What are the causes of harassment in the workplace?

I learned the hard way that harassment rarely announces itself. It does not walk into the room and declare its intent. It lets the room declare permission first. A joke that is not that funny. A comment that slides past because the person brings in revenue. A manager who handles a complaint like a scheduling conflict. The story begins small and believable. The damage compounds because the adults in charge want to believe they are still the good guys.

If you have ever told yourself your team is too smart for this, you have given harassment a head start. Smart teams are very good at locating the lines of power and stepping right up to them. When targets hesitate, the behavior is framed as culture. When bystanders freeze, the behavior becomes normal. Harassment is not an HR problem that appears out of thin air. It is a leadership problem that grows in pockets where pressure meets silence.

Power is the first accelerant. Not just title power, but the power to decide pay, projects, promotions, and who gets booked on the next flight. The person who controls calendar invites controls access. The person who controls budgets controls who gets to try and fail. When that person flirts in the hallway or comments in a private chat, the target is not only dealing with discomfort. They are calculating rent, visa status, future references, and the cost of saying no. The behavior hides inside power that is already accepted as necessary for the business.

Performance protection is the second accelerant. Every founder knows the tension between values and the numbers. The mistake is pretending there is no tension. You tell yourself this closers-only culture is temporary. You promise to balance it after the quarter ends. You decide the account is too important to lose. You overlook the comment, then you overlook the pattern, then you assign the target to a different team so everyone can move on. You just created a manual for anyone who wants to behave without consequence. High performer immunity is how harassment learns that the rules are flexible.

Ambiguity is the third accelerant. Startups worship speed and informality. That sounds efficient until the very same informality is used to press someone into late drinks or a hotel lobby conversation that never should have happened. People cannot rely on their instincts alone when power is uneven. They need bright lines. If your company has no policy on alcohol at work functions, no expectation around off-hour messages, and no training on manager boundaries, you did not create freedom. You created a playground for plausible deniability.

Incentives shape behavior long before your values do. If managers are evaluated only on revenue, they will weigh complaints against targets met. If recruiting is rewarded only by speed to hire, they will ignore whisper networks about a candidate who leaves trails of discomfort. If you hold up founders and early employees as heroic for sleeping in the office, you telegraph that boundaries are for people who do not care enough. None of this is theory. It is a scoreboard. People play to the board you design.

Culture is what you model when you think no one is watching. If executives talk about customers like they are prey, do not be surprised when a sales leader treats junior staff like accessories to a win. If leaders make snide comments about partners or spouses, do not expect the team to keep relationship lines clean at offsites. Harassment rides on the language the room tolerates. Every time a leader breaks tension with a crude joke to seem relatable, they teach the team that power buys permission. It always starts with the joke.

Remote work did not end harassment. It repackaged it. The backchannel has moved into private chats and side servers where messages vanish and tone can be denied. The late night DM now lives in the blurred line between collaboration and coercion. Screenshots feel like protection until you remember who controls performance reviews. If you have not trained managers to handle digital boundaries, you have simply shifted the venue and raised the confusion.

Cross-cultural teams add another layer. Culture is not an excuse. It is context. Some markets normalize after-hours socializing with alcohol. Some markets strictly separate gender at work events. Some teams rely on banter to build trust. Others hear banter as disrespect. When you avoid naming these differences, you force the most vulnerable person to carry the risk of misread signals and the cost of speaking up. Leaders who say they are building a global team but refuse to standardize safety are not building global anything. They are building a lottery.

Another cause sits in the shadows of your org chart. HR that reports entirely to the same executives who are implicated will not act like a safeguard. HR that is under-resourced will default to quiet paperwork rather than protection. HR that is measured on speed to close issues will prioritize avoiding mess. The team that should be a counterweight becomes a concierge for power. The solution is structural. HR needs an independent escalation path, clear authority to investigate, and air cover to enforce consequences without career suicide.

