Cultural Toxicity

I’m British.

The British work ethic involves a number of things which may be considered bad in other cultures. We can’t get started without making a morning drink. We complain about Mondays, Thursdays, Fridays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Mainly, however, it seems that one of the ways we bond is by complaining about shared adversity.

And maybe that’s healthy. I remember fondly how a group of us facing redundancy discovered a great comfort in each other’s company, with a ton of gallows humour, and shared grievances.

However, even though I’m guilty of more than occasional moaning, whining and grumpiness, I’ve come to think there have to be limits in order to create a healthy environment.

I once had a new person join my team. He visited our offices having joined in a remote location. He asked me a bunch of clarifying questions about how things worked. His questions were a catalog of old battles, repackaged into horror stories about working with me. The particular team member, a lovely chap, plainly asked for the facts and I was happy to set the record straight.

What I discovered from that experience is that he’d been given an induction into the toxic relationship that a different person and I were embroiled in. Maybe there were faults on both sides, but my side of that relationship wasn’t a party to briefing against any other individuals in the team.

Having been on the receiving end of that weird experience, I’m a little sensitive when I discover a situation where someone new is being briefed on all the old battles and how to keep fighting them. While we all love a bit of shared adversity, there are multiple sides to every story, and teaching someone about the old battles may give them a sense of shared history with their new team, but may also become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

By keeping old battles alive we’re doomed to bear a grudge. There’s fine line to tread between learning from history and keeping old wounds open.

A culture where you teach someone who to dislike before they’ve come across them is probably bordering on the toxic.

So I like to aim to find balance within the force.

There have been old problems. They hurt. There were many good intentions on all sides of those problems. We are where we are. We need to go forward open mindedly.