We Kept Watching Anyway

Have you noticed how many of the big series are dark now? Breaking Bad. Succession. Even Yellowstone. Shows where nothing good really happens, where almost everyone is compromised and the people who get ahead are the ones prepared to go furthest.

I watched a lot of it, and at some point I had to stop myself. I noticed what it was doing to my mood. Hours of watching people be cruel to each other, and I still wanted the next episode. The darkness feeds itself. The more you take in, the more normal it feels.

Working in a toxic environment is very much the same.

It looks gripping from the inside

Toxic workplaces rarely look toxic while you're in them. They look compelling. There's usually one leader everyone agrees is difficult, and everyone also agrees gets results. The ruthlessness gets called decisiveness. The brutal review gets called high standards.

People stay, because there's always a sense the next chapter will be better, and because leaving feels a bit like walking out of the cinema halfway through.

In my days of HR leadership I heard "difficult but brilliant" more times than I can count. It's usually said with a shrug, as if that closes the subject.

The trouble is that the damage rarely gets called damage. It gets told as a story. The finance director visibly unravelling under a so-called visionary becomes part of the plot. Strong personality, hard to work for, worth it. That's the line people use about every antihero on television, and in an office it does the same job. It turns something that should be stopped into something to be watched.

You see it in exit interviews that never mention the real reason someone left, because saying it out loud feels disloyal to a show everyone else still seems to be enjoying. You see it in high performers who stay two years too long, telling themselves the plot is about to turn. And you see it in the people who stay and slowly get harder, because the only way to survive that kind of story is to start playing a version of the same character.

Nobody in these situations is twirling a moustache. Most of the leaders at the centre are talented, often charming, and completely convinced their version of events is the right one. Nobody sets out to build Breaking Bad in a workplace. It builds up one reasonable decision at a time, until enough people are invested in the story that calling it what it is feels like the unreasonable thing to do.

What actually helps

The organisations that get out of this do one plain thing. They stop treating difficult as a sign of quality.

For any leader who gets results at a visible human cost, they ask whether those results would still be there without the behaviour. Usually they wouldn't. The results and the damage turn out to have been the same thing all along.

I'm not suggesting anyone give up their favourite series, and not every demanding leader is a problem. But a culture that's interesting to talk about is not the same as a healthy one, and it's easy to mix the two up, on screen and at work. Drama keeps your attention. Health mostly doesn't need to.

The question for anyone leading people is whether the story would still look good if they had to live in it rather than watch it.