Early teams often believe trust eliminates the need for rules. The opposite is true. Trust lets rules serve their purpose. Without rules, the person with the most social capital wins the argument about what happened. With rules, you reduce arguments to observable standards. A clear anti-harassment policy with named examples is not performative. It is a map. Training that uses scenarios from your industry is not corporate theater. It is rehearsal for real pressure. Reporting channels that work anonymously and in multiple languages are not bureaucracy. They are access.

Founders sometimes ask me if they need to choose between being pragmatic and being principled. The choice is false. Principled systems are pragmatic because they prevent the expensive mess you cannot model in a spreadsheet. The public scandal is not the start of your losses. The losses began when the first strong candidate quietly pulled out because a friend warned them about your culture. The losses grew when a manager spent hours triaging a complaint without training. The losses compound when a team ships late because a talented engineer asked for a transfer and everyone pretended it was about the stack.

Here is what I believe now after watching teams burn through trust they thought was loyalty. Harassment grows where leaders benefit from not seeing it. It grows where performance is worshipped more than people. It grows where policies exist on paper and die in practice. It grows where bystanders are not trained and targets are asked to carry both the burden and the risk. It grows where founders confuse charisma with character.

There is a better way, and it is not complicated. Start with a standard you can say out loud in any room. Name the behaviors that break safety in your exact context. Put constraints on alcohol at company events and set hard cutoffs that managers enforce. Make one senior leader responsible for event safety, and rotate that duty so it is not a punishment. Give managers scripts for shutting down comments in the moment. The first seconds after a bad line are where culture is decided. If your leaders cannot land a firm, clean redirect, train them until they can.

Build reporting that people believe in. That means multiple channels, including a third party, with timelines and outcomes that are communicated without exposing the target. That means tracking patterns, not treating each incident like an island. That means consequences that are visible and consistent. If you demote a high performer for misconduct, say that you did so. The entire company is listening for proof that the scoreboard changed.

Fix incentives. Add a people metric to every manager’s scorecard that cannot be gamed by pizza parties. Think retention quality, not just headcount. Think promotion equity across gender and nationality. Think 360 feedback that includes questions on safety and respect. If managers learn that their own advancement depends on how safe their teams feel, they will learn quickly. If they do not, you have your answer about fit.

Clarify the relationship between social life and work. Your team does not need forced intimacy to collaborate. They need predictable rhythms and professional warmth. Host events that do not hinge on alcohol. Design inclusive activities that do not punish caregivers or observant staff. If you must run late sessions with clients, assign two leaders to attend and rotate the burden so no single person becomes the default after-hours face. You cannot remove all risk. You can distribute it.

Teach bystanders. Most people freeze because they do not want to escalate or become a target. Give them simple options that lower the temperature and create space. Redirect the conversation, check in with the person privately, bring in a manager, and document what happened. Bystanders are not a last resort. They are your fastest path to prevention when power is present and targets are calculating costs.

Finally, own the first failure. If something goes wrong on your watch, say it plainly and fix it publicly. Do not outsource the apology to HR. Do not drown the event in generalities about values. Targets and bystanders are not waiting for grand statements about culture. They are watching what you do with the person who crossed the line, and they are listening for whether the rules now mean something.

If you are a founder or leader who still believes harassment is an edge case that good hiring will solve, ask yourself one question. What have you built that makes it harder to get away with, not just easier to report after the fact. If you cannot answer that in one sentence, you have work to do. The causes of harassment in the workplace are not mysterious. They live in power that is unchecked, performance that is protected without condition, ambiguity that is convenient to the powerful, and incentives that quietly reward silence.

What I would do differently if I were starting again is simple. I would design for safety the way I design for uptime. I would put clear boundaries into onboarding, rehearse hard conversations with my managers, and make promotion decisions that prove no one is immune. I would still chase growth, but I would never pretend the cost of silence is cheaper than the cost of a lost deal. I would remember that trust is not a vibe. It is the operating system that lets people do their best work without calculating what they will have to survive tomorrow.

There is no perfect culture. There is only a set of rules and rituals that make everyday behavior safer and the wrong behavior expensive. Build those rules. Practice those rituals. Protect the person who speaks up first. If your culture depends on your presence, it is not culture. It is dependency. And dependency is how harassment learns it can stay.