The Keys to Combating a Toxic Culture

How DE&I Training for Leadership and Management can Transform Your Company Culture

The term “toxic culture” gets thrown around a lot in HR and L&D spaces. It gets used so often that there’s a lot of confusion about what a toxic working environment is and what preventative measures organizations can take to avoid it. Sometimes toxic culture is misused to represent conflict or other problems within an organization, like bad relationships amongst teams or low employee engagement. While those issues can be contributors to a toxic working environment, they don’t create toxicity by themselves.

So, what constitutes a toxic culture in an organization? To put it simply, a toxic culture is “a work environment with a negative atmosphere caused by coworkers, supervisors, and/or the company culture that make it difficult to work or progress in a job” (Career Plug, 2022 Toxic Work Environment Report). In these toxic environments, employees don’t feel physically and/or psychologically safe at work, and don’t feel that their contributions to the organization are important or valued. A 2020 BCG study found that “employees who report negative workplace interactions are 40% less productive and 13 times more likely to quit.”

The key to combating toxicity and investing in a positive culture at your organization is to train your managers to be exceptional leaders, starting with topics in diversity, equity, and inclusivity, commonly referred to as DE&I. Why? Because studies are showing that DE&I training creates a stronger company culture, helps retain employees, decreases workplace conflicts, prevents low employee engagement, and increases creativity, productivity, and innovation!

Let’s take a deeper look at the ways DE&I training for leaders and managers can transform the culture at your organization.

Leading Teams by Example

Your managers' influence over their teams is powerful and has a direct impact on workplace culture. In a 2022 survey by OfficeVibe, they found that “75% of employees who display low engagement levels or leave their jobs say it’s due to their manager or leadership”, and in a 2022 Pew Research Article, they found that 57% of employees interviewed would leave a job if they felt disrespected.

These critical points only highlight the importance of DE&I training. Your managers’ attitudes and behaviors set the bar for what your organization deems acceptable for all its employees. Leaders that have positive attitudes, approach problems collaboratively, and have healthy boundaries set a positive example for their teams, and communicate the standards of behavior they expect in others. Qualities of a good leader and manager are empathy, trustworthiness, dependability, excellent communication, and proactive problem-solving. So, by investing in diversity, equity, and inclusivity training for your managers you lay a strong foundation for building a positive, thriving culture at your organization.

Alternatively, if a team at your organization is struggling, always first observe how their manager conducts themselves both as a team leader and in their other work responsibilities. You may find certain DE&I skills need work.

At CarbonCo I want to help guide you on your journey to elevating the leaders in your organization! My Altitude Training Course offers 50 training sessions focused on teaching your managers practical tools so they can lead their teams with expertise. This course is designed for leveling up leaders currently at your organization and is also great for new manager training!

Learn more about how Altitude Training can level up the leaders at your organization today.

Be Proactive

The second major way to combat toxicity in your organization is to be proactive. By emphasizing the importance of DE&I training for managers and supervisors you’re helping to develop skills that help proactively prevent toxicity from taking root.

Through DE&I training, your managers will learn how to embrace positivity and prepare to correctly address inevitable conflicts. Instead of managers who avoid issues, you’ll have leaders who guide their teams by fostering trust, encouraging growth, and valuing vulnerability. To help your managers gain insights into their leadership styles and voice I offer a 5 Voices Quiz! This quick, easy assessment helps managers identify their personal brand of leadership, and offers insights into their strengths and weaknesses

Uncover your personalized results with this free high-level assessment!

Measure Your DE&I Training Impacts

When implementing any training course or program, measuring your results is incredibly important. Luckily, measuring the impact of your DE&I training program isn’t complicated. Whether you’re sending quarterly employee surveys, recording course completion rates, measuring skill and job role improvements, or recording the rate of turnover and employee engagement, there are tons of ways to see just how effective DE&I training is at creating a positive company culture.

If you want help devising a strategy to measure your DE&I training results, I recommend reviewing and implementing the Kirkpatrick model. With over six decades of helping organizations assess their training programs, the Kirkpatrick model is a tried-and-true method of showcasing the success of your program. You can learn more about the Kirkpatrick model of measuring training programs by visiting their site here.  

Protecting Your Organizations’ Positive Culture

Your company’s culture is incredibly important to the success and longevity of your organization and DE&I training is a key tool to achieving and maintaining a positive company culture. However, for HR and L&D leaders, developing and implementing an impactful DE&I training program can sometimes get overshadowed by other job role responsibilities. Implementing DE&I training for managers and supervisors can feel complicated making it easy to put on the back burner but organizing an amazing DE&I training program can be easy if you get help from the right places.

CarbonCo Services has many resources to help you on your journey to create impactful, long-lasting change in your organization. To help guide you on your journey to DE&I training and investment in positive company culture I offer several highly rated services that will help implement effective leadership training on important DE&I skills your managers need to be successful in their roles! Send my free 5 Voices Quiz to your managers, or, if you know you’re ready to elevate the leaders at your organization, sign up for my Altitude Training course! With 50 sessions geared toward leadership training, your managers will gain practical, and powerful tools for effectively leading their teams, including lessons on DE&I.

For those wanting to immediately dive into an in-depth DE&I training program, check out my DE&I training course containing 16 sessions focused on equipping your managers with simple, practical tools to become inclusive leaders worth following.

Reserve 45 minutes on your calendar to discover how Carbon Co can help you create a positive culture in your organization through impactful leadership and management training.