOs and their one-downs to even try and formulate a plan swiftly while still carrying the major decisions they need to make to deliver their plans on time. Often times, they simply don’t know where or how to start without putting a halt to certain initiatives, campaigns or programs.
It is also a case of over familiarity and attachment to current processes, tools and scope of work that can build up an inertia for change of any sort that calls for an overhaul of the marketing department. While some companies choose to refresh their CMO leadership team, they find themselves in an even worse-off situation.
Why you may ask. Well, if you look at it objectively, a new CMO as in any new leadership person who just joins an organization will need to learn about the culture, processes, team capabilities from scratch. That is the so-called teething or onboarding period where the old team is likely to view the new leadership with suspicion and is less open to sharing information on how things actually work for fear of judgment.
Worse, you expect the CMO to already have a plan on how to transform while trying to settle into the organization without knowing the ins and outs of how things work. This journey itself will take at least 9 months to a year to complete before transformation can actually take place. It definitely cannot be a cookie-cutter approach that the CMO brings and applies from their previous company as every company is unique. Also, not all CMOs even have that approach they can rely on, which means even more time trying to plan or learn it from scratch.
In my experience working with various leadership and organizational structures, often I find that as marketing leaders, we are not given a lot of leeway and time to transform, resulting in having to look at quick and cheap wins, often at the expanse of people. This is not ideal nor is it sustainable even if you see initial positive results in terms of either business or marketing returns. These results are often not sustainable for longer term growth and retention of their key talents.
This is simply because good people who are working for something beyond just a pay check would not want to be associated with such an organizational culture. And that culture is often changed for the worse or established as a result of the hasty changes to be made.
It might be worth considering having independent third parties partnering with you and your CMO to help alleviate some of the pressure of planning for that change, so they can still focus 100% on the BAU to keep the engine running on full tank. After all, that is what you are paying your CMO for and not simply to do a once-off transformation. In other words, think bigger picture and longer term.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.