How to overcome a toxic workplace

Seven months ago I made a promise to myself. After a near fatal heart attack forced me to confront the way I lived and worked, I wanted to understand why so many ambitious teams were burning out and why so many talented people were shrinking from leaders who claimed to care about results. I also wanted to test a belief that had kept me going through cardiac rehab and the long quiet mornings that followed. High standards and humane leadership do not cancel each other out. They lift each other up.

The past months took me into boardrooms, factory floors, remote standups, ambulance stations and school staffrooms. I interviewed founders who had stepped back from the edge after running at full speed for years. I listened to employees who loved their craft but dreaded Monday. I read deeply in the research on stress, autonomy and meaning at work. Over time the patterns converged. Teams did not falter because excellence was asked of them. They faltered because excellence was pursued in ways that isolated people, muddied priorities and eroded trust. When pressure rises and clarity drops, even the strongest performers begin to wobble.

There is a better way, and it is practical. I call it the RISE Framework. Relate. Inspire. Simplify. Empower. It is not a slogan. It is a sequence of leadership behaviors that convert aspiration into healthy high performance. You can adopt it even if your calendar is full and your targets are non negotiable. You can adopt it if your culture has pockets of cynicism. You can adopt it if you had a morning like mine a year ago and promised yourself that if you were given more time you would use it differently.

The first move is to close the distance between you and your people. Performance deteriorates when leaders rely on assumptions about what their teams value, fear or need. Performance improves when leaders step into the specific reality of each person, not to coddle, but to understand the constraints and strengths that shape their day. Empathy has a reputation for softness, yet in practice it feels like precision. When you understand the project manager who cares for an elderly parent, you do not lower the bar. You design work that makes the bar reachable. When you see the junior engineer who lights up during customer calls, you do not hand out compliments. You put her where she can create value and feel it.

Relating well does not require long therapy sessions. It requires intentional contact and active listening. Ask a few questions that uncover context. What is getting in your way this week. What feels underused. What does a win look like for you in the next fourteen days. Then close the loop. Reflect back what you heard. Tailor your guidance. Remove one obstacle quickly so people learn that speaking up is worth it. Research on trust and engagement has been telling us for years that empathy is not a luxury in leadership. It is a performance multiplier because it unlocks discretionary effort and reduces the mental tax of guessing what the boss wants.

People will push through hard days for many reasons. Fear of missing targets works, but only for a while and at a heavy cost. Pride in craft works better, but it fades when outputs feel disconnected from outcomes. Purpose, the clear line of sight from a task to a difference in the world, is the most renewable fuel of all. When you show an analyst how her model improves the accuracy of a life saving forecast, or a service agent how his patience keeps a family loyal for a generation, you upgrade the meaning of routine work.

Purpose is not a poster. It is a habit of narrative. Link each sprint or sales cycle to the mission you claim to serve. Invite people to tell the story in their own words. Let them bring their values and experiences to that story. The psychology is simple. When someone can say this matters to me and I can see how my piece moves the whole forward, resilience rises. Well being rises. Output rises. These effects show up in the research on meaning and motivation, and they show up the next time your team hits a snag and keeps going anyway because they care about the why.

Pressure without clarity is a toxin. It drives frantic activity and shallow thinking. It creates conflict between teams that are each chasing a different interpretation of success. Leaders often underestimate the cognitive load their organizations place on people. Meetings multiply. Metrics proliferate. Priorities collide. The answer is not to demand more grit. The answer is to simplify.

Simplification begins with ruthless prioritization. Decide what wins look like this quarter and what can wait. Translate strategy into plain language and a handful of stable measures that people can remember. Check the system for mixed messages. If you say quality beats speed, your incentive plan should not reward the fastest fingers on the keyboard. If you say customer first, your processes should not make it harder to fix a customer problem than to file a perfect weekly report. Ask your team to identify friction that wastes an hour every day. Remove it. Every time you reduce ambiguity you return mental energy to your people. Confidence rises because expectations are knowable. And confident people push further with less stress.

The final move is to shift from permission to ownership. Autonomy is not a new idea. It is still underused because it feels risky. What if the team makes the wrong call. What if quality slips. What if the leader becomes less central. These concerns are understandable. They vanish when you set clear intent and boundaries, then let people figure out the how. Delegation becomes genuine empowerment when the decision rights and the accountability sit in the same hands.

This is not micromanagement with nicer words. It is the practice of giving someone a real problem, the authority to solve it and the support to grow through the attempt. Establish what good looks like, including the constraints that cannot move. Then step back. Ask for frequent, light updates that focus on learning, not on theatrics. When mistakes happen, mine them for process insight rather than identity judgment. Over time you will see the well documented benefits. Lower stress through greater perceived control. Higher motivation through self determination. Better creativity through room to experiment.

