Every Toxic Workplace Started With A Leader Who Meant Well

By,  

Sandeep Suri, founder of Aspire and Acquire, Partner at Positive Momentum, a seasoned executive coach and leadership mentor

No founder sets out to build a toxic culture. Most speak passionately about respect, growth and fairness, and in the early years, that intent shows up in how decisions get made. Yet years later, some of these same organisations are unrecognisable — burned-out teams, quiet resignations, a culture where honesty carries a price. The shift is rarely traced to one bad decision. It builds through hundreds of small ones, each made by a leader who believed, at the time, it was the right call.

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Toxicity, in other words, is mostly a story about blind spots. And blind spots are far more predictable than most leaders assume.

Intention is not impact

Leaders judge themselves by intention. They believe they're approachable because the door is open. They believe they reward merit because a review process exists. They believe they listen because town halls happen. Teams, however, judge leaders by impact — and that gap is where toxicity takes root.

A leader who interrupts every idea believes they're moving fast; the team experiences dismissal. A leader who sets stretch targets believes they're building ambition; the team experiences unsustainable pressure. Each side is operating on its own version of events, and asking for the other one takes effort most leaders skip.

Silence is not the same as stability

Meetings run smoothly. Deadlines get met. Numbers look healthy. Leaders read this as proof that all is well. But silence is one of the weakest signals a leader can rely on — people stop raising concerns long before they stop showing up, having calculated, often correctly, that staying quiet costs less than speaking up.

That calculation gets reinforced constantly: every time bad news is met with defensiveness instead of curiosity, every time a dissenting voice is quietly sidelined, every time credit travels upward while blame travels down. Each instance teaches the team a small lesson about what's safe to say. Over time, those lessons add up to a culture that has gone quiet — while leadership keeps mistaking that quiet for calm.

Pressure needs protection

Ambitious targets build strong organisations — but only alongside psychological safety. Teams absorb enormous pressure when they trust that failure will be treated as information, not a threat to their career. Remove that trust, and the same pressure turns corrosive: people start protecting themselves before they protect outcomes, holding back on risk and delaying the moment they admit a mistake.
Leaders who chase results without building that trust often mistake short-term wins for sustainable performance. The real cost shows up later — in the exit of the strongest performers, and in a culture where covering up problems feels safer than surfacing them.

Engagement scores, retention numbers, exit interviews — these are proxies leaders lean on because culture is hard to observe directly. But proxies can be gamed, and they lag reality by months. A team can score well on a survey while living through genuine fear, because a survey captures what people are willing to report, not what they're actually experiencing.

Distance grows faster than awareness

Scale changes what a leader can see. In a team of ten, tension is visible directly. In an organisation of a thousand, that same tension passes through several layers of managers before it reaches the top — and every layer softens it a little more. By the time information reaches senior leadership, it has usually been reshaped into something easier to hear.

This isn't dishonesty; it's incentive. A manager who passes along an unfiltered problem risks being seen as its source, so the safer move is to smooth it over before escalating. Multiply that across several layers, and senior leadership ends up several steps removed from the reality their teams live in every day. The organisations that avoid this treat proximity to ground truth as a core leadership responsibility — built through direct, regular contact several levels down, and skip-level conversations that stay genuinely open rather than ceremonial.
 

Closing the gap

Fixing this starts with treating feedback as data, not criticism to be managed. It means building low-risk, structured ways for people to disagree — and then visibly acting on what surfaces, so the next disagreement actually gets raised. It means auditing who really gets heard in a room, separate from who simply gets invited into it. And it means holding teams to high standards while making early failure a safe part of getting there.

Toxic cultures are built one overlooked signal at a time. They get dismantled the same way — not by leaders who claim to have no blind spots, but by those who build the systems to see past their own before the damage shows up on a dashboard.