I felt like what I was doing was trying to make my work place a better workplace, and what I heard was like, ‘No, thank you. We’d rather work in a terrible place.’ – Participant, Low-Morale Experiences in Formal Library Leaders study
Welcome to the first of a three-part series exploring Legacy Toxicity – a powerful Impact Factor for formal leaders who are experiencing low-morale. In this series, I’ll share insights into recognizing, realizing, and reconciling legacy toxicity (and if you’re heading to this year’s ACRL Conference, be sure to join me and my co-panelists on Friday, April 4 at 4:30P as we discuss legacy toxicity, leadership, and well-being).
While I’ve been continuing my work on low-morale experiences in library workplaces, more conversations and resources surfacing aspects of workplace harm and impacts on library workers have emerged. These resources offer leaders opportunities to review procedural fixes and queries to long-standing problems. My first four low-morale experience studies focused on on various aspects of the experience and continue offering a meaningful understanding of how formal leaders are perceived during employees’ trajectories of workplace harm and revealed formal leaders’ very real roles of engagement in perpetrating or allowing workplace abuse and neglect to begin or continue.
In 2023, I published a study focusing on the low-morale experiences of formal leaders. The study validated the causes, influences, ,and impacts of workplace abuse and neglect on leaders – and revealed new impact factors, including legacy toxicity, which, after data analysis, I defined as:
the dysfunctional environment inherited by a person who assumes a leadership position in a toxic organization or group. Such toxicity may not be effectively mitigated due to the previous incumbent’s role in perpetuating abuse and neglect, already exhausting avenues to eradicate abuse and neglect; and/or; organizational, group, or individuals’ conscious or unconscious resistance to the new leader’s attempts to reduce or eradicate the source(s) of toxicity. (2023, p. 20).
My ongoing data collection projects on formal leaders’ reflections on legacy toxicity and their decisions to leave their role continue to validate the experiential parameters of this Impact Factor.
As conversations about legacy toxicity increase, it is important that the lived experiences of people dealing with workplace harm are honored, and that includes maintaining the context of their experiences within their rich and deep narratives. To that end, it holds that legacy toxicity is an impact factor that influences the development of low-morale experiences (long-term exposure to workplace abuse and neglect) for formal leaders. Legacy toxicity is surfaced when new leaders arriving to dysfunctional /toxic organizations recognize already established organizational dysfunction/toxicity and begin making positive changes to hold abusers accountable, establish employee responsibilities for positive cultural/behavior changes, and redress or attempt dismantling Enabling Systems, and the like. Narrative data also show that this holds for leaders who are promoted internally, and therefore may have been part of the perpetuation of (or been victims of) established organizational dysfunction. Because legacy toxicity is contextualized within a formal leader’s low-morale experience, it highlights organizational peers’, direct, or indirect reports’ deliberate or unwitting acts of abuse and/or neglect towards the formal leader – even if they want the formal leader to create and/or collaborate with them to create a functional, supportive workplace/organization.
Understanding this context, the significance of this impact factor is its expansion of contemporary perceptions of dysfunctional organizational culture by:
- interrogating the conventional narrative that low-morale experiences are primarily caused by top-down abuse from (unaware) leaders to other employees;
- exposing industrial/employee acceptance or promotion of ideas that those in leadership roles should expect and accept abuse and neglect as an inherent part of their role; and
- highlighting the role and impact of individual, group, or organizational trauma responses on attempts to improve organizational culture.
Looking through the lens of lived experience, Legacy Toxicity upends notions that organizational toxicity is a failure of leadership, or that leaders should “fix” dysfunctional organizations on their own/within the leadership group in hopes of ‘trickle down’ culture change. Rather, Legacy Toxicity reveals that formal leaders and reports may suffer from long-standing historical workplace trauma. With those traumas come personal defense mechanisms that, through time, become organizational narratives that include iterations of “Us (reports) vs. Them (the leaders)” (or vice versa). Therefore, a new mandate is revealed: all employees – at all levels – are responsible for awareness of and response to negative behaviors, impact factors, and enabling systems as they work towards positive culture change.
Conversations placing legacy toxicity outside of events of workplace abuse and neglect – and which omit trauma-informed responses and encourage leaders to solution-find with the singular tool of self-reflection – marginalize lived experience, isolate leaders, and ignore the role of community-building in restoring organizational functionality. Legacy toxicity mitigation is a collective effort that is long-term, requires an ethics of care and mutuality, and includes a broad and deep foundation of support for self-preservation, critical hope, and ultimately, healing – the latter of which is central to well-being.
What are the signals of legacy toxicity? As a formal leader, what do you need to be aware of when interacting with traumatized employees? What are some community- centered reflections that invite care and healing? We’ll explore these questions in Part 2 and Part 3, so join Renewers on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, or Blue Sky – and don’t so you’ll know when these considerations are shared! For ongoing insight, subscribe to the Renewals newsletter.
Are you ready to heal from the low-morale experience you’re enduring – or have endured – while in a leadership role? Would you like space to begin reimagining what community-building could look like for your workplace? Do you need help identifying and applying critical hope, coaching, communication, and Self-Preservation skills in your formal or informal leadership approaches? Let’s set up a Connection Call!
