Catherine Day and Associates’ Blog

This is a big one. We have all met someone totally shocked and often debilitated by being the victim of working in a corrosive environment. In this article I want to explore the following:

What is a corrosive environment?

How to determine what is the correct path for you.

How to avoid the negative effect, while remaining in tact and true to your own values

What is a Corrosive Environment?

Some indicators are:

• Colleagues who discuss the boss, other colleagues or staff in an undermining way when the party being discussed is not present.
• A culture where gossip is the norm
• Unhealthy humour - always at someone else’s expense
• Executives encouraging or not discouraging any of the above behaviours
• Favoritism, with appointments based on cronyism rather that competence, experience or skill.
• Gender bias.

Recently I attended some of Dr Michael Yapko’s lectures  at the Catholic University in Brisbane. His general topic was depression and in one lecture the effect in the work force of depression. The statistics on absenteeism are amazing and depressed individuals are not making quality decisions they would otherwise be capable of, and, that bullying in all forms and the corrosive behaviours described above have a great human and economic cost in our society.

How to Determine Your Path

If you already have a career plan, ask yourself if this environment can support your professional needs and your professional and personal values.

Talk the issues over with a good and trusted friend. If your friends do not have a professional understanding find an expert to talk to and seek advice.

How to avoid the negative effect, while remaining intact and true to your own values

Sometimes corrosive behaviour can be addressed within the company, especially if it is random. You could talk to a senior HR executive or an executive you believe you can trust.

If this is not possible you should consider other options such as leaving, explore possibilities with responsible recruiters, and perhaps seek mentoring to help you make the most of this difficult time.

When I work with people in these circumstances I encourage them to consider what they have learned in this process and how they can turn this tragedy into a triumph.

This article only touches on what can be a very worrying subject. We all spend a great deal of our waking hours in our work environment and the effect on our health and well-being from negative vs a positive environment is huge.

There is an article on this blog on trust. The the model there might be of interest to those of you setting some criteria for the type of organisation where you would prefer to work and, where your skill and experience will be embraced with your health and wellbeing remaining intact.

Catherine

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A topic my clients regularly discuss with me is, “what is trust?”

I usually reply by asking what trust means to them and, as you would probably expect, the variety of the answers is staggering. For instance:

• not doing the wrong thing
• fidelity
• not being made vulnerable

In my experience all the great and successful teams that I have worked with enjoy high levels of TRUST and this absolute trust allows them to fly, free from limiting behaviours.

A very wise friend, a highly qualified and experienced psychologist, shared this experience with me. She had been invited to work with some of America’s top scientists when the question of trust came up. My friend, as one of the facilitators of the group posed the question to this very distinguished group, “How would you describe trust in one word?”

This debate became long and untidy so they changed the rules from a one word definition to a few more and gradually they arrived at the following model:

TRUST comprises three elements:

Competence - the ability, skills and experience to deliver

Reliability – Doing what you say you are going to do, to a high standard, on time

Sincerity - acting with genuine feelings; free from guile, deceit or artifice.

The very good news is that if you have the potential, coaching and mentoring can improve competence and reliability.

The bad news is that you either are sincere or not, it cannot be coached, but may be developed through, calamity, epiphany or clinical processes.

Interestingly, Aristotle, long before these other wise men, formed a similar view. Trust is:

. competence, spirited personal integrity (aretê)

· Intelligent good sense, practical wisdom (phronêsis)

· Good will and respect for the troops (eúnoiâ)

Trust is something that has been debated and defined for millenia. Why is it so important?

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Have you ever pondered why some people seem happy and others not?

Do you know the difference between happiness and pleasure?

Buddhist monk, Matthieu Richard (the Dalai Lama’s right hand man), has a fascinating lecture about the nature of happiness and how happiness can be found through mind training.

You can see an excellent video on the web site “Pick the Brain” by clicking on this link

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