Is it just me or is organizational health viewed mainly as a senior management concern within many corporations? What about lower and middle management?

An unhealthy and sometimes toxic work culture is depicted in the NBC TV comedy series The Office.  The incompetence of leadership and toxicity of this office is extreme for the sake of comedy but I wonder how many real life offices are not far from the reality that this team faces at Dunder and Mifflin Inc.  This office produces adequate revenue and profit so  senior management and HR doesn’t care how toxic and crazy the culture is?

“Toby is a part of HR which technically means he is from corporate so he really is not a part of our family.” – Michael Scott

The fact is that when there are several layers of leadership, even the most healthy and well-meaning team of executives and HR programs can not always stop toxic culture from dominating working teams.

Even in corporations with high performing executive teams a toxic culture can and often does periodically develop under them. Unhealthy cultures can come from the following sources (to name a few):

• a void of leadership from overworked or stressed out middle managers
• poor leadership from beginning supervisors and managers
• cynical employees spreading gossip and discontent
• competing managers and individual contributors looking out only for their next promotion

Working on a team that has poor health is often a lousy experience.  Even highly unified and well-functioning executive teams can not guarantee that sub-teams stay healthy long-term, they must rely on managers.

Fortunately, if things are healthy at the top than toxicity can not take over the company but it can make life hard for the people at or near the bottom.  Unhealthy work team cultures can cause unfair situations and considerable missed productivity which is a waste of company money and time.

I want to see an increased focus on middle and lower management organizational health.  Having a healthy executive team is often just not enough, trickle down health does not always happen and even when it does trickle down it is often not fast enough to protect the company from waste.

Do teams in your company get healthier at the top?