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Work Isn't Working

Toxic Bosses Make People Lose Their Passion & Commitment for Their Work

Our ongoing research indicates that employees under toxic bosses experience decreased confidence, self-esteem, motivation and engagement. They feel stuck, helpless, detached, disengaged, lose passion and commitment to their work, and dread going to the office.

These employees also report reduced performance, productivity and negative impacts on their team dynamics and relationships, which leads to a diminished sense of belonging and increased feelings of isolation and distrust toward their workplace.

Laura Hambley
Toxic bosses are a global issue with devastating consequences for organizations and employees
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Work Isn't Working

Leadership Downplaying Potentials They Can’t Perceive

That’s because those behaviors are common signs of a sensitive person—someone whose mind is wired to go deep. And sensitive people tend to be high performersin the workplace, often bringing unique gifts that create value and drive innovation. 

There’s just one problem: many sensitive people try to downplay and even deny their sensitivity—especially in their careers.

As someone who has similar traits such as these, I completely disagree that we downplay our sensitivity. Actually we are the ones being downplayed by others, especially management. I’ll explain further below.

As a personality trait, being sensitive means you process more information about your environment and respond to it more strongly. That gives you a keener eye for detail and an innate ability to read the emotions of others. It also means you may think longer or feel stronger emotions than someone else in the same situation.

That explains the occasional workday crying session—and the struggle with fast-paced deadlines. However, it also means the sensitive mind is akin to a next-generation supercomputer. All that extra processing power turns up more creative solutions, insights, and a startling ability to connect dots that others miss.

Two ways I’ve described this in the past is that your sensitivity makes you too empathetic to the point of it being debilitating. If someone is fired unjustly or if someone is targeted by a toxic boss, you feel like you are that person, experiencing their emotions as if they were your own. It also makes you feel like a canary in a coal mine, which usually doesn’t end well for the canary.

A simpler way to understand people like this is to realize that our pattern recognition capabilities are supercharged, so we can detect patterns usually way before other people (i.e. in days or weeks instead of months or years).

In a survey conducted by graduate student Bhavini Shrivastava, the IT workers who tested highest for sensitivity were indeed the most stressed out at work—but they were also those whose performance was rated highest by their managers. This is no surprise to experts on giftedness, who have connected sensitivity to high ability for nearly sixty years; one recent study suggests that up to 87% of gifted individuals score as highly sensitive.

In practical terms, sensitive people come with five main gifts: they are wired for deep thinking, understand emotions, score high for empathy, are natural creatives, and have a high sensory intelligence—a trait that includes situational awareness, which wins soccer games and keeps patients alive in the ER. 

Many of these gifts are in high demand in our economy; they are the building blocks of innovation and leadership. So, by rights, sensitive people ought to put their sensitivity at the top of their resumé. But that is not the message we get about being sensitive.

And yes, if you’re able to detect and recognize patterns before others, that amplifies your abilities and increases your situational awareness (which I’m impressed that this article sees the relationship between the two).

When I was a Systems Support Officer for the Federal Government, I would often have people from other departments coming to get my help instead of getting help from their own Support Officer. The reason being is that 1) I often was able to detect the cause of issues before other people, almost on an intuitive level, and 2) I actually talked to people like they were human beings, using metaphors to help explain what was going wrong, rather than talking to them using computer terminology that made them feel like they were technological idiots.

When I was initially hired as a Junior Web Developer for another web firm later in my life, I quickly became one of two Senior Web Developers, with one of the firm’s owners telling me that I was the “gem” of their hirings. This happened though because the owners specifically asked for our input, thus being very open to feedback from us. The more I opened up and provided my deeper perspective of things I was seeing and aware of, the more they were amazed by me.

Despite its many gifts, “sensitive” has become a dirty word. It’s used to mean easily offended, overreacting, and weak. Men run away from the term altogether, and women are slandered for being too sensitive—a phrase that should be retired. This stigma is why many sensitive people hide who they are. 

One reason for this stigma is our culture’s obsession with toughness. We idolize people who are loud, assertive, and quick to take risks—never mind that these are traits of a toxic leader. But a sensitive person’s slower, more thoughtful approach pays off. In studies of both humans and primates, the genes associated with sensitivity also lead to measurably better decision-making.

So how do we tap that advantage in our companies and careers today? First, we must embrace sensitivity by encouraging and rewarding it at an organizational level and by owning it as sensitive people.

This is pretty much why I disagreed with the earlier statement that sensitive people downplay their abilities but rather their abilities are often downplayed by others instead, particularly management. And I’m not even talking about a “toxic leader” downplaying their abilities, it can happen with a non-toxic leader as well. I mean just think about it and imagine how things play out in a typical scenario.

A highly sensitive person detects a pattern within the organization that most other people are blind to seeing, so it’s invisible to others. This could be a cultural pattern of behaviours, beliefs, or values that are negatively affecting the organization and affecting the well-being of its people in turn. If a highly sensitive person relays what they’re perceiving to management, take a guess how management or leadership is going to react to someone critiquing their company? Probably the same as how a leader typically reacts to someone telling them about a new paradigm in their business.