Microsoft did not transform over the past decade by accident. It transformed because a leader applied principles that mirror RISE with relentless consistency. When Satya Nadella became chief executive in 2014, he inherited a successful but brittle culture. Silos were thick. Rivalries were common. The company needed a reset in how people worked together as much as in what they built.

He began with Relate. He championed empathy as a core leadership skill and modeled it in public and private. He asked leaders to read widely on compassionate communication and to reflect on how their words landed. This was not a public relations move. It was a signal that relationships and curiosity would replace cynicism and point scoring.

He moved to Inspire by articulating a mission that was both expansive and concrete. Empower every person and every organization to achieve more is not a slogan when it becomes the lens for product bets, acquisitions and the daily conversations teams have about tradeoffs. Engineers and sellers could place their work on that map and see its significance.

He worked to Simplify. Layers that slowed decisions were cleared. Priorities were narrowed. The shift to cloud became a shared drumbeat rather than a set of dueling agendas. With clarity in place, teams stopped spending their best hours interpreting the plan and devoted those hours to executing it.

He then Empowered. Decision making moved closer to customers. Teams were trusted to ship, learn and iterate. Leaders focused less on controlling every move and more on setting direction, coordinating across boundaries and developing people. The result has been widely documented. Faster execution. Stronger collaboration. A culture where high standards live alongside psychological safety.

Transformation feels daunting when viewed at enterprise scale. Start where you have authority. If you run a function, use RISE to tune your operating rhythm. If you manage a small team, use RISE to redesign your one on ones and sprint reviews. If you are an individual contributor, use RISE to lead sideways and upward by modeling the culture you want to live in.

Begin with one human conversation. Book fifteen minutes with each person you lead. Ask about energy levels, obstacles and aspirations. Capture what you learn. Use it to tailor goals and support. In your next team meeting, tell a purpose story that connects this week’s work to a real customer or stakeholder. Keep it specific. Then remove a piece of friction. Cancel a status meeting that adds no value, merge two reports into one, or pre decide a tradeoff that usually leads to debate. Finally, hand someone a piece of authority they do not yet have but can handle with guidance. State the intent and the boundary. Cheer their progress. Own the shared outcome.

Measure differently. If you only track output, you will miss the early signs of cultural health that make output sustainable. Add a few leading indicators. Percentage of people who report role clarity. Time from decision to action. Number of meetings eliminated or shortened. Instances where a customer problem is solved without escalation. Trends in psychological safety and workload reasonableness. Share these openly. Celebrate movement.

A detoxed culture still works hard. It simply refuses to trade health for haste. Set norms that protect focus and recovery. Agree on windows for deep work and on response time expectations that respect different time zones and caregiving realities. Rotate on call duties so no one carries the burden alone. Teach managers to spot strain before it becomes sickness. Normalize proactive use of leave and encourage leaders to model it.

Hold the line on standards. Healthy does not mean easy. It means that people know the rules of the game, believe in the prize and trust the coach. It means feedback arrives quickly and respectfully. It means that excellence is described in observable behaviors, not in fuzzy ideals that reward the loudest voice. When you see standards slipping, address the gap with specificity and support. When you see someone raise their game, name the behavior that made the difference so others can repeat it.

The day my heart faltered I promised that if I made it back, I would build and teach the kind of leadership that elevates performance by honoring the people who deliver it. The RISE Framework is my contribution to that promise. It is built from research, from the lived experience of teams who turned anger into energy and from my own stubborn belief that work can be both exacting and humane.

You have your own why. Protect it. Let it guide how you show up in every conversation, document and decision. If you are a founder, your why is the seed of a culture that will keep growing long after you have left the building. If you are a new manager, your why is the antidote to the impulse to mimic the worst examples you have seen. If you are an experienced executive, your why is the reason people will follow you when the market shifts and the path is unclear.

Relate to your people until trust becomes your default state. Inspire with a mission that is alive in the choices you make, not only in the words you publish. Simplify until priorities are unmistakable and the work flows with less friction. Empower until ownership lives where the knowledge and the motivation already reside. This is how you detox a culture without diluting ambition. This is how you deliver results that compound year after year without burning through the people who make those results possible.

If you have led through a shift like this, tell your story. If you are trying now, share the early stumbles and the glimmers of progress. Celebrate the leaders who carry empathy, purpose, clarity and trust into every room. Share this with a colleague who is ready to rise. The future of work is not a debate about toughness versus kindness. It is a practice of leadership that insists on both. When you invest in the well being of your people, they invest in the enduring performance of the company you are building. RISE is your roadmap. Start today.