Is It Toxic?

“Mean Girls is corporate America, and corporate America is also Scandal, and sometimes Game of Thrones, depending on where you are.”

That’s how my late friend Benish Shah described work.

“You have people who want power. You have people who are insecure. You have people who are incredibly good at what they do, but then they’re threatening to everybody else just by the very nature of existing. Then you have a popularity contest. You combine all of those and you have a fantastic teen movie.”

It’s funny because it’s true.

Most of us have worked with difficult people. Most of us have endured cliques, favoritism, gossip, or exclusion. I once worked on a small all-female team that functioned like a high school lunch table. At meetings, colleagues would sit on each other’s laps, play with each other’s hair, and chat about weekend plans while pointedly excluding me from the conversation.

It felt terrible.

But looking back, it wasn’t toxic.

The truly toxic situations I’ve experienced were different. They involved public shaming, sexual harassment, manipulation, and being used as a pawn in organizational turf wars. Those environments didn’t just make work unpleasant. They made me question myself.

And that’s one of the reasons toxic workplaces are so damaging.

Have you ever been in a workplace where your gut kept telling you something wasn’t right, but you couldn’t quite prove it?

Maybe you wondered if you were being overly sensitive. Maybe you convinced yourself you needed to toughen up. Maybe you kept swallowing your discomfort because everyone else seemed fine.

Toxicity is often hard to identify precisely because it thrives in ambiguity.

These environments create uncertainty, and uncertainty fuels anxiety. Over time, you stop trusting your own instincts. Like gaslighting, toxicity can become normalized. You get so accustomed to feeling bad that you stop noticing how bad you feel.

That’s why I loved Benish’s advice column, Is It Toxic?

Readers would write in with workplace scenarios and ask her to make the call. Because here’s what she understood: we often talk about toxic bosses and toxic coworkers, but toxicity is fundamentally an organizational problem.

As she told me:

“It’s the behavior that you tolerate, or that you don’t tolerate, that you promote or that you shut down.”

Toxicity isn’t usually one bad interaction. It’s a pattern. It’s the accumulation of behaviors that an organization allows to continue.

Before her death, Benish dedicated her work to helping organizations build cultures where managers could lead with more compassion and accountability, and where shaming, targeting, and weaponizing people’s personal lives would no longer be tolerated.

One of the most helpful things she taught me was how to distinguish between a difficult situation and a toxic one. I asked her how someone could tell the difference, especially if they’re conflict-averse, self-critical, or prone to blaming themselves.

Her answer surprised me:

She said not to look for a smoking gun — look for patterns. Track the moments that make your internal alarm bells go off. Notice who is involved. Notice what happens before and after. Write it down.

In fact, Benish literally recommended making a spreadsheet. By the time a truly catastrophic event happens, you’re often already at the point of quitting or being pushed out. But the earlier warning signs tend to be much smaller:

• Who gets interrupted?

• Who gets left out?

• Whose mistakes are remembered?

• Whose mistakes are forgiven?

• Whose ideas are dismissed until someone else repeats them?

Patterns tell a story.

And once you can see the pattern, you can start asking the bigger question:

What’s motivating the behavior?

Sometimes the answer is obvious. Bias. Competition. Insecurity. Politics.

Other times it’s more complicated.

Benish told me about a manager who was exceptionally hard on her because that manager was actually trying to protect her from people elsewhere in the organization who wanted her gone.

The behavior was unpleasant, but the motivation mattered.

Looking at patterns, people, and motivations together can help you determine whether you’re dealing with a toxic environment, a difficult manager, or simply a poor fit. But as Benish reminded me:

“We’re emotional beings. We know when we feel supported and when we don’t.”

That insight becomes especially important when deciding how much of yourself to share at work. We hear constant messages about bringing our whole selves to work and leading with vulnerability. But Benish challenged the simplistic version of that advice.

Psychological safety isn’t created because an organization tells you to be vulnerable. Psychological safety is created when vulnerability is treated with care.

As Benish put it, when you’re in an environment where people are not supportive, personal disclosures can become liabilities. A mental health diagnosis, a family challenge, a personal struggle, any of it can be misunderstood, dismissed, or even used against you.

That doesn’t mean vulnerability is bad. It means vulnerability requires trust.

And trust should be earned.

This is one reason psychological safety matters so much. Benish was a champion for inclusive workplaces, particularly for women of color, and she understood that inclusion requires more than good intentions.

People need to feel safe enough to contribute, question, disagree, and be themselves without fear of punishment or humiliation. That’s why there’s such a strong connection between inclusion and toxicity. The behaviors that make people feel unsafe, silenced, or excluded don’t just harm individuals, they undermine an organization’s ability to create a culture where everyone can thrive.

You can’t have one without the other: The healthiest workplaces don’t ask people to be brave enough to endure toxicity. They actively remove the conditions that allow toxicity to flourish.

I’d love to hear from you:

Have you ever realized a workplace was toxic only after you left? What were the signs you missed while you were still in it?

With Feeling,
Morra