So it’s not courage that sensitive people need to step forward with their amplified abilities. It’s management that needs the courage to accept the critique and feedback from their employees about their business. Most conventional management and leadership teams do not have this capacity though, although you might see it in Fortune 500 companies, if you’re lucky.

Again, as I’ve iterated in the past, if your a leader within a company and you’re looking for people to take leadership positions in your company, you don’t need to look outside of it to find them. There are leaders all around you. You just need the perception to be able to see them.

That’s the problem with our world today though. Most people, particularly leaders, are using outdated mindsets, paradigms, and worldviews to navigate and make decisions in their daily work lives, which is why they are blind to what’s right in front of them. Until they can broaden their perception and internal worldview, their external sight will continue to be limited, thus limiting their organizations in turn.

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Work Isn't Working

Work Is Making Us Feel Disconnected

“Everyone is recognizing this feeling of disconnectedness is the No. 1 issuethey’re facing,” says Doug Camplejohn, founder and CEO of Airspeed. But, he adds, “the answer is not going back to to the office. The reality is, this problem has existed forever, and Covid had only made us all more aware and sensitive to it.”

Employee dissatisfaction and disengagement have been on the rise for years, according to Gallup.

To find better solutions, executives will need to recognize they don’t fully understand what employees want and need — at least not without further surveying and open discussions. A sweeping majority of 9 out of 10 executives say their company has a deep knowledge of their workforce, but just 6 in 10 workers agree their bosses understand what motivates them, or their personal characteristics, interests and values.

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Work Isn't Working

Activision Blizzard Can’t Hide Internal Reality Any Longer

The Activision Blizzard lawsuit has opened the floodgates
Arming decision-makers in tech, business and public policy with the unbiased, fact-based news and analysis they need to navigate a world in rapid change.
www.protocol.com

The company’s stock price has tumbled nearly 10% this week, and CEO Bobby Kotick acknowledged in a message to employees Tuesday that Activision Blizzard’s initial response was “tone deaf.” Meanwhile, there has been a continuous stream of new reports unearthing horrendous misconduct as more and more former and current employees speak out about the working conditions and alleged rampant misogyny at one of the video game industry’s largest and most powerful employers.

Organizers of the walkout are calling for change. The demonstration was billed as “the beginning of an enduring movement in favor of better labor conditions for all employees,” organizers said ahead of the event. Now, those who participated say they “will not return to silence,” according to Axios.

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Work Isn't Working

Pandemic Exposing Systemic Issues of Work

‘The industry is broken’: Inside B.C.’s restaurant labour crisis (VIDEO)
It was already an issue before the pandemic. 🍽️
www.newwestrecord.ca

While B.C. restaurants are in the middle of the peak summer season, a massive struggle to retain employees continues to grow. As the cost of living in Metro Vancouver keeps rising, workers often can’t make a viable living wage.

The pandemic totally cracked it open; it exposed all of the bad parts of our industry and we have an opportunity now to fix it.

It’s pretty obvious what needs to change and it needs to change across the board and that’s just how people are treated in the restaurant business. It has to be treated more like how every other industry is, where people aren’t pushed to their limits because of stress, because of the amount of hours worked, and because of low pay.

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Work Isn't Working

Employees Quitting Because Companies Investing in Technology Rather Than People

A key mistake leaders are making is causing the Great Resignation. Here are 3 ways to fix it
The CEO of Workhuman argues that the old model of work-for-pay, which focuses on trying to extract the best out of employees coupled with an abundant investment in technology, is backfiring on the workforce.
www.fastcompany.com

By primarily focusing on staying on top of tech advances, we’re at risk of ignoring the reality of what’s actually driving business today: our people. 

Purpose, meaning, mutual trust, and recognition are built by people one interaction at a time, and it’s up to leaders to build the infrastructure that facilitates these. Just as you expect a comprehensive plan to make your tech stack work smoothly, you need to be strategic about how your culture stack is making the most of that larger investment. 

If companies want to better understand the needs of their employees, the easiest solution is to simply ask. As technology leaders, we’re used to a seemingly incessant cycle of feedback loops when it comes to our products and solutions, and we have an obsession with the customer that eclipses most anything else and drives our roadmap. What would happen to our culture if we brought that same obsession internally, too? 

The time when it was a sign of success if work didn’t know anything about your personal life is over. It was a ludicrous notion to begin with. In today’s world, we know the value of celebrating the whole human. We must find ways to make sure that we’re seeing our coworkers for who they really are and, in turn, knowing that we are embraced and accepted for who we are.

Bringing this level of humanity into the everyday work experience is the best way to be in a position to hear from, listen to, and really get to understand what the humans in your organizations need. And understanding what needs will be a critical priority if we’re going to make it through another year of massive societal and organizational change.