Reflections on the toxic and the intoxication - I

"Baby, can't you see I'm calling?

A guy like you should wear a warning

It's dangerous, I'm falling

There's no escape, I can't wait

I need a hit, baby, give me it

You're dangerous, I'm loving it"

Introduction to an addiction

"Toxic" is a song recorded by American singer Britney Spears for her fourth studio album In the Zone (2003). A song with elements of bhangra music and breathy vocals, that speaks of a lover as a dangerous yet addictive drug. When I heard it recently I interpreted it as our love for the toxic workplace. By toxic workplace, I mean a workplace where primitive mental contents such as denial, splitting, and projective identification that, are enacted and have destructive consequences. And our compulsion or the uncontrollable need to work incessantly, which like any other addiction, stems from underlying psychological needs.

Denial is the rejection of traumatic thoughts, emotions, or actions. It can be tacit, when the denied content simply does not enter awareness, or explicit, when it enters awareness but is not associated to the self (“I’m not angry!”). Splitting is partitioning a set of conflicting thoughts or feelings into two distinct subsets and then claiming one subset—often, but not always, the one with a positive valence—while denying or disowning the other subset.

Projective identification is the attribution of psychic elements of one’s own, such as thoughts, emotions, or a whole identity, to another person or group, followed by attempts to evoke those elements in the other group so that it seems that they, not us, own them. The person doing the projecting subsequently identifies with the person or group enacting them, denigrating them, if the projected content is negative, or idealizing them, if it is positive.

The magic of making the visible invisible?!

On Sep 15, 2020, in the "invisible health crisis in organizations," Raghu Raman, former president of Reliance Industries, highlighted two concerns - employee disengagement and mental health, and called for creating an environment of psychological safety and optimism: "A plummeting economy is not the only sickness that corporate India has been battling for some time now." He had cited a 2011 Gallup survey. Below, I have provided the data for a 2023 survey.

The state of the workplace

In 2023, the State of the Global Workplace: 2023 Report representing the collective voice of the global employee found a global rise in employees thriving at work, even as worker stress remained at a record high. The reasons - lack of connection with others, of meaning, of well being and of pay.

1. Employee engagement reached a record high in 2022 - After dropping in 2020 during the pandemic, employee engagement is on the rise again, reaching a record-high 23%. This means more workers were finding their work meaningful and felt connected to their team, manager and employer.
2. The majority of the world's employees are quiet quitting - Quiet quitting is an outcome of psychological disengagement at work. While employees may be physically present or logged into their computer, they don't know what to do or why it matters. They also don't have any supportive bonds with their coworkers, boss or their organization.
3. Employee stress remained at a record high - Worldwide, 44% of employees said they experienced a lot of stress the previous day. Employee stress has been rising for over a decade. Many factors influence stress, but Gallup found that managers play an outsized role in the stress workers feel on the job, which influences their daily stress overall.
4. In 2022, the world experienced a surge in job opportunities - The increase in available jobs signaled that the world economy was open for business. But employers were being called to pay more attention to retaining their most talented workers as a result.
5. Over half of employees are actively or passively job seeking - Across the countries and areas surveyed, 51% of currently employed workers said they were watching for or actively seeking a new job. Increased pay was a top factor in what people want in their next job. Additionally, improved wellbeing and opportunities to grow and develop were also highly prized by job seekers.
6. Engagement mattered more than where workers work - engagement had 3.8x as much influence on employee stress as work location. How people felt about their job had a lot more to do with their relationship with their team and manager than being remote or being on-site.
7. "Quiet quitters" know what they would change at work - As part of their survey, they were asked, “If you could make one change at your current employer to make it a great place to work, what would it be?” Overall, 85% of responses related to three categories: engagement or culture, pay and wellbeing.

The state of mental health

The Times of India cited that, as per a report by the World Health Organization (WHO), India has one of the world’s largest populations of people with mental issues in one shape or another. In India, more than 80% of people do not seek professional psychiatric assistance. You’ll hear personal accounts of shame, misery, prejudice, and embarrassment from people you know who have experienced these things.

Nearly 14% of India’s apopulation required active therapeutic interventions, states the National Mental Health Survey conducted by NIMHANS in 2016. As per the data, about 70% to 80% of persons in India struggling with mental illness receive no care. According to the survey, only one out of every ten people in India suffering mental health issues get evidence-based treatment.

The WHO says, about 20% of Indians would suffer from mental diseases by the end of 2022. According to the World Health Organization, 5.6 crore Indians suffer from depression and 3.8 crore from anxiety disorders. The World Health Organization forecasts that India will lose $1.03 trillion in economic value owing to mental health issues between 2012 and 2030 (at 2010 dollar rate).

A research published in the Lancet in October 2021 found a 35% increase in mental health disorders in India. According to the ‘Global Burden of Disease Study 1990–2017,’ one in every seven, suffer from a variety mental problems. Psychiatric disorders attributed to a two-fold increase in diseases in India, with the total disease burden rising from 2.5 percent in 1990 to 4.7 percent in 2017.

According to a study conducted by the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) in 2021, “there is a critical lack of mental health specialists." The Indian Psychiatric Society estimates that there are 9000 psychiatrists in India, with 700 psychiatrists graduating every year. This translates to 0.75 psychiatrists for every 100,000 inhabitants in India. This is much less than the minimum of three psychiatrists per 100,000 people that is advised, and means that we would need an additional 30,000 psychiatrists, 37,000 psychiatric nurses, 38,000 psychiatric social workers, and 38,000 clinical psychologists. According to estimations based on the number of mental health professionals currently being educated in numerous institutions in the nation, it’ll still take 42 years to satisfy the requirements for mental health professionals, 74 years for mental health nurses, 76 years for psychiatric social workers and similar years for clinical psychologists, presuming the sample size (if population in general and mental health human resources) remains static.

