What Being on Both Sides of a Toxic Workplace Taught Me About Leadership

The hardest leadership lesson I ever learned did not come from a training or a book. It came from being inside a broken system and slowly realizing I was not just surviving it. I was part of it. 

Most leadership content treats toxic culture like something that happens to organizations, not something individual leaders participate in, sometimes without ever realizing it. I want to talk about it honestly because I have been on both sides and neither is comfortable to sit in. 

On the employee side it did not feel dramatic. It felt quiet and disorienting. I did not know where I fit. I doubted my own capacity in ways that had nothing to do with my actual skills. I was careful about who I trusted and who I learned from. The environment had an undercurrent that made it hard to feel settled, and for a long time I wondered if the problem was me. 

It was not. But I did not fully understand that until I moved into leadership myself. 

Part of what makes toxic culture so insidious is that new leaders are rarely given the tools to recognize it, let alone navigate it. Without real leadership development, the path of least resistance is to fit in, to mirror the leaders above you, to adopt the culture as it exists rather than question it. When you have not yet been given the opportunity to understand your own leadership identity, your own values, and the distinct perspective you bring, it is almost impossible to know where the culture ends, and you begin. If we are not preparing new leaders to step into that identity with confidence, how can we expect them to own it? 

What I was not prepared for was the pull that exists in toxic organizational systems, subtle but persistent, to choose a side. Not because anyone asks you to directly but because straddling the line between protecting your staff and satisfying the expectations coming from above eventually becomes unsustainable. The tension builds quietly until you find yourself slowly shifting without fully realizing you have moved. 

I felt that pull. I navigated it imperfectly. And the moment I understood just how imperfectly was when the loyalty I thought I had built higher up the organizational chart offered me no protection when I needed it most. I found myself exposed, navigating conflict largely alone, inside a system that was not equipped to handle it well. The burden of responsibility grew heavier the higher the stakes climbed, with little understanding from those further up of the risk that created for the people carrying it. 

What my clinical background gave me was the ability to zoom out. To see the human behavior underneath the organizational dysfunction. To recognize that I was not just a victim of the culture or separate from it. I was part of the system, and the system was struggling. 

That perspective did not make it easier in the moment. But it changed everything about how I approach organizational culture now. 

Part of what we did inside that organization was try to build something better from within. We developed a Leadership Training Academy specifically to address the gaps we were seeing in middle management, giving emerging leaders the tools, self awareness, and support that the system was not providing them. That program was presented at national conferences and it became the seed of what Phoenix Rise Consulting is today. We did not just leave and start over. We tried to fix it first, and what we learned in that process shaped everything about how we work with organizations now. 

Here is what I know on the other side of it. Toxic culture rarely announces itself. It builds in the gaps between what is said and what is done, between who is protected and who is left exposed, between the values an organization claims and the ones it actually lives by. And leaders at every level are either contributing to closing those gaps or widening them, whether they realize it or not. 

Self awareness is not a soft skill. It is the difference between a leader who perpetuates a broken culture without knowing it and one who has the courage to see their role clearly and do something different. 

Phoenix Rise Consulting was built in part because of what was learned in those hard seasons. Not despite them.