Are you unintentionally creating a toxic workplace?

Official narrative vs. lived experience

Toxicity rarely begins with behavior: it begins when reality splits. Most organizations can clearly explain how work is meant to happen. You hear it in all-hands meetings, onboarding, and leadership updates. The more revealing question is whether that version survives contact with reality on the ground. Consider three scenarios:

• In an all-hands meeting, do you recognize what you hear, or does it sound like a version of the business that only exists in that room?
• Can new joiners succeed using what they are taught, or do they quickly learn what to ignore?
• When priorities clash, do teams resolve them openly, or does one side step back with resignation because the outcome is already decided elsewhere?

When a company’s official narrative and lived experiences of reality diverge, a new authority emerges. It does not happen in meetings, but in side conversations, workarounds, and disclaimers such as, “This is what leadership says, but here’s how we actually get things done.” 

How incentive drifts fracture the system

This structural split rarely happens overnight. It develops when what is communicated at the top and what is rewarded downstream begin to drift apart.

Consider a business that prides itself on delivering exceptional customer outcomes. If the sales team is incentivized purely on volume while the delivery team is held accountable for client experience, conflict is inevitable. Sales will overpromise to close deals, leaving delivery to absorb the consequences of poor-fit clients.

No one is acting irrationally. Each part of the system is responding to its incentives. The organization works, but with compromises. Over time, friction is normalized, people stop challenging the reality gap, and organizational unity erodes. Misalignment is rarely a failure of culture: it is a system producing exactly what it rewards.