Due to a lack of awareness, misinformation, and plain indifference, individuals who are experiencing any type of mental health issue are erroneously labelled as “maniacs” by the general public. This perpetuates the cycle of alienation, misery, and humiliation for the sufferer.

Double trouble

Indian corporates and society were inefficient and sick well before this pandemic. But here is why the two “co-morbidities” of disengagement and mental health pose an existential threat to economic recovery.

"A global report finds that 18% of global depression cases emanate from India. Another survey of 200,000 professionals in India found that about half of them suffered extreme stress at work. Adjusted for population size, India may rank first in the incidence of mental disorders," say Jeffrey Pfeffer and M. Muneer in "The corporate hush over mental health can prove costly on 17 Nov 2020 in article. Jeffrey Pfeffer is the chair professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and and M. Muneer is the managing director of CustomerLab.

"With a taste of your lips, I'm on a ride

You're toxic, I'm slippin' under

With a taste of a poison paradise

I'm addicted to you

Don't you know that you're toxic?"

Fake it till you make it?!

Superficial attempts at resolution underestimate the lack of clear understanding of this addictive love. In an article dated 26 Nov 2020 "The fake promise of the office counsellor," Divya Naik, a Mumbai-based writer, psychotherapist and counsellor, writes that "In-house therapists and mental health policies aren’t enough if the work culture remains toxic, say employees

"Holistic employee mental health is integral to creating a thriving workplace, especially at a time when people are stressed and tired of working from home because of the pandemic. Everything, from productivity, decision-making and engagement, to the overall work culture of an organization, rests on the well-being of the worker. Employee happiness, though, depends on a number of well-being facilities. One cannot address well-being concerns in an organization by merely accessing counselling support or conducting the occasional mental health webinar. It’s crucial when thinking of employee well-being to take into account the virtues that help organizations flourish by creating the optimum work environment. Simply put, when companies put their people’s mental health first, it has a direct impact on the bottom-line and builds resilience.

“Organizations need to do a deeper examination and see what kind of people are being hired and whether or not they are empathetic and kind. Is the leadership team empathetic? If there are toxic people at the top level who are being backed and supported by the management, then mental health policies and programs will continue to be ineffective,” she quotes.

Lalitha Jayaram, a sales manager with an IT company in Bengaluru provides us with a glimpse into the nature of the real problem - "While a “great place to work" certificate is hung on the walls of many offices, it begs the question of whether it is also a safe space to work in terms of employees feeling comfortable enough to be themselves and function at their own pace. “In my experience, workplaces have HR design activities for the employees so they can maintain ‘well-being’ like yoga, Zumba, team games. Some workplaces don’t recognize it beyond the extent of ‘we are a safe space, please do come and talk to us when you need to’. I think what a lot of organizations fail to understand is that merely saying the words “safe space" without doing what it takes to create and maintain a safe space is of absolutely no use."

Feeling the feelings?!

Intoxication has two meanings. One, the condition of having physical or mental control markedly diminished by the effects of alcohol or drugs drank to the point of intoxication. And two, a strong excitement or elation. It is the latter that I am focusing on because it directly points us to how an organization promotes certain behaviors and discourages other ones leading to making the visible invisible and faking it.

Celia Swanson, who's held top leadership positions with both Walmart and Sam’s Club, presents us with how we may be Enabling a Toxic Culture Without Realizing It through two types of team members:

1. Passive enablers - they are typically unaware of what’s happening. They often mean well but are blinded by ‘achievement mode’ and are hyper-focused on driving results. Passive enablers must have a strategy for looking deeply into how results are achieved and acting with urgency when problems arise.
2. Active enablers - they need to recognize that choosing not to speak up is, in fact, a choice to support the behavior. Active enablers need to find ways to speak up that do not involve high-risk consequences. 

In exploring the dynamics of Followers Becoming Toxic Lynn Offermann, a professor of organizational sciences and communication at the George Washington University highlighted the vulnerability of leaders. That is, they can be led astray just as their followers can—actually, by their followers. This happens in a variety of ways.

• Sometimes, good leaders end up making poor decisions because well-meaning followers are united and persuasive about a course of action. This is a particular problem for leaders who attract and empower strong followers. These executives need to become more skeptical of the majority view and push followers to examine their opinions more closely.
• At other times, leaders get into trouble because they are surrounded by followers who fool them with flattery and isolate them from uncomfortable realities. Charismatic leaders, who are most susceptible to this problem, need to make an extra effort to unearth disagreement and to find followers who are not afraid to pose hard questions. Organizational mechanisms like 360-degree feedback and executive coaching can help these leaders get at the truth within their companies.
• Finally, unscrupulous and ambitious followers may end up encroaching on the authority of the leader to such an extent that the leader becomes little more than a figurehead who has responsibility but no power. There’s not much leaders can do to completely guard against a determined corporate Iago, but those who communicate and live by a positive set of values will find themselves better protected. And since followers tend to model themselves after their leaders, the straightforward leader is less likely to have manipulative followers.

Professor Offermann argues that leaders need to stir debate, look for friends who can deliver bad news, and communicate and act on a solid set of values. 

In the next set of reflections I will further peel the layers that hide the sickness and offer my understanding and experiences working with individuals and organizations.

I look forward to your reflections.

| Sorabh M Gupta |